Alleged Inconsistencies and Contradictions in the Bible: Many people are truly bothered by the alleged contradictions and inconsistencies in the Bible...Critics have written extensively in attempts to discredit the Bible, and its defenders have responded by explaining certain difficult passages. Most alleged contradictions could very well result from our demanding more historical precision than the gospels ever intended to provide. Furthermore, what appear at first to be inconsistencies are often fully explained on more careful examination. For example, today we might attribute a certain statement to the president when technically it has been delivered through his spokesman. So we should not assume a contradiction between Lukes account that the Gentile centurion requested, through Jewish intermediaries, a miracle from Jesus (Luke 7:6), and Matthews version reporting that the centurion made the request personally (Matt 8:5). There are more problematic examples, but we should know that Bible students have always been aware of these issues. They have not been discovered by some new, sophisticated techniques that would have caused waves of unbelief had they been available long ago. The early Church Fathers addressed these very issues, and Augustine even wrote a fifth-century commentary, Harmony of the Gospels, that discussed many of them. Too often skeptics make it sound as if we know something today that our predecessors did not that now makes belief in the historical reliability of Scripture untenable, says Blomberg. That claim is simply false. David Lumbaugh (Jesus on Trial: A Lawyer Affirms the Truth of the Gospel)
Posted on: Wed, 10 Sep 2014 13:45:42 +0000
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