Why do gospel contradictions matter?

[taylor93112]

First off, I'm not a believer. But I constantly hear from fellow non believers that the gospels aren't reliable because they contain contradictions. Honestly, I don't understand why this argument is used. From my understanding, the gospels spread by word of mouth for at least 20+ years before being written down. And then mark was written down, which the others are based off of. So isn't the real reason they are unreliable due to them being circulated by conversation for over 20 years?

Please, correct me if I'm wrong. I'm happy to be educated.
(Any helpful links would be appreciated!)

[Tonus]

For a number of reasons. One, you would expect that god's guidebook for humankind would be a work of wonder so amazing that there would be no doubt of its divine origin, but instead you get a clumsy anthology that wasn't edited very well. Second, if the idea is to establish the truth of certain matters, it helps if the various accounts don't contradict in important details. Third, why are there so few corroborating documents outside of the gospels, most of which either don't seem legitimate or are oddly unimpressed with the realization that god had walked among men. And why would it take that long for people to even begin to write down their memoirs of the time that they PARTIED WITH THE LORD OF THE WHOLE UNIVERSE???

Although the length of time between what happened and when people wrote about it also brings up a curious idea: imagine that this itinerant preacher warned about stuff that would happen in 30-40 years, and none of it happened, so a group of people start writing stories about how he predicted stuff that really did happen? And what if, hundreds of years later as the state religion built upon his memory is gaining traction, they decide that to be relevant those stories have to have a future interpretation as well? Suddenly the dearth of contemporary material and the way that the Bible is assembled into its current form might just have an explanation that seems plausible.

[GrandizerII]

First off, I'm not a believer. But I constantly hear from fellow non believers that the gospels aren't reliable because they contain contradictions. Honestly, I don't understand why this argument is used. From my understanding, the gospels spread by word of mouth for at least 20+ years before being written down. And then mark was written down, which the others are based off of. So isn't the real reason they are unreliable due to them being circulated by conversation for over 20 years?

Please, correct me if I'm wrong. I'm happy to be educated.
(Any helpful links would be appreciated!)

Sometimes what happens is that you get certain fundamentalist Christians who take the Bible so literally as the Word of God that the Bible cannot have any errors in it.

That is why nonbelievers respond with the argument that this cannot be the case as the Bible has contradictions (pretty much errors) in it. If the Bible has errors, then the Bible cannot be God's word literally.

What you said is true as well, but good luck trying to convince these Christians that the Gospels weren't directly inspired by God through the pen of man.

[abaris]

First off, I'm not a believer. But I constantly hear from fellow non believers that the gospels aren't reliable because they contain contradictions.

That's just one of the reasons why they aren't reliable. Multiple authors collecting hearsay and legends of a superstitious world. That's quite obvious, looking at the way the stuff was written.

And then of course there's the biblical equivalent of pink elephants and unicorns roaming the land at every gven moment.

But most of all, something supposed to be the law of a supreme being shouldn't contain any contradictions. It should be at least as reliable and straight as the Codex Hamurabi, which is quite literally written in stone.

[Cyberman]

You can have a story filled with contradictions, or you can have one that's held up as truth (divine or otherwise); but you can't reasonably have both at the same time.

[abaris]

You can have a story filled with contradictions

A good story shouldn't have contradictions. That happens when the editor didn't do their job properly.

[Cyberman]

Who said the story was a good one?

[Chad32]

It causes people to kill each other over which verses are more important. It makes it impossible to follow the entire bible faithfully when you're commanded to kill everyone outside your group while also doing unto others as you would have them do unto you.

The messiah is supposed to be a guy named Emanuel who is the prince of peace, yet we get a guy named Jesus who brings a sword instead. Jesus doesn't even meet all the requirements for the Jewish messiah anyway.

Why should there be any contradictions or inconsistencies, when the source of this divine inspiration is the same omni everything god? One reason I hear that the bible should be trustworthy is that it's consistent, and some of its propheses have come to pass. Except neither is true. The city of tyr was never fully destroyed, and you can find it today, and the end times did not come during the lifetimes of the people Jesus spoke to, despite him saying so.

And how did the gospels get the details of the most important man in history mixed up? Was Jesus that forgetful?

[downbeatplumb]

You can have a story filled with contradictions

A good story shouldn't have contradictions. That happens when the editor didn't do their job properly.

Like a planet killing death machine that can be killed by one lucky strike on a hatch at the surface.

[Jenny A]

First off, I'm not a believer. But I constantly hear from fellow non believers that the gospels aren't reliable because they contain contradictions. Honestly, I don't understand why this argument is used. From my understanding, the gospels spread by word of mouth for at least 20+ years before being written down. And then mark was written down, which the others are based off of. So isn't the real reason they are unreliable due to them being circulated by conversation for over 20 years?

Please, correct me if I'm wrong. I'm happy to be educated.
(Any helpful links would be appreciated!)

Why are the contradictions used as arguments by atheists? Because many Christians claim the Gospels are 100% accurate either by divine inspiration or because the gospels were written by eye witnesses (a dubious if not down right fraudulent claim). If someone claims that something is absolutely accurate, there's nothing like a contradiction either internally (like what day was Jesus crucified on) or with what we know of the history of the ancient world (for example, the world wide census that never happened) to refute that claim.

Slightly less fundamentalists Christians will contend that the Gospels are "spiritually inerrant," a wishy-washy term I tend to think of as theologically inerrant. But there are theologically driven contradictions in the Gospels too.

Not necessarily a good reason, but I must admit that it's also rather fun to watch Christians tie themselves into logical knots trying to explain away the contradictions. It's an end in itself.

Finally, anyone genuinely interested in the likelihood of particular story in the Gospels, or any other historical document needs to weigh the evidence carefully. Contradictions between sources and contradictions between sources and the historical context are part of the evidence.