I hear a lot about how the Bible is self-contradictory from others but I have not heard one argument that passes the test as a proven error.
Please show me some of the famous supposed logical fallacies/contradictions in the Bible, and I will objectively give my thoughts as a scholar (not formal) of the Bible. In this thread, we may find some errors and we may debunk some supposed errors … I am down for either one because the Bible is a big part of my life and I would love to perceive it in the most real way possible.
Let’s do it!
Me first: 2 Kings 24:8 says Jehoiachin was eighteen years old when he became king and 2 Chronicles 36:9 says he was eight. This seems like an error, but the Hebrew word for eight and eighteen are the same, believe it or not, IIRC. (I can’t find my Hebrew Bible right now, but this is true. I will definately get back here with the proper word and translation ASAP.)
This is the one spark of hope I see in what would otherwise be a worrying OP; somebody else did this a while back (can’t find the link), except their attitude was “Show me the contradictions, and I will explain everything - there aren’t any contradictions!”.
Unfortunately this soon changed to 'Stop being horrible about the Bible, I’m leaving!" - I’m not suggesting you’ll do this, I really hope you won’t.
Anyway, back to the topic, how do you deal with the whole [God can’t be seen]/[people saw him] conundrum (John 1:18 vs Gen 32:30)?
Noah brought two of each animal, one male one female (Genesis 7:19-20)
Not sure about this one
If you mean before he died on the crucifix, you get alot of different versions because the gospels are told from four different points of view. Luke says that his last words were “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit” (Luke 23:46). John says that he said “It is finished” (John 19:30). Interesting to note that in this gospel we find another contradiction where Jesus drinks wine before he hands over the spirit when earlier he said that He would not drink from the fruit of the vine until He had risen again. According to Mark and Matthew, “My God, my God why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34, Matthew 27:46) were his last words.
My all-time favorite “logical error” in the Bible is in the Pastoral Epistles, and I’m firmly convinced it’s St. Paul being playful.
It was a commonplace of Greek philosophy to pose a riddle that amounted to “All Cretans are liars. I know this is true, for one of the Cretans himself told me.” It’s a classic paradox, because for the statement to be true proves that it’s false, and for the statement to be false supports the idea that it’s true.
Sending advice to Titus, whom he has just dispatched to be Bishop of Crete, Paul discusses what Titus will be up against in his new see. In the course of this he comments:
An educated Jew who was a Roman citizen would have had to have run into that paradox, and I think Paul intended to give Titus a chuckle in the middle of a serious batch of advice by throwing in what they’d both recognize as a bit of Sophistic wordplay.
FTR, I’m a kinda sorta Catholic, my parents make me go to church and all. Just wanted to point that out because I was so happy that I could actually answer a question in GD.
Doesn’t sound like hanging suicide (as per Matthew) to me.
Neither is the Bible. According to Matthew, Joseph’s father is Jacob. According to Luke, it’s Heli.
But someone’s last words are not dependant on one’s point of view. Either the words are someone’s last, or they’re not. If you have several different versions of what someone’s last words were, then all but one of those accounts must be false.
Here is one I have never heard. As I recall, one bit of “explanation of natural phenomenon” in the bible is that the rainbow signifies God’s promise not to drown the world in another flood, and that it first appeared after the flood was over. For this to be true, the very laws fo refraction of light would have to be completely reworked such that basic vision is impossible. Is there any way of explaining that other than, “God can make whatever he wants happen?”
It would seem odd that He had a self-inconsistent system and only revised it to be self-consistent after the flood.
Flood, as you might expect from Diogenes (he is, after all, a Cynic! ;)) in a thread on “contradictions in the Bible,” his questions were trick ones.
Yes, Matthew says that Judas went and hanged himself. But check out Acts 1:18-20; the story’s quite different.
Did Noah take a mated pair of each kind of animal, or did he take seven of each kind of clean animal and each kind of bird, and two of each kind of unclean animal? (See Genesis 7:1-5)
On Joseph’s father, see Matthew 1:16 and Luke 3:23. (There is a reasonable explanation of this one, as it happens.)
And you handled the last words well – although supposedly he was given vinegar rather than wine, this probably being another way to taunt him when he said “I thirst.”
That’s not what Acts 1:18 says: 18 With the reward he got for his wickedness, Judas bought a field; there he fell headlong, his body burst open and all his intestines spilled out.
This also contains a couple of other contradictions. Here is what Matthew says:
3When Judas, who had betrayed him, saw that Jesus was condemned, he was seized with remorse and returned the thirty silver coins to the chief priests and the elders. 4"I have sinned," he said, “for I have betrayed innocent blood.”
“What is that to us?” they replied. “That’s your responsibility.”
5So Judas threw the money into the temple and left. Then he went away and hanged himself.
6The chief priests picked up the coins and said, “It is against the law to put this into the treasury, since it is blood money.” 7So they decided to use the money to buy the potter’s field as a burial place for foreigners. 8That is why it has been called the Field of Blood to this day. 9Then what was spoken by Jeremiah the prophet was fulfilled: “They took the thirty silver coins, the price set on him by the people of Israel, 10and they used them to buy the potter’s field, as the Lord commanded me.”
Matthew says that Judas threw the silver back into the Temple, then killed himself, then the priests bought a potter’s field.
Acts says that Judas bought the field, then he blowed up real good.
So who bought the field, Judas or the priests?
When did they buy it?
Did Judas hang himself or did his guts blow up?
That’s not what Genesis 7:2 says:
Of every clean beast thou shalt take to thee by sevens, the male and his female: and of beasts that are not clean by two, the male and his female.
Well here’s the discrepency I was referring to:
Matthew 1:16 And Jacob begat Joseph the husband of Mary, of whom was born Jesus, who is called Christ.
LUK 3:23 And Jesus himself began to be about thirty years of age, being (as was supposed) the son of Joseph, which was the son of Heli.*
Four different points of view, yes, but supposedly all the inerrant word of God. Somehow we get three entirely different utterances before he gives up the ghost:
Matthew 27:46,50: And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, “Eli, eli, lama sabachthani?” that is to say, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” …Jesus, when he cried again with a loud voice, yielded up the ghost.
Luke23:46: And when Jesus had cried with a loud voice, he said, “Father, unto thy hands I commend my spirit:” and having said thus, he gave up the ghost.
John 19:30: When Jesus therefore had received the vinegar, he said, “It is finished:” and he bowed his head, and gave up the ghost.
What do you say, fuel? How is this not a contradiction?
Fuel, actually, the Hebrew words for “eight” and “eighteen” are similar (as in English) but not identical: eight is shemoneh, eighteen is shemoneh esreh.
A number of the Jewish commentaries on both verses suggest that Jehoiachin was co-regent with his father Jehoiakim for the last ten (out of eleven) years of Jehoiakim’s reign, so that the verse in Kings states how old he was at his independent accession, while Chronicles is referring to his age when he was made co-regent. [A 19th-century commentary, the Malbim, suggests that this was done by the same Pharaoh (Necho) who had deposed Jehoiakim’s brother Jehoahaz and placed Jehoiakim on the throne; he wanted to forestall any claims to the kingship by Jehoahaz’s heirs.] Incidentally, modern historians assume quite a number of co-regencies among the kings of Israel and Judah that are not mentioned in the Bible (mainly in order to keep Biblical history synchronized with Assyrian/Babylonian chronology), so this idea sounds reasonable enough on its face.
ISTM, though, that this serves as a good example of why such threads tend to go nowhere. The world didn’t have to wait for the good folks at Skeptic’s Annotated Bible to discover contradictions and inconsistencies in the Bible; you can find plenty of places where the Talmud discusses such apparent contradictions and proposes resolutions, and often uses this method to derive details of Jewish law. (I’m not familiar with Christian literature, but I’m sure you can find much the same sort of thing there too.) So in short, to someone who believes that the Bible is divinely inspired, there are no unresolvable contradictions - they were put in to teach us something; to someone who doesn’t, most if not all such explanations are going to seem like little more than sophistry.
Before anyone bothers with any more, I’d like to know: what will you do if we do prove one? Are you open and willing for it to be so proven, by normal standards of evidence and argument? Or are you so totally convinced of the infallibility of the bible that no argument will affect you?
For that matter, it’s a little unclear where the burden of proof should lie. If you want to make an extraordinary claim, (i.e. that a particular book is inerrant,) then you don’t get the benefit of the doubt. It’s your job to provide evidence for your view. We shouldn’t have to assume the Bible is inerrant unless we can prove otherwise. OTOH, it’s not clear to me how one could actively prove the Bible to be inerrant, beyond dispelling supposed errors.
How about we run two books in parallel? An experiment and a control, as it were. We find contradictions in the Bible which you explain away, and you find contradictions in another book which we can try to explain away using the same logic that you use.
