There are a large number of Christians who think that the Bible is inerrant and infallible because it was inspired by their god, similar to the way that Muslims think that the Koran must be 100% correct because their god directly dictated it to their prophet.
This of course poses some problems because there seem to be some clear contradictions between different parts of the Bible. When I was an undergraduate, I was a believing Christian but not a biblical literalist and some of us used to have a little fun at the expense of a local evangelical preacher by asking him to explain certain obvious contradictions in the four different versions of Jesus’s life told in the four Gospels and then watching him twist himself up in knots to try and show how they were all in fact consistent when the plain words showed otherwise.
But that does raise the question of why those contradictions exist at all and were allowed to enter into the scriptures. After all, we know that these documents were transcribed from earlier oral traditions and copied multiple times by scribes who sometimes made alterations in the texts. Why didn’t the writers of the various texts or the people who put the documents together remove these contradictions?
In a review of the book A History of the Bible: The Story of the World’s Most Influential Book by John Barton in the November 2019 issue of Harper’s Magazine, Christopher Beha writes that the goal of those who put together these compilations was not to create a document that represented a coherent theology that was free of contradictions and inconsistencies that could be defended by literalists but merely to serve as an archive of existing knowledge. Writing things down and putting the documents together in a book was a means of preserving documents for posterity.
Composed by (or revealed to) a single person over the course of twenty years, the Qur’an is internally coherent and remarkably consistent in tone and intention; while it does have some narrative elements, it is first and foremost “a guidance to the God-fearing,” as an early sura puts it. By comparison, one of the most striking features of the Hebrew Bible is its variation. It contains verse and prose, legal writing and storytelling. Mythological accounts of prehistoric times share space with passages that clearly aim to meet the standards of documentary historiography, at least as it was understood in the ancient world. Some books are what we might now consider short novels, fairly realistic and coherent narratives with beginnings, middles, and ends, recounting incidents from the lives of obviously imagined characters with little in the way of divine intervention. The Song of Songs is an anthology of erotic poetry that makes no mention of God and would surely be treated as thoroughly secular in any other context. The Book of Job and Qoheleth (known to Christians as Ecclesiastes) advance worldviews sharply divergent from the mainstream of Jewish and Christian belief. All of this is perhaps to be expected from a collection of works written over the course of a thousand years, but in some places, particularly in books that are the product of redaction, inconsistencies crop up from verse to verse. This feature of the Bible is apparent from the very beginning: the first and second chapters of Genesis provide two differing accounts of the creation.
Modern skeptics point to these moments to undermine the Bible’s authority, though all they really undermine is a particular and relatively recent way of reading the Bible: as an inerrant work of historical truth. Clearly the Torah’s earliest editors were aware of its discrepancies, which must not have been a cause of great embarrassment, or else they would have been corrected at a time when the “official” version of these texts was still unsettled. Far from cleaning up such problems, these scribes actually introduced them in the process of combining competing narratives. To Barton, this suggests that the Torah was meant as a kind of archive, designed “to ensure that no piece of tradition got lost.” Adding a narrative thread to the scroll was the only reliable way to preserve it, and there was no reason that it had to be perfectly reconciled with any other thread. (Similarly, the literary critic and biblical translator Robert Alter has suggested that the primary criterion for the canonization of such heterodox books as Job and Qoheleth must have been their literary quality.)
That kind of explanation of biblical contradictions makes a lot more sense than the pretzel logic invoked by the literalists to imply that they don’t exist. But it will never be congenial for those whose religious faith is inextricably linked to the idea that the Bible is inerrant.
Hmmm. The mention of the Jewish Torah corresponds to only the Old Testament for Christians.
And as for the New Testament, many books were left out when that was assembled. The Gnostic gospels for instance.
Unless of course he was omniscient or something.
Is it the people pointing out the untruth of religious texts who are the problem, or is that a justified response to those others who insist that it is true?
Even the phrase “the bible” is oxymoronic. Each sect has cherry picked and rephrased to suit their specific beliefs and needs. Then there are the numerous councils throughout history that selected which writings would be included, how they’d be ordered and worded. Even when taken to extremes (e.g. Mormon texts), the contradictions and wild fantasy parables seem to avoid all scrutiny within the sect.
Contradictions in the bible don’t bother most believers because they only read little bits of it, if that.
If you really want to have fun with believers, challenge their knowledge of the book and how it was constructed, not their belief in it.
Alexander Selkirk @1: Torah is only the first 5 books of the Hebrew Bible. (The entire Hebrew Bible was traditionally considered to be 24 books, but Christians decided the same books should be counted as 39 for some reason.)
Composed by (or revealed to) a single person over the course of twenty years, the Qur’an is internally coherent and remarkably consistent in tone and intention
… which explains the massive plagiarisms and overlaps from the bible.
Textual criticism of the koran has been held back by fear and by the claim that the arabic is hard to understand, but it’s my understanding that what little textual criticism has been done shows its a derivative compilation.
It always gets trickier because of the dodge that the koran and the suras are separate things, which would be relevant if they were actually treated that way (it’s like saying that Paul’s alleged letters were separate documents so naturally they are going to contain repeats, etc. yeah, so)
The koran is definitely “beautiful poetry” but it’s the performance that matters there, more than anything. There are also some beautiful translations. But that’s like comparing Ursula LeGuin’s Tao Te Ching translation with some clunky work intended to capture a 1950s maoist sensibility -- it can be great poetry or not.
There are some recent scholars who argue that the earliest that any book of the Bible could have been written in anything approximating its current form was Hellenic times, which would reduce the time course over which the Hebrew Bible could have been composed very significantly. Though it does contain much older (probably oral) traditions. For instance, Israel Finkelstein makes a convincing argument that the tale of Jacob’s interactions with Laban in Genesis 29-31 originates from the times of the Omride kings of Israel (9th century BCE) when the border between Israel and Aram matched the place of the monument allegedly erected by Jacob and Laban in Genesis 31.
One of these scholars, Russell E Gmirkin, thinks the Primary History of the Hebrew Bible (books Genesis to Kings) was composed mostly out of whole cloth by Jewish men who learned the Greek language and classic Greek literature in adulthood (in the library of Alexandria) and who sought to invent a national epic for their people inspired by Herodotus, Plato, and many others.
@5 I completely agree, but a cousin of mine studied the historicity of the bible in Israel, no less, and somehow remained a believer intact (there is a lot of social pressure on her). I was nearly certain she’d come around after that. I don’t pry too deeply into her uncertainty, that would be impolite give her father is a pastor.
As several people pointed out already, the idea of “literal” truth, especially of the Bible, was foreign to pretty much everyone until relatively recently — the past few centuries or less. Anything that was outside of the direct experience of a person or of the other people in that person’s village wasn’t really real to them. It was more like the “reality” of a fairy tale or myth. And nobody expects “literal truth” from a myth or fairy tale. The point of myths and legends is to give meaning and narrative to people’s lives, so what happens doesn’t seem like “a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing.” So contraditions aren’t a problem, as long as they don’t interfere with people getting what they want or need out of the stories.
Actually, I think the biblical literalists are doing much the same thing with their “literal” interpretations. It’s pretty obvious that what they’re looking for is certainty and simple answers in the face of an uncertain, ambiguous, and complicated world. It doesn’t matter so much which “literal truth” they hold on to, as long as they can count on it not changing under their feet and as long as they have a community that validates their beliefs. The Bible has been around, unchanged, for far longer than anyone they know has been alive, it comes from an all-powerful source, so holding on to it feels like hanging on to something eternal and unchanging — and thus safe.
That’s why pointing out the contradictions or “proving” that their beliefs are false doesn’t work. When they hear people trying to convince them that their beliefs are false, they hear somebody trying to take away the life raft they’re clinging to in a stormy sea, so they just cling to them more fiercely. You’d need to find some way to make them feel safe and like they’d still be safe if they let go.
A number of stories in the Jewish scriptures originated in the Bronze Age. Gen. 1 is simply a version of the Mesopotamian “Enuma Elish,” some (most?) of which dates back to the 3rd millennium BCE Sumerians, later adapted by the Babylonians. The Adam and Eve tale is an attack on worship of the goddess Asherah, the wife of El/Yahweh. She was worshiped by the Israelites (who were polytheists down into the 6th century BCE and probably later). At some point, some Israelites became hostile to the worship of Baal; later, Asherah also was targeted; Eve is one of the other names of Asherah, (also “Tanith”) who was depicted at times as a nude woman associated with snakes and a sacred tree or wooden pillars. This might have been (maybe likely was) the result of a power struggle between the priests of El and the priests of Baal in the pre-Exile period; the story itself might be either from the Babylon Exile or afterward. El, Asherah and Baal are Bronze Age Canaanites deities.
The flood myth goes back to the 3rd millennium BCE. The Noah myth is virtually identical to the flood story in “Gilgamesh.”
Even some stories about Jesus are Bronze Age. Scholars have shown (I got this from “Gospel Fictions,” by Randel Helms, but it’s in some other scholarly works) that the story of Lazarus is simply a retelling of the story of the resurrection of the Egyptian god Osiris. A number of details in the Lazarus myth parallel details of the Osiris tale. Examples: Lazarus is “Eleazar” in Hebrew, which is derived from El-Osiris. Lazarus is buried in Bethany; Osiris was buried in Annu, aka Beth-annu (House of Annu); and so on.
Contradictions, as it turns out, don’t matter to believers. Just look at magas.
Clearly the Torah’s earliest editors were aware of its discrepancies, which must not have been a cause of great embarrassment, or else they would have been corrected at a time when the “official” version of these texts was still unsettled.
Somewhere along the line, somebody clearly tried to do some cleaning-up, and just as clearly had to yield to some push-back. Take, for instance, the odd fragment of story in which Miriam protected Moses from an attempted assassination by their god: maybe mythologists can reconstruct the rest from parallel stories, but for the modern Twoo Believer that whole episode has to go into the “don’t think about this too much” basket.
William Sierichs @11:
To note that Eve’s name in Hebrew is pronounced ‘hava’ (and was more likely pronounced ‘hawa’ in antiquity), whereas the Aramaic for snake is ‘hiwia’. Wouldn’t be surprised if her name once had a folk etymology related to snakes before becoming related to ‘living’ (‘hai’).
Pierce R. Butler @13:
Not Miriam (his sister), but Zippora (his wife). The story is indeed quite garbled, though the Samaritan Torah has a clearer version of it. And Thomas Römer compares it to Yahweh’s attack on Jacob prior to meeting Esau. Obviously when a chosen of Yahweh is about to reunite with a brother he hasn’t seen for decades (Aaron vs Esau) Yahweh must attack him for some reason. (Unfortunately I can’t think of a third example to make it a rule.)
The “Kopran”, sounds interesting.
Do you know how or where you learned that? I hear this occasionally, and I ask them the same question, and I don’t recall hearing a good answer.
This doesn’t seem to fit with my understanding of history at all. For example, Galileo was charged in 1633 for saying heresy, aka defending Heliocentrism. Sure, a big reason of why he was charged was that he mocked the pope, but the public official reason was making a scientific claim that contradicted their version of scripture. I don’t see how this heresy charge is consistent with what you just wrote.
Could you explain, please?
Lofty @#15,
Thanks for pointing out that typo. I have corrected it.
Seems obvious to me:
If one takes the Babble to be a holy book and to be Revelation from the monotheistic deity, then one should be bothered by the contradictions (though see below); however, if one takes it as mythos and storytelling, then one should not be at all bothered.
Back in the day, when disputing biblical goddists, I used to make the point that for every claim expressed therein, I could find also a converse claim.
(e.g. can God be seen? Yes, and no)
—
Anyway, anyone who can accept the incoherence of such conceits as trinitarianism has mastered the art of doublethink, so they don’t actually care about truth, despite their protestations.
anat @ # 14 -- Thanks for that correction!
Another favorite major biblical anomaly: the pre-Flood story which talks about the “sons of God” who contributed to the sin level by dallying with the daughters of men. Even as a kid, I thought the older half-brothers of Jesus surely merited more ink than just a verse or two…
The Skeptic’s Annotated Bible is still online, and has more than 500 such contradictions. FWIW.
I’m always leery of any argument that relies on this sort of cod-linguistics.
Eleazar does not derive from “El-Osiris”; it is Hebrew for “My God helps/aids (or: helped/aided)”. “El” is Hebrew; why is it being used as a prefix for an Egyptian god? Osiris ended up in Byblos, on the coast of Phoenicia; by what hand-waving does that end up being the same as Bethany, which appears to have been in the Judean mountains, not far from Jerusalem?
And so on.
I don’t think that a willingness to put up with contradictions is a feature exclusive to religious MAGA-hat wearers.
[Andrew, if you were referring to Tabby @12, you are endorsing that claim whilst ostensibly disputing it — the which you could have avoided by adding “also” between your first two words]
I was not.
There are a couple of things which I think I see in the comments here. The first is that people who claim the BIble to be literal truth are silly, which, sure, they are. Reality does not admit contradictions, so claiming the bible as a faithful transcription of reality is silly and obviously wrong.
The second is that as a literary widget, the Bible’s contradictions arose naturally, and ought to be expected. Again, obviously true. I will note in passing that if you showed an event to 4 witnesses, let us call them Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and then had them immediately write down what they saw, you would get 4 different accounts. This does not mean that the event did not happen, nor that you cannot learn much from their contradictory accounts. See also: legal proceedings.
But, yes, the contradictions of the bible arose naturally, and for perfectly comprehensible reasons.
The third thread which I think I detect is the one I wish to quibble with. It is the notion that basing ones life on a thing that contains contradictions is silly.
I don’t believe in God, but I do believe in Love, and Art, and Beauty and a bunch of other things. Every one of those boxes, when popped out, is a huge pile of contradictions. I probably cannot even tell you how I feel without contradicting myself. This is baked in to us, the living with contradictions. We’re just jumped up monkeys. Our natural patterns of cognition are horribly suited to science and mathematics, which is why we had to invent vast Byzantine systems to to be able to build up knowledge and ideas with actual predictive power. Logic is not something we do naturally, we had to invent it, and we have to struggle to hew to it if we want to to Science and Science-like things, things with predictive power much beyond what monkeys need.
Our massive brains are not logic machines, and more than our fingers are machine tools. They are blobs of fat and neurons that are — just barely — capable of inventing and using cognitive tools that let us build rockets and whatnot.
If you’re willing to tell a fellow to stop believing in God because his holy book contains contradictions, you are at best a paper-thin step from telling him to stop loving his lovers because those relationships are built on foundations that also contain contradictions.
Can you point to a reference that discusses this? I did a Google Scholar on Exodus 4:24, and found more than a few works on the topic, but only a brief aside about the Samaritan version.
All the different works I found point out how ambiguous and confusing the verses are, and it’s really not clear whom Zipporah is addressing (Moses? Or her son?)(the consonants “het-tav-nun” in the text can mean either “bridegroom” or “son-in-law”, and one argument is that she’s claiming that her child is now “kin” to Yahweh), or whom Yahweh is threatening to kill (again, one paper suggests that since the prior verse was taking about killing the firstborn of Pharaoh, Yahweh was after Moses’ firstborn) or what the whole thing means.
Richard Friedman’s “Who Wrote the Bible” posits that the best explanation for the parts of the Torah that make either Moses or Aaron “look bad” is that there were two rival groups or lineages of priests, Aaronid and Mushite, claiming descent from an ancestral Aaron and Moses (Moshe) respectively, who were basically composing works that honored their own ancestor, and sometimes denigrated the ancestor of their rivals. I might tentatively suggest that the verses of Ex 4:24-26 were written by Aaronid priests to imply that Mushite priests were lax in circumcising their sons (delaying instead of doing it 8 days after birth), and that made God mad enough to kill. Maybe.
Andrew:
I don’t detect that claim in any of the commentary; got a reference?
What I see is that the laboured denial that such contradictions exist is bemusing.
Also:
I’m willing to tell them that their holy book contains contradictions, sure. But it hardly comes to that, the very idea of God is silly in itself. So, no worries there.
And yeah, if I thought someone was in a toxic relationship and cared about them, I’d tell them that’s what I thought — and I would feel virtuous thereby. Nothing to do with contradictions, though.
As usual, John, my point seems to have passed by you several miles to the left.
Heh. Sure, Andrew.
As always, John, you or anyone else is welcome to contact me by email, if you are interested in clarifications: [email protected]
As you know, as a standard practice I am unwilling to be drawn into what I suspect to end up an endless round of explanation and clarification in public comment threads. If your interest is genuine rather than performative, you are free to contact me privately, however.
Andrew, I quoted two contentions @26, I addressed them, you tried to evade the issue with bluster. Simple.
Just so we’re clear here, John, I understand you to be indicating that you are interested in performance, not discourse. If you genuinely were interested in my responses, I have made it clear how they can be obtained.
I have, naturally, no objection whatever to your choices here, and encourage you to carry on. You will find me, as usual, no longer involved in this thread of comment.
Instead of speculating about my interests, Andrew, you could either have made no retort to my #26, or instead addressed my contentions.
Again: (1) There is no evidence of your purported 3rd thread, and (2) nobody made the claim that people try to dissuade people from belief in God based on biblical contradictions (other than contradictions vitiate claims of inerrancy). Also, the claim that pointing out such errancy is akin to rebuffing people’s love relationships is not just unsupported, but vacuous.
Not hitherto. 😉
What I find is that you don’t dare to attempt to sustain your claims. But sure, you don’t want to perform. I get it.
To John Morales
You’re such an asshole.
Heh. I get that a lot, Gerrard.
(I don’t begrudge your venting, it’s your consolation)