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Errors and Contradictions in the Bible


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I figure that this, and the discussion about whether Jesus really exists, belong in this section, as they aren't political.

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You hear a lot of folks saying, "Well, you know, the Bible has lots of errors in it." When I ask them to show me one, they never can, but they stand by what they claimed. Funny thing, that. A bit like the guy who said "Well all those animals would never have fitted into that ark" and then admitted that he had no idea how big the vessel was. (It was about 450 feet long!)

So, I thought I might toss out a few supposed errors and contradictions, just for a bit of fun. Some people apparently have nothing better to do than to look for mistakes in the scriptures. I once told a friend that there were supposedly some errors, and he said "If there are errors, then I am blissfully unaware of them." Them's my sentiments, but I, and other preachers, are prepared to defend the Bible against any attempts to find faults.

People get all excited when they think they've found an error. What they don't realize is that God has written that book in such a way that an attacker can break his neck over it if he chooses to do so. I sincerely hope that you won't.

Now, English is my mother tongue. When I say the Bible, I mean the Authorized King James Bible. If you want to find errors in other English versions, you'll have to line up behind me, because I can produce stacks of them. I won't defend them, although some of the "errors that aren't errors" are the same in those, too. In fact, a lot of the attacks on the Bible apply to Hebrew and Greek, as well as versions in other modern-day languages, and so have nothing specifically to do with the King James Bible. The King James Bible isn't the issue here, in the main.

So, here we go. I'll give three, and then give the solutions later. (Doesn't that sound patronizing, ha, ha? :D )

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(1) "Two and twenty years old was Ahaziah when he began to reign." (II Kings 8:26), yet "Forty and two years old was Ahaziah when he began to reign." (II Cronicles 22:2) It's the same guy in both verses.

(2) This one has to do with the dimensions of the "molten sea" outside Solomon's temple. II Chronicles 4:2 says "He made a molten sea of ten cubits from brim to brim, round in compass, ..., and a line of thirty cubits did compass it about." But every math student knows that the circumference of a circle is pi (about 3.14159) times the diameter, so if the diameter is 10 cubits, then the circumference would have to be about 31.4159 cubits. And God doesn't say "about ten"; he says "ten".

No, I wouldn't have noticed that "error" either, but someone did.

(3) "Thou shalt not kill." (Exodus 20:13), yet "To everything there is a season, ..., A time to kill." (Ecclesiastes 3:1 and 3) This one is a classic "boo boo" in the scriptures.

By the way, none of these three "errors" has anything whatsoever to do with which modern-day Bible version you use; they are present in Hebrew.

Later,

Shrdlu

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P.S. If you want more of these puzzles, get a copy of "Problem Texts", by Peter Ruckman, which can be ordered from the Bible Baptist Bookstore in Pensacola, FL. They have a website.

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Why anybody is perplexed/amused/whatever by the fact that a collection of cultural histories and wisdom stories written and or codified over centuries by different authors with different perspectives (perspectives which very often reflect the tenor of their times) should at times present "contradictions" is something that I find amusing. Of course there are contradicitions. Look at the varying geneologies (including Jesus') - there are inconsistencies (or at the least, ambiguities) there.

Shrdlu, you no doubt believes that Isiah and Daniel were each the work of a single author. Although I respect that position, I myself find it next to impossible to acccept. There are just too many stylistic and philosophical variations over the course of each book for me to accept that position. To me, it seems obvious that these are compilations of various writings from several different generations written under several different sets of circumstances.

Rather than trying to explain away the obvious (or, to be fully accurate, obvious as I see it), I myself think it's more beneficial to accept them, and then get on with the business of understanding why they exist, what historical circumstances led to their co-mingling, and then look beyond the facts in order to grasp the larger truth. To me, that is where the beauty and wisdom of God is found, perhaps even the very essence of God (if such a thing can ever truly be grasped by the human mind) - the underlying unity beneath a facade of what on the surface seems like chaos and discontinuity. Perfection proving itself to NOT be the lack of friction and contradiction, but rather the embracing of it as necessary parts, complimentary opposites if you will, of a greater whole. If all you can see is the inconsistencies, then you see the duality (or greater), but if you can see the wholeness, if you can not just accept, but actually embrace the contradictions, then you may well be on your way to embracing the unity, which is, after all, one of the GREAT themes running throught the Bible - the constant push/pull of seperation (humanity as their own highest power, with each individual person being their own potential theocratic universe) vs. unity (humanity united in subservience to a greater, common, unity, aka God). It's the story of all of our lifes told through a specific geo-cultural voice, and nit-picking for "errors", "contradictions", and such is much akin to looking for flaws in your wife's complexion - no doubt you will find them SOMEWHERE, but what does it prove about anything that really matters?

I guess it's obvious that I'm not a literalist, eh? ;)

Although I do wonder whatever became of the Ark of the Covenant - cats were running around like crazy with it for a while, and then all of a sudden it's like it never existed. It's almost as if a different generation of writers took over the gig and left all that legend stuff behind!

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Contradictions in the Bible

My favorite contradiction involves the following:

Are we punished for our parents' sins?

Exodus 20:5 "For I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation." (Repeated in Deuteronomy 5:9)

Exodus 34:6-7 " . . . The Lord God, merciful and gracious, . . . that will by no means clear the guilty; visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children's children, unto the third and to the fourth generation."

I Corinthians 15:22 "For as in Adam all die, . . ."

vs.

Ezekiel 18:20 "The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father."

Deuteronomy 24:16 "The fathers shall not be put to death for the children, neither shall the children be put to death for the fathers: every man shall be put to death for his own sin."

There is just no way to logically reconcile these statements. I have had more than one argument with a Christian extremist regarding this contradiction, yet I have never received anything approaching a reasonable explanation.

I think that, yet again, Jim has nailed it on the head. I know plenty of Christians who, with unshaken faith, acknowledge such contradictions because they realize that the Bible cannot be the literal word of God.

Edited by Edward
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Although I do wonder whatever became of the Ark of the Covenant - cats were running around like crazy with it for a while, and then all of a sudden it's like it never existed. It's almost as if a different generation of writers took over the gig and left all that legend stuff behind!

I saw it on eBay. The winner divvied it up, remastered it to SACD, and sold it to Dusty Groove (the bastards!).

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There is just no way to logically reconcile these statements. I have had more than one argument with a Christian extremist regarding this contradiction, yet I have never received anything approaching a reasonable explanation.

As a Christian, I want to tell you that you are absolutely right! And you won’t. This, I believe, is what makes Jesus all the more necessary: to actually be the living reconciliation. If that doesn’t make sense to you, take heart: I’m still trying to figure it out myself. But I believe it, and that gives me comfort that I don’t have to worry about trying to reconcile it myself, because I obviously can’t. (Not so much because the Bible sez I can’t, but just because I’ve realized that, by my own power, I am unable to reconcile it. IOW, if you were to ask me about it, I’d look you square in the eye and say, “You’re right. It does say that, and I cannot explain why it says that.”)

For that matter, following what Jim was saying, look at the fact that all four Gospels present differing perspectives of the Crucifixion. It’s like having four witnesses to an auto accident: just TRY and get the same exact story from all four people. But they’ll all agree on one thing: it DID happen.

In the end, this is why my faith remains unshaken by these contradictions: the fact that Christ came as a living reconciliation, as if to say, “Don’t be troubled or confused by what you read. Read with your heart. Let me worry about resolving these differences. Believe that I can and will resolve these contradictions, and you will live in peace.” (The fact that various extremists take a lot of these contradictions (or at least one side of them) and then shout from the mountaintop as if they were the Messiah, and the resulting war and tensions from such shouting, just goes to show how little we who call ourselves Christians really have learned. Jesus was right: we really are like sheep!)

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I personally find it fascinating to trace the evolution of perception through the course of the Bible (as well as the non-cannonical intertestamental literature that exists, literature which is essential reading, I think for anybody who wants a full picture of the world and times of New Testament-era Judaism and how the culture from which Jesus sprang got from "there" to "here") There's a constant unfolding of awareness and consciousness that culminates in the tale of Jesus, as if the quest for understanding about who/what this "God" thing was REALLY all about kept taking a few steps forward, a few more backwards, etc., until this cat came and showed everybody that it's really simple - love your neighbor as yourself, because your neighbor IS yourself, and by operating from that consciousness, you live in harmony with the spirit of Creation (aka "God"). And seeing that all the steps backward, from the Garden of Eden on, were inevitably driven by a desire to have a "kingdom" (i.e. a self-glorification, be it individual or collective) here on Earth rather than accepting that the true "kingdom" lies BEYOND (as in non-tangibly), what better way to make the point than to have the guy die on this plane only to be resurrected and ascend, as if to say, "try all you want to get your jollies here, but all "here" will ultimately do is kill you. What you really got to do is LET GO of all this self-aggrandizing mess and rise above it all, rise into the WHOLE instead of trying to build here in the partial).

Doesn't matter if it "really happened" or not. The lesson is the same either way - lose yourself to find yourself. "Die" and be "reborn" into a much, MUCH better life, a life that no longer depends on "the world" for validation or meaning, because "the world" is just part of what REALLY exists (Physics has long ago disproven the notion of a three-dimensional reality as being the "all"). Simple as that. The questions had all been answered - who we are, why we're here, all that juicy stuff finally revealed itself through the life (again, real, exaggerated, or totally fabricated is irrelevant) of a human, the only form which we stubborn and dense humans seem to pay attention to.

A perfect culmination to a tale that spans more than several centuries, but one that didn't have enough sales potential (it's so SIMPLE, but it really doesn't FIT into the lifestyle of most people, then or now...) to move it beyond it's core audience (and an audience that history suggest was STILL waiting for thier "Messiah" to come back SOON and do it HERE, NOW - early non-cannonical Christian literature suggests that much of the church was expecting the Second Coming to be just around the corner, which just goes to show you that old habits die hard...), much less stop the endless persecution of that audience by people who were still VERY hung up in the "kingdom on Earth" bag from THEIR P.O.V. Worlds were colliding, and somebody needed to co-op the truth so that their Earthly Glory could still remain, and somebody else needed to sell out the truth so that they could stop living in mortal fear every waking moment. The road to hell indeed is paved with "good" intentions...

So the record (a gloriously LITERATE record, btw, full of archtypical personal dramas, wisdom stories, all kinds of allegorical tales, as well as poetry, satire, and even a SEANCE!) of a cultural-specific and incredibly RICH legacy of an ongoing quest for a broader understanding of the eternal questions gets turned into something else entirely, and all sorts of convoluted "theology" arises that tries to make questions into answers, and answers found "along the way" into The One True Law, no further exploration or understanding needed (or allowed....). The medium became the message, and the message became the massage. Or the strangulation, depending on who you were and when and where you lived.

Jesus wept.

Edited by JSngry
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Great posts Jim!

I'm just going to make one quick note regarding my feelings on this subject.

Do I believe in a higher power? Yes - but not in any accepted "version" I've run across.

Do I believe the Bible is the word of God? No - to me it's just another version of the Greek myths without all the other Gods running around.

Do I believe Jesus existed? Yes, I believe he was a real person. Was he the "Son of God"? No.

I'll shut up now....

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Okay, ya got me. I haven't really researched this issue, because I've never been interested enough to do so. I'm just going off half-baked theories that I've seen on the History channel and other places. So, I shouldn't have posted that piece probably.

But, whether he *really* existed or not...if he did, then he was just a man. I just don't buy the whole Messiah thing.

"If Jesus came back today he'd be in jail by next week" - Brave New World (Motorhead)

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Do I believe Jesus existed?  Yes, I believe he was a real person.

Based on what?

There's actually a fair amount of evidence suggesting that Jesus was an actual person. Whether he was the Son of God or not is another story...

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navc...istorical+jesus

One of the pages your Google search found:

http://www.nobeliefs.com/exist.htm

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From the above cited text:

"Many Christian apologists attempt to extricate themselves from their lack of evidence, claim that if we cannot rely on the post chronicle exegesis of Jesus, then we cannot establish a historical foundation for other figures such as Alexander the Great, Napoleon, Socrates, etc. However, there sits a vast difference between historical figures and Jesus. There occurs either artifacts, writings, or eyewitness accounts for historical people, whereas, for Jesus we have nothing.

Alexander, for example, left a wake of destroyed and created cities behind. We have buildings, libraries and cities, such as Alexandria, left in his name. We have treaties, and even a letter from Alexander to the people of Chios, engraved in stone, dated at 332 B.C.E. For Socrates, we have the eyewitness writings of Plato that depicts his philosophy and life. Napoleon left behind artifacts, eyewitness accounts and letters. We can establish some historicity to these people because we have evidence that occurred during their life times. Yet even with the contemporary artifacts, historians have become wary of stories of many of these historical people. For example, some of the stories of Alexander or Nero starting the fire in Rome always get questioned or doubted because they contain inconsistencies or come from authors who wrote years after the alleged facts. In qualifying the history of Alexander, Pierre Briant writes, "Although more than twenty of his contemporaries chronicled Alexander's life and campaigns, none of these texts survive in original form. Many letters and speeches attributed to Alexander are ancient forgeries or reconstructions inspired by imagination or political motives. The little solid documentation we possess from Alexander's own time is mainly to be found in stone inscriptions from the Greek cities of Europe and Asia." [briant]

Inventing histories out of whole cloth or embellished from a seed of an actual historical event appears common throughout the chronicle of human thought. Robert Price observes, "Alexander the Great, Caesar Augustus, Cyrus, King Arthur, and others have nearly suffered this fate. What keeps historians from dismissing them as mere myths, like Paul Bunyan, is that there is some residue. We know at least a bit of mundane information about them, perhaps quite a bit, that does not form part of any legend cycle." [Price, p. 260-261]

Interestingly, almost all important historical people have descriptions of what they looked like. Plato described what Socrates looked like, we have busts of Greek and Roman aristocrats, artwork of Napoleon, etc. We have descriptions of facial qualities, height, weight, hair length & color, age and even portraits of most important historical figures. But for Jesus, we have nothing. Nowhere in the Bible do we have a description of the human shape of Jesus. How can we rely on the Gospels as the word of Jesus when no one even describes what he looked like? How odd that none of the disciple characters record what he looked like, yet believers attribute them to know exactly what he said. Indeed, this gives us a clue that Jesus came to the gospel writers and indirect and through myth. Not until hundreds of years after the alleged Jesus did pictures emerge as to what he looked like from cult Christians, and these widely differed from a blond clean shaven, curly haired Apollonian youth (found in the Roman catacombs) to a long-bearded Italian as depicted to this day. This mimics the pattern of Greek mythological figures as their believers constructed various images of what their gods looked like according to their own cultural image.

Historial people leave us with contemporary evidence, but for Jesus we have nothing. If we wanted to present a fair comparison of the type of information about Jesus to another example of equal historical value, we could do no better than to compare Jesus with the mythical figure of Hercules."

Again, an excellent point. How, how, HOW is it possible for someone as famous in both his alleged lifetime and afterwards as Jesus is said to have been to have NO eyewitness accounts? No mention in letters or municiple documents? There is absolutely NO evidence that a man named Yeshua lived in Nazereth (a city that did not exist), that he was born in a manger in Bethlehem, that he inspired hordes of followers, and that he was put to death by crucifixion. We ASSUME because this story is SO well-known (we repeat it every Christmas and Easter, and millions of people discuss his alleged life, words and deeds every single day) that it must have SOME basis in fact. Yet there is nothing. I've said this before: 33 AD is NOT prehistory. It is IMPOSSIBLE for someone as well-known and as contraversial as Jesus was said to live and die without leaving a single trace of his existence save several highly questionable documents written decades after his death. Something doesn't add up.

Don't people see that it is pointless to ask questions like "What would Jesus do?", "What did Jesus really think?", or "How did Jesus really feel?" when you can't even establish that such a person ever lived? I looked at several of those links about the historical search for Jesus and, what a surprise, not one of them seemed even remotely credible. An historian is interested only in what can be proven. The study of the life of Christ is not history: It is mythology, and that's a completely different discipline.

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Don't people see that it is pointless to ask questions like "What would Jesus do?", "What did Jesus really think?", or "How did Jesus really feel?" when you can't even establish that such a person ever lived? .

Yes, about as pointless as asking THAT question is! :g:g:g

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My favorite contradiction involves the following:

Are we punished for our parents' sins?

Exodus 20:5 "For I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation." (Repeated in Deuteronomy 5:9)

Exodus 34:6-7 " . . . The Lord God, merciful and gracious, . . . that will by no means clear the guilty; visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children's children, unto the third and to the fourth generation."

I Corinthians 15:22 "For as in Adam all die, . . ."

vs.

Ezekiel 18:20 "The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father."

Deuteronomy 24:16 "The fathers shall not be put to death for the children, neither shall the children be put to death for the fathers: every man shall be put to death for his own sin."

There is just no way to logically reconcile these statements.

I can give an immediate explanation. No problem.

God distinguishes between nations and individuals when it comes to sin and the punishment thereof. There is also a distinction between the penalty after death administered to each individual, and a penalty on earth imposed on a person - which might be made to carry over to his descendants, for certain crimes/sins.

Each individual must bear the punishment, after his death, for his own sin, unless he got saved while still on earth by accepting Jesus as Saviour, of course. Thus (Ezekiel 18:20) the son does not bear the punishment for his Dad's sin: namely being judged as an individual after death and cast into the lake of fire, preceded by a spell in hell. No-one will ever be sent to hell and the lake of fire for another's sins. Then, the scripture in Deuteronomy 24:16 says that no-one is given the earthly death penalty by the country's authorities for a crime committed by another. And we know that no-one ever is (at least, not in a just society).

When it comes to nations, God says, in those Exodus verses, that his punishment of the nation in question will sometimes carry on for several generations. Thus, people born later will suffer because of what their ancestors have done. (It's a bit like the comment that rain falls on the just and the unjust.) This suffering is only on earth, not after death. So there is a big difference between the two types of punishment.

An example of the national judgment is the Jews in captivity in Babylon, living in a foreign land under the control of the Chaldeans. These Jews had children who were born in captivity, and these children suffered because of the earlier sins of the fathers, even though they were not personally to blame. Another, contemporary, example would be a child born in an impoverished country that is suffering from prolonged drought. God has brought on the drought as a judgment on that nation for its evil false religions (that's why it happens), but the new-born child is not individually to blame, at least, not at first.

Another point about this punshment for several generations is that God, being God, knows what each of us will do in the future. Thus, if an individual, or nation, is going to be only evil in the future, then God sometimes makes them suffer right from birth.

So, you see, there is a logical explanation of these apparently contradictory scriptures. If one approaches the Bible with a humble heart, not looking for errors, then an explanation will be found. Sometimes the answer is not easy to find, but one can ask God to reveal the answer.

When I first saw that king who was 22 and 42 at the same time (!!), I did not know the explanation. But I did not think there was an error. I just wanted to know how this could be explained. I asked my then pastor, who did not know the answer at first. But he did find me an answer, and I will post it "in a future broadcast", as Robert Stack used to say.

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Shrdlu, you no doubt believes that Isaiah and Daniel were each the work of a single author. Although I respect that position, I myself find it next to impossible to acccept. There are just too many stylistic and philosophical variations over the course of each book for me to accept that position. To me, it seems obvious that these are compilations of various writings from several different generations written under several different sets of circumstances.

This is almost 100% correct. The various human authors of the Bible did have different styles and lived under widely varying conditions. But divine inspiration of the Scriptures is not incompatible with this. God had a way of letting each writer write in his own style and yet the results are still given by God's inspiration.

It's a bit like preachers' sermons today: you will find lots of different styles, but God can speak to the listener's heart through any of them.

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Although I do wonder whatever became of the Ark of the Covenant - cats were running around like crazy with it for a while, and then all of a sudden it's like it never existed. It's almost as if a different generation of writers took over the gig and left all that legend stuff behind!

The ark was raptured out of the earth when Nebuchadnezzar's armies invaded Jerusalem and destroyed Solomon's Temple (where, of course, the ark was housed, in the most holy place). It is seen in Heaven in Revelation 11:19: "And the temple of God was opened in heaven, and there was seen in his temple the ark of his testament ... "

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