Does the Bible have contradictions?
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| Angel 013 (Photo credit: Juliett-Foxtrott) |
Very early in church history there were attempts to write harmonies of the Gospels. There are three synoptic Gospels—Matthew, Mark, and Luke—which give a biographical sketch of the life and ministry of Jesus. Many events are parallel among those three authors, though they don’t always agree in each detail—how many angels were at the tomb on the day of resurrection, what the sign on the cross said, what day of the week Jesus and the disciples celebrated the Passover celebration in the upper room, and so forth.
Those things have received a tremendous amount of careful attention by biblical scholars, some coming to the conclusion that there is no way to harmonize them and that we just have to accept that there are contradictions among the biblical writers, which would then seem to falsify any claim to divine inspiration.
Others have felt that they indeed can be reconciled. For example, one Gospel writer tells us that there were two angels at the tomb on the day of the Resurrection, and another mentions only one. Now the critical word that’s absent from the text is the word “only.” If one writer says there were two angels at the tomb and the other one comes along and says there was only one, there you have a bona fide contradiction between the two. If one says there were two angels at the tomb and the other says we came and saw an angel, obviously if there are two angels, there has to be one angel— there’s no contradiction. There is a discrepancy; that is, they don’t say exactly the same thing. The question is, Can the two accounts be harmonized—are they logically compatible with one another?There are some extremely difficult passages in the Scriptures, and I’m not always happy with some of the resolutions, but for the most part those difficult discrepancies have been thoroughly reconciled through biblical scholarship.
