Logical Errors in the Bible? Show me!

Great Debates
21

[hijack] The way I heard it is that a famous Cretan said that “All Cretans are liars,” but of course, this version isn’t a paradox, because as long as there’s one Cretan whose lying/truth telling propesity is the opposite of the rest, the logic works out.

The version as you give is much closer, but isn’t QUITE a paradox, since it hangs on the truth-telling value of the person making the statement. The only way to make it a straight paradox in the logical sense is for someone to say “I am a liar.” I don’t think it’s possible to phrase the Cretan version to make it one. If there is, I can’t think of it at the moment. [/hijack]

22

“I am a liar” isn’t even strong enough to be a paradox.

You actually have to quote Harry Mudd and say, “I’m lying to you right now.”

23

There is also the interpretation that what is meant is that he was given posca. Posca is the Roman poor man’s wine; wine mixed with stale wine(vinegar) and water. As a good thirst quencher this was normally part of the soldier’s rations.

Which turns, what is usually conceived as a taunt, into a kind act. The soldiers gave him to drink from their own rations.

24

Or even simpler: “This statement is false.”

25

I hope these are enough to get you started Fuel.

I’m glad you started this thread. I look forward to having some of these explained.

26

I still want to know why Jesus cursed the fig tree when the text of Mark clearly states that it was not yet the season for figs. And why that tale gets better and better as it’s told: first it being found withered when they look at it the next day, and in a later version, withering on the spot.

It’s obvious: as he was in the process of hanging himself, the “jerk” from the fall was so powerful that his guts fell out on the field that he bought via the preists by giving them the silver (albiet very fast).
Next?

27

I recommend the following site for some of the many internal consistancies withing the bible. And while reading, please remember that this site is maintained by the Worlds Best Christian (so close to Jesus he validates her parking).

http://www.bettybowers.com/answers.html

28

Oddly enough I don’t see them as “logical” errors.

Rather, they’re precisely the same errors one would expect of stories handed down via oral tradition and/or written by those who were not present at the event.

We know, for example, that entire chapters were written anywhere from a few years to a hundred years after the event they describe.

Have a look at the thread discussing the 2000 election- Not even three years ago, it concerns an event the entire world watched in broadband realtime, we have hard copies from the event itself and countless analysis in the years afterward. And yet we, the most connected generation to date, can dispute major points such as Supreme Court decisions.

And yet we apparently expect a people who barely had writing, and where perhaps one in a hundred was what could pass for literate at the time, and when paper was, pound for pound, more expensive than gold, to have gotten every nuance and detail exactly correct, to say nothing of recording it without a trace of bias.

We can also be quite certain that major plot points- the Flood, walking on water, water to wine, the burning bush, the Ark- being impossible or at least horrifically improbable, are at absolute best, merely metaphor.

In other words, one can logically assume, with an excellent degree of reliability, that much of the book is apocryphal and the rest, fable.

Thus it is not, and cannot be, the “infallible” work it is purported to be. It is no more and no less a collection of ancient morality plays and the era’s equivalent of editorial pages, which through a series of quirks has been elevated to a Holy relic.

29

Jesus refers to himself as the “son of man.” Which man is he the son of, being as he had no earthly father?

How can Lot be considered a righteous man, when he offered his virgin daughters up for rape?

30

If Hannibal was involved, he could hang himself and be gutted at the same time!

I can’t elaborate, but I’m pretty sure this is a figure of speech.

31

::: applauds Doc Nickel :::

A very cogent analysis. JFTR, except for four letters: II Peter, I and II Timothy, and Titus, which except incidentally do not pretend to report any events, but rather give advice, best scholarly datings of the New Testament books are well inside your 100-year maximum. John, writing at the latest 70 years after Jesus’s death, would be the longest range.

On the other hand, some of the Old Testament books are far in excess of the 100-year range. Ruth as we have it is almost certainly post-Exilic, dating its current form to about 500 BC; it has no interior dating but describes the courtship and marriage of the grandparents of King David, who took the throne of the combined kingdoms in the year 1000 BC (sheer coincidence that in our calendar this happens to be such an even number). On that basis the events it describes would have taken place about 1100 BC, or 600 years before the final composition of the book. My Jerusalem Bible attributes the composition of Job, a “wisdom” story in dialogue form, to the beginning of the 5th century BC. But the frame story places Job himself back in the time of the Patriarchs, perhaps a millennium before.

Perhaps the most controverted question here – and I will stress that Orthodox Jews and conservative Christians do not “buy” the theory – is in the multiple-document hypothesis for the Torah. This identifies four strands of narrative that have been integrated together to form the five books of the Law which begin all Bibles – a “J” strand composed in Judah in the 9th Century BC, characterized by use of the Divine Name at all times, by a focus on the patriarch Judah and his descendents, and by masterly storytelling skills; an “E” strand composed slighly later in the Northern Kingdom, with “elohim” (God) used for the divine epithet and a tendency to find natural explanations for legendary events, and a focus on Joseph; a “D” strand found mostly in Deutronomy and dating to the days of King Josiah; anbd a “P” strand with a focus on laws, ritual, and genealogies, using “the Lord God” as often as not when referring to God, and evidently post-Exilic in composition. “P”'s toledoth formula (“These are the generations of…”) and the lineages linking them serve as the overall frame story for the Torah. So we have Creation at the Ussher date of 4004 BC (Jewish calendars suggest a slighly later date), the Flood about 2350 BC, the Patriarchs living betwween 2000 and 1700 BC, the Exodus beginning about 1240 BC – related with allegedly verbatim dialogue, including the giving of the Law to Moses, in books dating between 1000 and 500 BC.

32

Polycarp- so what’s your take on the two fathers of Joseph in the Matthew & Luke geneologies? the levirate marriage tradition that Eusebius cites or that Luke was actually recording Mary’s lineage (I did once read a claim that the Matthew geneology was Mary’s but that seemed to be unique to that one writer.)

33

I’ve seen both of these, but the one that I find actually reasonable (as opposed to the idea that one or both Evangelists made up the genealogy out of whole cloth, the most “rasonable” explanation of the discrepancy) – is that Matthew is using the old Semitic custom of recording the heirship in the “son of” usage (which was very common throughout the ancient Near East – compare the Assyrian records referring to Kings of Israel as “son of Omri” even though his descendants had been extinguished a century before). On this theory, Zerubbabel son of Pedaiah son of Shealtiel, descended from David through Nathan, was heir of line after the lineage through Solomon and Josiah died out without progeny during the Babylonian Exile. His eldest son Abiud was heir to the Davidic line, and this continued the lineage until Jacob son of Matthan died childless in the First Century BC. Meanwhile, his younger son Johanan (Rhesa apparently being an epithet of Zerubbabel meaning, more or less, “Prince” that Luke mistook for a son’s name sired a lineage leading to Heli whose son Joseph the Carpenter has a New Testament role. Joseph was the man whom Jacob’s death s.p. caused the heirship to fall on, much like the classic movie gimmick of the grocery store clerk whose sixth cousin’s death leaves him with a virtually worthless Mitteleuropean countship, with ensuing hilarity. This matches childless kings adopting heirs down through history – a historical example from relatively recent times being Karl XIII Konig von Sverige adopting Jean-Baptiste Jules Bernadotte, Merchal de France, back in 1808.

For those into the fulfillment of prophecy, it also covers the curse on Jechoniah and his descendents in Jeremiah and the restoration of the heirship to Zerubbabel in Haggai.

I’m interested in it only on an intellectual level – it’s an explanation that makes sense from a known-custom point of view and does not require the assumption that one or both Evangelists were BS artists – but from the point of view of affecting my faith, it doesn’t make the slightest difference.

34

There was a program on TV here a while back that offered a different take on the vinegar business.

It seems that there was some painkilling substance that was in use at that time that was normally dissolved in vinegar. I’m pulling this out of my ass, but I think it was some kind of opiate.

This would make the taunting into an act of kindness - a sympathetic Roman soldier easing the pain of a dying man.

My two cents. Based on a vaguely remembered TV program, so view it with suspicion.

35

[hijack]Isn’t it odd that every time the bible contradicts itself somebody is quick to point out that what the bible said said isn’t what it meant, and there is a completely different meaning that rationalizes the contradiction? [/hijack]

36

That’s very true, Paco, and I believe it stems largely from the need on the part of some conservative Christians (and I think some Jews; I’ll let one of our Jewish posters address that) for an anchor of certitude on their worldview, which they place in the literalness of the Bible and its utter reliability (in their view). Any apparent contradiction is therefore a threat to their worldview and must be relolved.

Others of us do not have this exaggerated view of the Bible but do respect it as a collection of works held in high esteem and attemptedly preserved against scribal error for literally millennia, whatever hand God may or may not have had in its creation in our separate views. Therefore, we look critically at the alleged contradiction to see if there is some simple explanation.

To give a good example of this, see the Genesis 1 vs Genesis 2 material in the OP and subsequent discussion. While there are clear and obvious contradictions between the two stories, the often-pointed-out six days vs. one day creation is not one of them. To be sure, the Genesis 1 account does imply six days, detailing as it does each day’s work. But the sole refrence to a single day in Genesis 2 is the opening line, “In the day in which God created…” And, as is evident from both other points in the Bible and secular works, the Hebrew yom, like the English translation “day,” can have three distinct meanings: (1) period of roughly 12 hours characterized by sunlight, as opposed to “night”; (2) period of 24 hours in duration, usually between successive sunsets; (3) indeterminate period during which something occurred or someone flourished, as in “In George Washington’s day, there were no railroads.” It takes little common sense and no required recourse to special pleading to understand the yom in Genesis 2:5 as having the third meaning, and in fact, the Jerusalem Bible, emphatically non-fundamentalist in its outlook, translates it as “time” rather than “day” for this reason.

I’m quite prepared myself, to see contradicitons and logical errors in the Bible. But I’m also ready to see reasons why they may not be actual contradictions. Take for example the numerous times Jesus is quoted as having told a parable at distinct times and places in Matthew vs. Luke. There are three sensible explanations of this: (1) One of them is flat-out wrong; (2) Jesus told a given parable twice over the course of His three years of preaching (and anyone who has paid attention to the sermons given by one preacher over a multi-year span will note him using the same example in different contexts; people do have their pet interests!); and (3) Matthew’s Jesus is represented in giving subject-specific sermons/discourses five times in that Gospel’s narrative, and it is not a violation of First Century historiography to gather together known statements by the subject of the history to recreate a supposed discourse, the exact words of which were nbever recorded, but which was known to address the topic of those known statements. So the Sermon on the Mount addresses personal behavior and trust in God, and the Eschatalogical Discourse of Matthew 24-25 deals with End Times comments, not because Jesus said exactly those words in that order at those two particular times, but because these were preserved statements of Jesus on those two topics, each of which he was known to have preached on at the particular time in question. Luke’s placement of parts of them at different times and places is not a contradiction but is probably the more reliable indicator of where Jesus said those particular utterances, since Luke makes it clear that he had carefully researched out what Jesus actually said and did, and when and where he said/did them. Diffrent focus on reportage, which would have been clear to the average First Century reader, familiar with the “reconstructed speech” convention – just as a chronological and a topical collection of Churchill’s speeches will put things he is known to have said at known times and places in quite different order.

37

Not at all. Actually, it’s precisely what one would expect of a work of parable and metaphor- a story, in other words- as opposed to a record of fact.

Today we can cite hard copies of Supreme Court records, but back then? Wine? Vinegar? Water? Opium? Did the event actually happen? Did anyone say anything at all? Who knows- the records we read today are based off records not comitted to paper until months, years or decades after the event, assuming the event even happened.

The more I read, the more it becomes clear it’s simply an old storybook. Not that I lent it any credence to begin with, but what once might have been a relic is now nothing more than dusty old fables.

Read it as a window to that era, if that’s what interests you. Don’t base your life around it.

38

Still it’s fun to find that some of these parables/stories, that are trying to convey a message, are totally misread today. Like the posca thing.
Generations used to think, when hearing that story, ‘Ooh what nasty fellers them Romans, giving him vinegar.’ While the story meant to say that the Romans were all right.

39

The other day I was actually going to start a thread asking a question related to this. I have heard this statement before (about Lot offering his daughters up for rape), but I’ve never been religious, gone to Sunday school, etc… so I really have no idea about the Biblical context.

However, I read a novel recently - Sarah by Orson Scott Card - that explains the Lot situation in a different way. He says that although it seems that Lot was offering his daughters up to be raped, Lot did so in the belief that it wouldn’t actually happen (because the men were homosexual) - so he felt secure that they wouldn’t actually be raped. So supposedly Lot offered them up as a way to placate the angry men, but without actually putting his daughters in danger.

But I don’t know if any of this version is actually supported by the Bible - I have heard that Orson Scott Card is a Mormon, and that their interpretation is “different.” But I’ve never heard anyone explain how it’s different.

Sorry for the small hijack.

40

What about Gen1:26

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

Did God have a wife?