Bible Contradictions

[mwtech]

I used to be a Christian and only recently become an atheist after studying the Bible enough to notice the flaws. I believe the Bible in itself to be contradictory enough to prove itself wrong, and I enjoy discussing it with other people, especially Christians who disagree. I would really like to have a one on one debate with any Christian who thinks that they have a logical answer for the contradictions in the Bible. The one rule I have is that you can't make a claim without evidence, whether from the Bible or any other source. I am interested in logical conversation, and I don't believe that any Christian can refute the contradictions I have found without making up some rationalization that has no evidence or logical base.

[Apollo]

[Replying to post 50 by bluethread]

Did you respond to my question? If so, I think I missed it. For reference, it was asking you to write two statements (not from the bible, make them up yourself) that you would find in irreconcilable contradiction. If you can do this, that would go a long way to demonstrating that your criteria even makes a contradiction possible.

[bluethread]

[Replying to post 50 by bluethread]

Did you respond to my question? If so, I think I missed it. For reference, it was asking you to write two statements (not from the bible, make them up yourself) that you would find in irreconcilable contradiction. If you can do this, that would go a long way to demonstrating that your criteria even makes a contradiction possible.

I couldn't find one directed specifically at me. However, I must say that I find the "new covenant" Christians saying that the law, that Adonai says is forever, has been replaced is contadictory. I will accept arguments of practicality, as in one not being able to make sacrifice because there is no Temple, or one is not permitted to by the secular government. However, the view that we need not keep the commandments even when we can, I find to be a glaring contradiction.

[Apollo]

I couldn't find one directed specifically at me. However, I must say that I find the "new covenant" Christians saying that the law, that Adonai says is forever, has been replaced is contadictory. I will accept arguments of practicality, as in one not being able to make sacrifice because there is no Temple, or one is not permitted to by the secular government. However, the view that we need not keep the commandments even when we can, I find to be a glaring contradiction.

So you are saying the following two claims are contradictory:

"The Law is Forever"
"The Law has been Replaced"

How do you know that the first didn't mean that the law is forever in history, but that we no longer need to follow it? How do you know it hasn't been replaced for practical purposes, but that it will forever remain a part of holy history?

Why is this a stronger contradiction than, "The earth is round vs. the earth is flat" or, "X cost 22 dollars vs X cost 42 dollars"?

[mwtech]

My answer to 420 or 450 is that Bible doesn't tell that only 420 or only 450 talents were given nothing more or nothing less ever. By that knowledge it is possible to say that 420 were given and 450 was given. That is why I think there is no real contradiction in that part, because they are not exclusive.
And on what basis Ahaziah couldn't have reigned two times?

I appreciate your train of thought on these instances but I have to disagree with you. When I was a Christian debating atheists, I tried to find explanations for supposed contradiction in a similar way to what you do. In some cases, it made sense, but here, I don't think it applies.
If you read the entire chapters of 2 kings 8 and 9 and 2 chronicles 22, its pretty apparent that they are talking about the same events in the same time. I will list the similarities between the two passages.
-Ahaziah begins to reign in the place of his father Jehoram.
-Joram and Jehoram go to war with Hazael of Syria in Ramoth-Gilead.
-Jehoram is injured and Ahaziah goes to visit him in Jazreel.
-Ahaziah is killed by Jehu, and buried by his servants.
It is not possible for 2 Chronicles to be talking about a second reign, because Ahaziah dies in 2 Kings.

I don't have any strict literary evidence against your theory for the passages concerning gold talents, but it doesn't make much logical sense to me. It is technically true that 450 talents of Gold does contain 420 talents of gold, but when you look at the Bible as a spiritual guide, most people assume that everything put there was added by God for a reason. Why would God say 420 if there were really 450? Imagine a woman went out on a shopping spree and when she got home her husband asked how much she spent. She says $420. He gets his credit card statement and it says she spent $450. The husband would probably feel lied to, and rightfully so. It's deceitful of the wife to use technicalities to avoid giving the true version of the story. If God is not deceitful in nature, why would he do that?

Have you ever heard of Occam's razor? It's a principle I find useful in any logical reasoning. According to Wikipedia, it states that among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected. Other, more complicated solutions may ultimately prove correct, but—in the absence of certainty—the fewer assumptions that are made, the better. This obviously doesn't apply to every situation, but probability wise, this is the case more often than not. If there were only 2 or 3 contradiction in the Bible, then a complicated explanation might be permissible, but among so many, the odds that there is a convoluted reasoning behind each of them are little to none. Here are just a few more passages I found to be contradictory, some of them dealing with numerical values, some with the nature of god, some with the rules in the bible.

2 Samuel 23:8 God says David's chief killed 800 men--"These are the names of the mighty men whom David had: Josheb-basshebeth a Tahchemonite; he was chief of the three. He wielded his spear against eight hundred whom he killed at one time."
1 Chronicles 11:11 says he killed 300 men--"This is an account of David's mighty men: Jashobeam, a Hachmonite, was chief of the three. He wielded his spear against 300 whom he killed at one time."
Either he killed 800 or he killed 300. Both cannot be true.

In Romans 4:2 Abraham is not justified by works--"For if Abraham was justified by works, he has something to boast about, but not before God."
In James 2:21 He is justified by works--"Was not Abraham our father justified by works when he offered up his son Isaac on the altar?"
Either he was justified by works or he was not justified by works. Both cannot be true at the same time.

In Micah 7:18 God says he does not stay angry forever--"Who is a God like you, pardoning iniquity and passing over transgression for the remnant of his inheritance? He does not retain his anger forever, because he delights in steadfast love."
In Jeremiah 17:4 he stays angry forever--"You shall loosen your hand from your heritage that I gave to you, and I will make you serve your enemies in a land that you do not know, for in my anger a fire is kindled that shall burn forever.�
Either God stays angry forever or he does not stay angry forever. Both cannot be true at the same time

These just being a few of many, it seems that even if you can come up with a "possible" explanation, it would be by no means a probable explanation in every single case

[edform]

My original intention was to have a one on one debate and not post examples on the public forum to avoid having multiple conversations at once. I suppose I can give a few examples.

1. How many talents of gold were given to king Solomon?
-1 Kings 9:28 "and they came to Ophir and fetched from thence gold, four hundred and twenty talents, and brought it to King Solomon."
-2 Chronicles 8:18 "and Huram sent him by the hands of his servant ships and servants that had knowledge of the sea; and they went with the servants of Solomon to Ophir, and took thence four hundred and fifty talents of gold, and brought them to King Solomon.

Either Huram sent Solomon 420 talents, or 450 talents. Both cannot be true at the same time.

This business of supposed contradictions in Scripture is a very old argument and harmonization of the various examples may need to proceed in different ways. Your example of the gold from Ophir is of the sort in which the proposer of the contradiction has overstepped the evidence available.

To explain in this case...

You seem to have missed the fact that the combined navies of Solomon and Hiram went backwards and forwards to Ophir repeatedly with an interval of about three years...

1 Kings 10:22 For the king had at sea a navy of Tharshish with the navy of Hiram: once in three years came the navy of Tharshish, bringing gold, and silver, ivory, and apes, and peacocks.

You have further missed the fact that, for the purpose of overlaying the walls of the temple, David the King had amassed an enormous amount of gold of Ophir before Solomon became king...

1 chronicles 29:3-4 above all that I have prepared for the holy house, Even three thousand talents of gold, of the gold of Ophir, and seven thousand talents of refined silver, to overlay the walls of the houses withal:

Since we are also told that Solomon was by far the richest man of his day [1 Kings 10:23 and 2 chronicles 9:22] and consequently richer than David, it follows that the combined navy of Solomon and Hiram brought massively more than 400 or so talents of Gold from Ophir.

As there is no evidence of any kind in the text that the two quantities of gold brought to Solomon were the result of the same expedition, the differing amounts of gold are not a contradiction.

2. How old was Ahaziah when he began his reign?
-2 Kings 8:26 "Two and twenty years old was Ahaziah when he began to reign, and he reigned one year in Jerusalem."
-2 Chronicles 22:2 "Forty and two years old was Ahaziah when he began to reign, and he reigned one year in Jerusalem."

Either Ahaziah was 22 years old or he was 42 years old when he began his reign. Both cannot be true at the same time.

This second example is one in which it is blindingly obvious that there has been a copyists error at some point in the transmission of the text. The numbers in question are very similar in the Hebrew: 22 is כב and 42 is מב - in case the Hebrew letters do not appear correctly on other computer systems, the difference between the two numbers in Hebrew Script is a single vertical stroke in the first of two letters, an extremely easy mistake for a scribe to make. Since we also know that Ahaziah's father, Jehoram, was 40 years old when he died [32 when he came to the throne and reigned 8 years], having a son of 42 was quite a feat.

This specific dichotomy was addressed by Archbishop Ussher when he was assembling his 'Annals' and he obtained a very early Syriac version of the text of 2 Chronicles in which the number given was 22, the same as in the 2 kings text, suggesting that the current Masoretic text is not as perfect as it is cracked up to be. The old Archbishop records that he was dismayed by the very large sum of money he had to shell out to gain possession of this particular ancient manuscript.

So this particular 'contradiction' required a minute error in transcription and has ancillary information in the text of Scripture which makes it impossible to accept the obviously erroneous, 42 years old, version. The effect of such self-explaining contradictions on the overall value of Scripture is zero. Anyone who turned away from Scripture as a source of truth on the basis of something as trivial as this would hardly be acting sensibly.

Ed Form

[edform]

Josephs father was Jacob - Mt 1:16

Josephs father was Heli - Lk 3:23...

...Yes, they are different genealogies. But yours is a tired apologetic with no basis. It's irrelevant what modern Judaism does. Judaism at the time of the NT was paternal. The fact that there are contradictory genealogies is simply evidence that either one is wrong, or both are wrong. Further, the scripture itself does not allow for this bizarre apologetic. Heli is not written as the father-in-law. He is clearly written in inspired scripture as the father of Joseph.

Where did you get the idea that Scripture says Joseph's father was Heli? It is certainly true that the text does not say that Heli was Joseph's father-in-law [although, in fact, he was], but it definitely does not say he was Joseph's father.

Let me explain - sadly this is long...

The Forms of Luke’s and Matthew’s Genealogies

Genealogies in Scripture are presented in two forms…

• Those that fall from an ancient ancestor and explicitly mentioned sexual generation at each of the successive stages of the descent. For example…

Ruth 4:18-21
Now these are the generations of Pharez: Pharez begat Hezron, And Hezron begat Ram, and Ram begat Amminadab, And Amminadab begat Nahshon, and Nahshon begat Salmon, And Salmon begat Boaz, and Boaz begat Obed, And Obed begat Jesse, and Jesse begat David.

• Those that rise to an ancient ancestor and explicitly declare the subject of the genealogy to be the son of every single person listed but do not permit a father-son relationship to be established between successive members of the list without external evidence to that effect. For example…

1Ch 6:33-38
…Heman a singer, the son of Joel, the son of Shemuel, The son of Elkanah, the son of Jeroham, the son of Eliel, the son of Toah, The son of Zuph, the son of Elkanah, the son of Mahath, the son of Amasai, The son of Elkanah, the son of Joel, the son of Azariah, the son of Zephaniah, The son of Tahath, the son of Assir, the son of Ebiasaph, the son of Korah, The son of Izhar, the son of Kohath, the son of Levi, the son of Israel.

In the second genealogical form, it is easy to assume that each successive man named is the son of the man whose name follows his own, but a wonderful example precludes that assumption without supporting evidence external to the list…

Genesis 36:1-2
Now these are the generations of Esau, who is Edom. Esau took his wives of the daughters of Canaan; Adah the daughter of Elon the Hittite, and Aholibamah the daughter of Anah the daughter of Zibeon the Hivite...

In this English version, and in the original Hebrew, we could be forgiven for concluding that the lady called Aholibamah was the daughter of someone called Anah, who was, in turn, the daughter of someone called Zibeon, a member of the Canaanite tribe, the Hivites but the conclusion would be false. The person called Anah is mentioned twice more in the same chapter: at verse 18, which merely repeats that Aholibamah was Anah’s daughter, and at verse 24, which explains who Anah actually was...

And these are the children of Zibeon; both Ajah, and Anah: this was that Anah that found the mules in the wilderness, as he fed the asses of Zibeon his father.

Anah was a man! The genealogical fragment in Genesis 36:2 actually says that Aholibamah was the daughter of Anah, and the granddaughter of Zibeon - the Hebrew words for son and daughter refer, of course, to descendants of all generations. If we did not have verse 24 to tell us that Anah was a man, we would have no way of knowing whether Anah was Zibeon's son or his daughter, because the list only gives the relationships between Aholibamah and each listed ancestor, It does not give any information about the relationship between successive names in the list.

The Luke 3 genealogy of Jesus is also in this form. It is probably complete, so that there actually are direct father-son relationships between the successive members of the list, but no such relationship can be proved, or even assumed, from the list alone. The highly condensed form of the Greek is as follows...

Jesus was commonly supposed to be the son of Joseph
of the Heli
of the Matthat
of the Levi
of the Melchi...
...of the Adam
of the God.

And, as the Cambridge scholar, John Lightfoot pointed out 300 years ago, the case of the noun son in the first verse of the list, [huios], will not support the standard expansion of this list into...

Jesus was commonly supposed to be the son of Joseph
who was the son of Heli
who was the son of Matthat
who was the son of Levi
who was the son of Melchi...
...who was the son of Adam
who was the son of God.

Instead it demands that the list be expanded in the form...

Jesus was commonly supposed to be the son of Joseph
Jesus was the son of Heli
Jesus was the son of Matthat
Jesus was the son of Levi
Jesus was the son of Melchi...
...Jesus was the son of Adam
Jesus was the son of God.

No relationship of any kind is stated between Joseph and Heli; this isn't Joseph's genealogy, as many suggest, and it certainly doesn't require assumptions regarding the possibility that Joseph was Heli's son in law to account for it - although, as I said earlier, he actually was. All we are told here is that Jesus was the direct descendant of every single member of the list, except Joseph, but explicitly including God. As an aside, and contrary to the standard translations, the list does not actually state that Adam was the son of God.

The genealogy in Matthew 1 is of the first form, where each successive man in the list was sexually generated by the man who precedes him. It is, therefore, an explicit genealogy of Joseph and not of Jesus, even though it begins with the words: The book of the generation of Jesus Christ. The question is: why is Joseph’s genealogy given under this heading? The answer lies in the way it ends…

Matthew 1:16
And Jacob begat Joseph the husband of Mary, of whom was born Jesus, who is called Christ.

The words that matter are Joseph the husband of Mary and the key is that Joseph took Mary with him to be polled.

Luke 2:1-5
And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed. (And this taxing was first made when Cyrenius was governor of Syria.) And all went to be taxed, every one into his own city. And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judea, unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem;(because he was of the house and lineage of David:) To be taxed with Mary his espoused wife, being great with child.

It doesn't make sense! She was nine-months pregnant and should not have been travelling. We don't know very much about the taxing that year, but we do know what the Romans did when they taxed their subject peoples - they demanded that all heads of households return to the headquarters of their family to be examined regarding their possessions. They had no interest in who the spouses of these people were, or how many children they had; what they wanted to know was how much their possessions were worth in order to assess them for tax, and to take the tax from them.

Luke's typical precision leads us to the explanation. Verse 5 of the quotation doesn't say that Joseph and Mary were married; she was his espoused wife, a term with a very precise meaning in Jewish society - in modern parlance they were engaged, but without the possibility of breaking the engagement unless the bride turned out not to be a virgin - marriage became permanent after the wedding night had shown that the bride was chaste.

This was a problem in Mary's case; she was pregnant and Joseph did not lie with her at all until after Jesus was born, so the marriage was not finalised at this point. The term espoused wife, which normally meant that the girl was still her father's dependant, plus the fact that she had been taken into Joseph's house [Matthew 1:24-25], and the fact that she journeyed to Bethlehem, indicate that her father was dead, that he had no sons, and that she was his eldest child, the head of the house that bore his name, and therefore liable to taxation in her own account.

In Israel, the daughters of men who had no sons inherited their fathers’ names and property as a result of the case of the daughters of Zelophehad [Numbers 27:1-11]. But such an heiress - the beneficiary of Heli's estate and name - was bound by the Law to marry only from her father's kin; If she did not, her inheritance was forfeit, and would go directly to her father's relatives under the second of the daughters-of-Zelophehad regulations [Numbers 36:1-9].

This is why Matthew gives Joseph's genealogy – He sets down the fact that Joseph was Mary's father's kinsman. The kinship between Joseph and Mary is made clear by the fact that the man called Matthan in Matthew is the same man Luke calls Matthat; Mary and Joseph were second cousins. Because Mary married into her father's family, as the Law required, her right to Heli's name, and position in society was preserved, and Jesus, her son, became the inheritor of that name through his mother.

The combination of the genealogy of Jesus in Luke with evidence for the propriety of Mary's marriage to her second cousin supplied by the genealogy of Joseph in Matthew, plus the clarity of the record that Mary was still virgin when she became pregnant with her son, establishes that Jesus of Nazareth was the son of David, the son of Abraham by way of Isaac, the son of Adam, and the son of God. He was also, as prophecy required, a member of Judah as the rightful heir of his maternal grandfather, Heli. Jesus was therefore the promised man of Judah [Isaiah 65:9 etc.], the very man promised to David [Samuel 7:11-14], and to Abraham [Genesis 22:15-18], and, because his mother alone passed him his membership of the human race, he was also the seed of the woman threatened to the serpent in Genesis 3:15.

Since his father was God, Jesus could have had no membership of Judah except through the specific regulations laid down as a result of the faith of Zelophehad’s daughters – how wonderful to see that every incident in Moses really is about Jesus the Christ [John 5:46]. That is why Matthew supplies the genealogy of Joseph, not because adoption by that kindly man gave Jesus any position in the house of David.

The other common theory for the presence of Joseph’s name in both the genealogies – that it establishes Jesus as heir to the throne of David - is equally unsupportable. Jesus’ eventual possession of the throne of the Kingdom of God will be a gift from God in recognition of his work of salvation; the natural, royal, line of David has no rights in it whatsoever since God expunged it from existence by the mouth of Ezekiel [Ezekiel 21:25-27], leaving Jesse as a dead stump.

So, there is no contradiction whatsoever between the genealogies in Matthew and Luke and no mystery as to whom Joseph was - he was Jacob's son, not Heli's.

Ed Form

[mwtech]

This second example is one in which it is blindingly obvious that there has been a copyists error at some point in the transmission of the text.

The fact that there are transcription errors in the bible is an issue when I speak with people like my sister, who's entire denomination believes that the King James Bible is the only English version acceptable to use because the saints who translated were inspired by God just like the original authors.

The effect of such self-explaining contradictions on the overall value of Scripture is zero. Anyone who turned away from Scripture as a source of truth on the basis of something as trivial as this would hardly be acting sensibly.

Ed Form

Not all of the contradictions are self explanatory. Most have a secular explanation of "human error," but that doesn't support the case that the bible is divine in nature.
I provided a few more examples in my original reply that I can find no logical explanation for (I, of course, mean an explanation that you don't have to twist the words around and make outside assumptions to come to). And I've found about 15 more that I could not find a reasonable explanation for.
The fact that I found these contradictions is not the sole reason I turned away from my religion. It is much more sensible when paired with the fact that I have never seen any evidence supporting there being a God. The only reason I know it as a concept is because I have been told by other humans that he exists.
So the fact that the Bible has so many of what I see to be contradictory statements that can only be explained in a convoluted way if it all, make me think that a super-intelligent, divine being was not, in fact, responsible. The absence of any answer to any prayer I have ever prayed, or the answer to any prayer of any number of religious people I know that wasn't the likely outcome to begin with furthers my doubt.
The convenient fact that none of God's miracles ever left a shred of evidence furthers my doubt.
The fact that there is no evidence at all for many of the events recorded in the bible furthers my doubt.
So, once I opened my eyes to even the smallest amount of logical reasoning, "God exists because the Bible says so" was no longer sufficient evidence for me.

[Strider324]

[Replying to post 56 by edform]


And now we add your tortured apologetic to that offered by bluethread. I wonder when we'll see the one about neither Heli nor Jacob being Josephs father?

[edform]

And now we add your tortured apologetic to that offered by bluethread. I wonder when we'll see the one about neither Heli nor Jacob being Josephs father?
Cool

Oh I think you need to do better than that or you will simply look like an 'I won't accept it, no matter what the argument' kind of debater.

Show us how what I wrote is in error, or explain how it is tortured. The arguments are extremely simple and the conclusions perfectly sound. Others may have made a pigs ear of this matter but that does not entitle you to dismiss sound logic with a wave - unless that's the best you can do.

Ed Form

[Strider324]

And now we add your tortured apologetic to that offered by bluethread. I wonder when we'll see the one about neither Heli nor Jacob being Josephs father?
Cool

Oh I think you need to do better than that or you will simply look like an 'I won't accept it, no matter what the argument' kind of debater.

Show us how what I wrote is in error, or explain how it is tortured. The arguments are extremely simple and the conclusions perfectly sound. Others may have made a pigs ear of this matter but that does not entitle you to dismiss sound logic with a wave - unless that's the best you can do.

Ed Form

Your argument is weak because it just creates other insurmountable logical contradictions. Ignoring the fact that if we accept that we somehow have genealogies of Mary and Joseph it must be explained just how it's possible that Marys family took 44 generations to get back to David while Josephs family were apparently so long-lived that they only needed 28 generations....

You're left with the problem that Marys line states that Salathiel was the son of Neri, but Josephs line says his son was Jechonias. So, unless Jechonias and Neri were the homosexual parents of Salathiel (he and his son Zorobabel are on both lists) - this conflict cannot be resolved without simply admitting that Marys line to David was broken - which christians of course will not do since it blows the whole prophesy mojo.

That's the inherent problem with trying to explain things away. You just get caught creating more conflicts.