101 Clear Contradictions in the Bible

[PaulConventionWV]

As Jesus would say, you are forgiven.

Well, I'll be. You really don't need any help destroying your credibility, do you?

 

[jmdrake]

I didn't know that TER was Theocrat. When did that happen?

He was asking questions, so I was asking questions.

LOL. Another contradiction. Anyway it's interesting and a bit sad that Theocrat decided to derail your topic instead of addressing it. Without going through all 101 (that's a lot) here are a few things to point out.

1) There can be multiple causes to the same event. Take God/Satan inducing David to number the people. Some would say "But of course. God made Satan make David number the people." I think that's the SF/FF/PCWV position. Other's would say God allowed Satan to do that for some unspecified reason. The Bible says "God hardened Pharoah's heart" but it also said he hardened his own heart.

2) Some of the number dependencies are trivial. Were there really a million men at the million man march or were there merely 900+ thousand?

3) Thought inspiration versus word inspiration. The ideas in the Bible can be inspired without it being a word for word transcription.

 

[PaulConventionWV]

LOL. Another contradiction. Anyway it's interesting and a bit sad that Theocrat decided to derail your topic instead of addressing it. Without going through all 101 (that's a lot) here are a few things to point out.

1) There can be multiple causes to the same event. Take God/Satan inducing David to number the people. Some would say "But of course. God made Satan make David number the people." I think that's the SF/FF/PCWV position. Other's would say God allowed Satan to do that for some unspecified reason. The Bible says "God hardened Pharoah's heart" but it also said he hardened his own heart.

2) Some of the number dependencies are trivial. Were there really a million men at the million man march or were there merely 900+ thousand?

3) Thought inspiration versus word inspiration. The ideas in the Bible can be inspired without it being a word for word transcription.

I'd say the important point here is that small scribal errors like 3 versus 7 are really quite meaningless and there's no indication that such a mistake existed in the original text. If anything, these small discrepancies are a testament to how well attested the manuscripts are. What such things really indicate is that no single authority has ever had complete control over the entire text of the Bible, proof that it has never been corrupted by any particular sect or creed. These supposed contradictions all have answers, and even skeptical biblical scholars say that it is the most well-attested and best-kept of any of the ancient writings, including anything from ancient Rome.

Oh, and Pharaoh was predestined to harden his heart.

 

[Ronin Truth]

Well, I'll be. You really don't need any help destroying your credibility, do you?

I certainly don't need any help from you for anything at all. Thanks anyway.

 

[Ronin Truth]

LOL. Another contradiction. Anyway it's interesting and a bit sad that Theocrat decided to derail your topic instead of addressing it. Without going through all 101 (that's a lot) here are a few things to point out.

1) There can be multiple causes to the same event. Take God/Satan inducing David to number the people. Some would say "But of course. God made Satan make David number the people." I think that's the SF/FF/PCWV position. Other's would say God allowed Satan to do that for some unspecified reason. The Bible says "God hardened Pharoah's heart" but it also said he hardened his own heart.

2) Some of the number dependencies are trivial. Were there really a million men at the million man march or were there merely 900+ thousand?

3) Thought inspiration versus word inspiration. The ideas in the Bible can be inspired without it being a word for word transcription.

Yeah Theocrat thought, and told Sola, that he had the handle on both this thread and me. Now he's gone and we're still here. LOL!

 

[PaulConventionWV]

I certainly don't need any help from you for anything at all. Thanks anyway.

Oh, you must have misunderstood. I never offered you any.

 

[Crashland]

I don't think it is particularly fair to just list a huge number of contradictions. It might have the effect of planting a few seeds of doubt in a believer, or re-enforcing a non-Christian's beliefs, but it isn't really a strong argument if all of the points are just listed.

I have to point out on the other side though, when these issues are explored one at a time, Christians are susceptible to afford the Bible a miles-long leash for creative exegesis to explain the apparent contradictions, while not affording other historical or religious texts the same allowance for their contradictions.

 

[heavenlyboy34]

I'll second it.

AND feel free to start an intelligent discussion. <shrug>

You don't find Japanese philosophy intelligent and interesting? Well, most philosophers in the world disagree with you-as do I. Quite a lot of ink has been spilled on the concept of "do" ("The Way") alone.

 

[PaulConventionWV]

I don't think it is particularly fair to just list a huge number of contradictions. It might have the effect of planting a few seeds of doubt in a believer, or re-enforcing a non-Christian's beliefs, but it isn't really a strong argument if all of the points are just listed.

I have to point out on the other side though, when these issues are explored one at a time, Christians are susceptible to afford the Bible a miles-long leash for creative exegesis to explain the apparent contradictions, while not affording other historical or religious texts the same allowance for their contradictions.

To your "other side" comment, other historical or religious texts don't have nearly the amount of authenticity that the Biblical texts do.

Besides, we never just assume that ANY historical text is contradictory until proven non-contradictory. Instead, the burden of proof is on the skeptic who wants to say that the original text was made with a built-in contradiction that sullies its authenticity. The vast majority of these supposed contradictions can be explained very easily, and all that has to be done to avoid the contradiction is find one particular way in which it could be interpreted without a contradiction. If we can do that, then there's absolutely no reason to think or assume that there would be one there. If anyone wants to believe that some contradictory interpretation is the correct interpretation, then they can believe that, but there's no evidence to think it's true or that any contradictory interpretation is better than the one that's not.

If you find a seeming contradiction in ANY historical text, it makes much more sense to try to reconcile them than to assume that the people who wrote the accounts were lying or stupid. It takes a heavy burden of proof to say that they can't be interpreted in such a way that there's no contradiction.

 

[acptulsa]

Well, I'll be. You really don't need any help destroying your credibility, do you?

And you need help destroying yours?

I'd say the important point here is that small scribal errors like 3 versus 7 are really quite meaningless...

Well, gee, that depends. If you're whole dogma--indeed, if your ticket to heaven--depends on some statement Paul made that Jesus does not confirm, then you have to decide, and fervently cling to the notion, that the Holy Spirit oversaw every word that got into the book down to the last detail. And that includes small scribal details.

Which is why all these people at all these websites like the one you quoted work so hard dreaming up excuses for these 'nonexistent discrepancies'.

 

[Ronin Truth]

You don't find Japanese philosophy intelligent and interesting? Well, most philosophers in the world disagree with you-as do I. Quite a lot of ink has been spilled on the concept of "do" ("The Way") alone.

Have I just missed all of your enlightened Shinto, Zen and Taoist, etc. threads?

I don't think so.

 

[PaulConventionWV]

And you need help destroying yours?



Well, gee, that depends. If you're whole dogma--indeed, if your ticket to heaven--depends on some statement Paul made that Jesus does not confirm, then you have to decide, and fervently cling to the notion, that the Holy Spirit oversaw every word that got into the book down to the last detail. And that includes small scribal details.

Which is why all these people at all these websites like the one you quoted work so hard dreaming up excuses for these 'nonexistent discrepancies'.

Oh, so you're back. Care to pick up where we left off and explain how you weren't using the induction fallacy?

Anybody who wants to believe the Bible was corrupted has to cling just as fervently to the notion that the contradictions are true. As I've said, we don't treat any historical text with the amount of rigor we do the Bible and it still comes out head and shoulders above the rest.

 

[Ronin Truth]

I don't think it is particularly fair to just list a huge number of contradictions. It might have the effect of planting a few seeds of doubt in a believer, or re-enforcing a non-Christian's beliefs, but it isn't really a strong argument if all of the points are just listed.

I have to point out on the other side though, when these issues are explored one at a time, Christians are susceptible to afford the Bible a miles-long leash for creative exegesis to explain the apparent contradictions, while not affording other historical or religious texts the same allowance for their contradictions.

Ya know, "being particularly fair" is just about #10 on my top ten agenda list.

 

[Ronin Truth]

Oh, you must have misunderstood. I never offered you any.

You asked a question and I answered it. End of story.

 

[Ronin Truth]

LOL. Another contradiction. Anyway it's interesting and a bit sad that Theocrat decided to derail your topic instead of addressing it. Without going through all 101 (that's a lot) here are a few things to point out.

1) There can be multiple causes to the same event. Take God/Satan inducing David to number the people. Some would say "But of course. God made Satan make David number the people." I think that's the SF/FF/PCWV position. Other's would say God allowed Satan to do that for some unspecified reason. The Bible says "God hardened Pharoah's heart" but it also said he hardened his own heart.

2) Some of the number dependencies are trivial. Were there really a million men at the million man march or were there merely 900+ thousand?

3) Thought inspiration versus word inspiration. The ideas in the Bible can be inspired without it being a word for word transcription.

Is it just the Paulinists/Christians that have such huge difficulties between the concepts of "word of" vs. "word about"?

The differences are huge, and cause loads of misunderstandings and troubles, it seems to me. Error on the side of caution, I'd say.

 

[Crashland]

To your "other side" comment, other historical or religious texts don't have nearly the amount of authenticity that the Biblical texts do.

Besides, we never just assume that ANY historical text is contradictory until proven non-contradictory. Instead, the burden of proof is on the skeptic who wants to say that the original text was made with a built-in contradiction that sullies its authenticity. The vast majority of these supposed contradictions can be explained very easily, and all that has to be done to avoid the contradiction is find one particular way in which it could be interpreted without a contradiction. If we can do that, then there's absolutely no reason to think or assume that there would be one there. If anyone wants to believe that some contradictory interpretation is the correct interpretation, then they can believe that, but there's no evidence to think it's true or that any contradictory interpretation is better than the one that's not.

If you find a seeming contradiction in ANY historical text, it makes much more sense to try to reconcile them than to assume that the people who wrote the accounts were lying or stupid. It takes a heavy burden of proof to say that they can't be interpreted in such a way that there's no contradiction.

We have established previously that when you are invoking the Bible's "authenticity," this does not equal accuracy or truthfulness. The Bible is "authentic" in the same sense that the US Constitution and Les Miserables and Mein Kampf are all authentic -- this does not say anything about whether those documents are accurate or if they have contradictions, and it should not factor into our evaluation of those potential contradictions at all.

I don't think we should assume there are or aren't contradictions. The only thing we can do is read the text itself and evaluate it. If we read the text and find that in two different places, there are two mutually exclusive answers to the same question, then that merits looking into. The burden of proof in this case is on both parties. If you claim that there are no contradictions in the Bible, then the burden of proof is on you to show that there aren't any (which is very hard because it is attempting to prove a negative. It's like a strong atheist trying to prove that there is no god.). On the other hand, if you claim that there is a contradiction, then the burden of proof is on you to demonstrate the contradiction in the text, which in some cases is trivially easy. Ronin provided a list of 100 or so instances of this. For most of these individual issues, it does not require very much explaining to demonstrate how they appear to contradict one another. Many of them do, however, require a great deal of explaining or creative interpretation to demonstrate how they can still be consistent.

I'm not saying that any of the apparent contradictions can't be explained away such that they could actually be consistent. I'm saying that the great lengths that Christians take to explain them away, are only allowed when applied to the Bible, and not to any other texts or collections of texts (since the Bible is, after all, a collection of texts from many different authors, times, and locations). If you were to take a Dick Cheney speech and a Ron Paul speech, and canonize them together into an "authentic" book, I am sure all of those apparent contradictions in there could be reconciled and explained away if we were to apply the same amount of creative interpretation and exegesis that Christians apply to the books in the Bible.

 

[Crashland]

Ya know, "being particularly fair" is just about #10 on my top ten agenda list.

If you are interested in rational discourse then you should move that up a few ranks, but if you just want to take potshots then leave it.

 

[heavenlyboy34]

Have I just missed all of your enlightened Shinto, Zen and Taoist, etc. threads?

I don't think so.

I didn't feel any need to do so. So? Are you trying to make a point here?

 

[PaulConventionWV]

We have established previously that when you are invoking the Bible's "authenticity," this does not equal accuracy or truthfulness. The Bible is "authentic" in the same sense that the US Constitution and Les Miserables and Mein Kampf are all authentic -- this does not say anything about whether those documents are accurate or if they have contradictions, and it should not factor into our evaluation of those potential contradictions at all.

I never claimed that authenticity equaled accuracy or truthfulness, but at the same time, its authenticity should not be ignored because it does give us some information on how much the document has changed over time, which is to say, very little. We can conclude from this that it has not been corrupted and that we can measure claims of contradictions according to how close it is to the original. This may even help the people claiming contradictions, since it gets us closer to the original document, which is the one they are trying to attack. However, as we've seen, almost all contradictions are either easily explained or probably attributable to a very small scribal error. We would give any less authentic historical writing the same benefit of the doubt because it makes less sense to say that the authors of the manuscript were either lying or stupid than it does to say that there is some way to reconcile the two claims. Thus, if the non-believer wants to prove that there are contradictions, he must provide airtight evidence that the document cannot be interpreted any other way. The burden of proof rests SOLELY on the skeptic's shoulders, just as it would for skeptics of written accounts from ancient Rome.

I don't think we should assume there are or aren't contradictions. The only thing we can do is read the text itself and evaluate it. If we read the text and find that in two different places, there are two mutually exclusive answers to the same question, then that merits looking into. The burden of proof in this case is on both parties. If you claim that there are no contradictions in the Bible, then the burden of proof is on you to show that there aren't any (which is very hard because it is attempting to prove a negative. It's like a strong atheist trying to prove that there is no god.). On the other hand, if you claim that there is a contradiction, then the burden of proof is on you to demonstrate the contradiction in the text, which in some cases is trivially easy. Ronin provided a list of 100 or so instances of this. For most of these individual issues, it does not require very much explaining to demonstrate how they appear to contradict one another. Many of them do, however, require a great deal of explaining or creative interpretation to demonstrate how they can still be consistent.

False. The burden of proof lies solely on the skeptic in this case. To compare this to God's existence is a category error because the burden of proof shifts based on what we expect. In the case of God's existence, we have no expectations so the burden of proof lies equally on both sides. However, when it comes to studying ancient documents, the expectation is that the authors of the texts were sincere and had no ulterior motives. We study every single ancient manuscript with the assumption that the authors of these historical accounts knew what they were talking about and were not attempting to deceive anyone. We do this even with far less authentic texts that have a higher risk of being corrupted. When we do find supposed contradictions, we don't simply assume that the apparently opposing claims have no explanation. The appearance of a contradiction can simply be due to a lack of information or, as is often the case with the Bible, a lack of context. It makes much more sense for historians to search for why both these apparently opposing statements were made rather than to simply assume that they indicate some sort of ulterior motives or incompetence of the authors. So, in light of all this, the burden of proof rests solely and heavily on the Bible skeptic to prove that apparent contradictions are 1) really contradictions and 2) cannot be explained.

I'm not saying that any of the apparent contradictions can't be explained away such that they could actually be consistent. I'm saying that the great lengths that Christians take to explain them away, are only allowed when applied to the Bible, and not to any other texts or collections of texts (since the Bible is, after all, a collection of texts from many different authors, times, and locations). If you were to take a Dick Cheney speech and a Ron Paul speech, and canonize them together into an "authentic" book, I am sure all of those apparent contradictions in there could be reconciled and explained away if we were to apply the same amount of creative interpretation and exegesis that Christians apply to the books in the Bible.

You are mistaken. This "creative interpretation" is "allowed" WRT every historical text. In order to substantiate the claim that there IS a contradiction, you must first eliminate all possible alternative explanations. If ANY of those explanations is valid, then the authenticity of the text does not suffer a scratch because you don't know if your claim of a contradiction is any more realistic or better than one that doesn't require the assumption that the authors were either deceitful or incompetent. What you are calling "creative exegesis" is really just "exegesis." If it weren't a realistic explanation, then it wouldn't be an explanation at all and, once again, the burden of proof lies on you to prove that no possible explanation can be reasonably applied. You continually claim that all of these explanations are just creative ways of getting around problems, but that assumes there was a problem in the first place. What's more, you have yet to substantiate these claims that such explanations are "creative" or go beyond the boundaries of rational thinking before you can claim that such an explanation is insufficient in some way.

What I find interesting is that you seem to think making the "positive claim" as you are doing in this case, is somehow EASIER than supporting the negative claim, even though skeptics of God's existence will often claim that they don't even need to support a negative claim but rather simply evaluate the positive. In this case, however, all of a sudden the positive claim is more believable to you even though the negative claim requires no burden of proof. That's where you expose your ignorance, in fact. You acknowledge the fact that we are making the negative claim and yet you will not grant us the lack of a burden of proof.

 

[PaulConventionWV]

If you are interested in rational discourse then you should move that up a few ranks, but if you just want to take potshots then leave it.

I think he's made it clear which one he wants.