RE: the so fallible Bible
October 15, 2013 at 11:02 am
OK, in response to my last question about the historical reliability of the Bible there was some quibbling about camels, but no one attempted to respond to the major claims, that the central narrative of the Old Testament never happened, there was no liberation from Egypt, no wandering in the desert, no conquest of Canaan. So I will move on to my next question.
Q: Is the Bible free from internal contradictions?
A:
Unfortunately for the inerrantists the Bible has a number of parallel accounts of the same event (often a fictional event) and there are divergences in the details.
The story is told twice in 2 Samuel 24 and 1 Chronicles 21 about a census of the fighting men of Israel ordered by David.
In Samuel God is angry at Israel for unspecified reasons and he inspires David to conduct a census for which God will then punish the nation. In Chronicles it is Satan who incites David to take a census, and God subsequently becomes angry.
The results of the census are a bit different. Samuel pegs the total at 1,300,000 for both Israel and Judah. Chronicles says it was 1,100,000 with a note that the tribes of Levi and Benjamin were not counted. In any case, the figures are grossly inflated as we saw that David's "kingdom" likely had 45,000 inhabitants in total.
In both versions God is angry about the census (for reasons intelligible only to a Canaanite deity) and through the prophet Gad offers David his choice of three punishments: three years of famine, three months of being defeated on the battlefield or three days of deadly plague. David leaves the choice up to God, who gives them the last alternative, a plague killing 70,000 Israelites. As the plague reaches its limit, David is commanded to buy the threshing floor of Araunah and offer sacrifices there.
One last difference: In Samuel he pays 50 shekels of silver; in Chronicles it is a much more generous 600 shekels of gold.
These discrepancies would be no big deal in considering two different secular works, but in a collection supposedly inspired by an omniscient deity we can reasonably expect that he will not be absent-minded about what he said a few hundred pages back.
There are much bigger differences in the two accounts of the birth of Jesus, but we are so accustomed to the blended version presented in Christmas pageants that we will not notice if we are not looking for them.
Both Matthew and Luke are dealing with the same issue. Jesus was known to come from Nazareth, but if he truly was the messiah, then prophecy demanded that he should be born at Bethlehem. They solved it in very different ways with incompatible details.
In Matthew Joseph and Mary appear to be living in Bethlehem. Nothing is said about any journey, certainly no stable. Joseph "took Mary home as his wife" but did not consummate the marriage until after her son was born. The magi come to King Herod seeking the newborn King of the Jews, and Herod's priests say that the messiah is to be born in Bethlehem. So the magi arrive with their gifts (no shepherds in Matthew) but are warned in a dream not to go back to Herod with the location of the baby. Joseph has another dream warning him to take the child and his mother to Egypt. It finally sinks in on Herod that the magi are not coming back, and he orders the death of all male children two years and under in Bethlehem. (It never happened. Flavius Josephus detested Herod, and in his History of the Jewish People set down a long catalog of his crimes but never mentioned the slaughter of the innocents.) In Egypt eventually Joseph is told in a dream that it is safe to come home. Learning that Herod's son Archelaus is ruling in Judea he decides that it will be safest to settle in the remote region of Galilee, so "he went and lived in a town called Nazareth." Which sounds as if he had never been there before. In any case the time between Jesus' birth and the trip to Nazareth is at least several months to travel to Egypt and back, and possibly more than two years.
Luke uses a very different mechanism to reconcile the Nazarene home of Jesus with a birth in Bethlehem. Joseph and Mary live in Nazareth, but in obedience to the call for a census throughout the Roman world they travel to Bethlehem, because that is the home of Joseph's ancestors. As noted in an earlier post, there is no record of such an empire-wide census, and the Romans would never have imposed the awkward requirement of traveling to an ancestral home to register. As we all know from those Christmas pageants, there was no room at the inn, so Mary gave birth in a stable, and shepherds came to worship the baby Jesus lying in a manger.
There is a big time discrepancy which simply cannot be harmonized. As noted above, in Matthew it takes months or even years for Mary and Joseph to get from Bethlehem to Nazareth. Luke tells us that Mary and Joseph go to Jerusalem (a short trip) to perform "the purification rites required by the Law of Moses" and then when they "had done everything required by the Law of the Lord, they returned to Galilee to their own town of Nazareth." That would be a span of only 41 days. According to Leviticus 12 Jesus would have been presented for circumcision on his eighth day, and then Mary would wait a further 33 days for her purification before offering a sacrifice.
It's like shooting fish in a barrel to come up with contradictions between widely separated parts of the Bible, but I can't resist taking one pot shot since it deals with the central doctrine of Christianity.
As is well known, Paul came up with the doctrine of justification, that all humans deserved death because of Adam's sin but were offered salvation for free because of Christ's sacrificial death on the cross.
Quote:18 Consequently, just as one trespass resulted in condemnation for all people, so also one righteous act resulted in justification and life for all people. 19 For just as through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous. (Romans 5)
However, Ezekiel goes to great pains to assert the opposite in Chapter 18. We will each of us be judged on the basis of our own actions.
Quote:20 The one who sins is the one who will die. The child will not share the guilt of the parent, nor will the parent share the guilt of the child. The righteousness of the righteous will be credited to them, and the wickedness of the wicked will be charged against them. 21 “But if a wicked person turns away from all the sins they have committed and keeps all my decrees and does what is just and right, that person will surely live; they will not die. 22 None of the offenses they have committed will be remembered against them. Because of the righteous things they have done, they will live. 23 Do I take any pleasure in the death of the wicked? declares the Sovereign Lord. Rather, am I not pleased when they turn from their ways and live? 24 “But if a righteous person turns from their righteousness and commits sin and does the same detestable things the wicked person does, will they live? None of the righteous things that person has done will be remembered. Because of the unfaithfulness they are guilty of and because of the sins they have committed, they will die.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people — House
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