Does the Bible Contradict Itself?

There are some circumstances in life where, as the saying goes, you just cant win,

If all the books of the Bible told exactly the same story, if every detail fitted together perfectly, people would not be satisfied, They would say:

"This looks fishy. Its obviously a put-up job. The Bible writers have put their heads together, and cooked up a story that hangs together. I dont trust it."

And they would be right. A situation like that would be highly suspicious.

But the Bible is not like that. There are places where it is difficult to make the details from one book fit in with another book. Sometimes one part of a book does not even seem to agree with another part of the same book.

Are the doubters reassured about this? Do they say, "This is more convincing. This looks more like real life"?

Not at all! They take the opportunity to criticise the Bible on different grounds. "It contradicts itself! So it cant possibly be wholly true.

Now this really is a poor argument. Real life is full of situations that appear contradictory. Only when you learn all the circumstances do you realise that these real life "contradictions" are not contradictory at all.

Take this one for example. On October 31st 1967 a London newspaper, the Daily Telegraph, reported that Mrs Margaret Fennel had twin sons in Birmingham Maternity Hospital the previous day. They were born in the small hours of the morning. The first was born at 1.40 a.m., and the second at 1.10 a.m.

Yes, you read it correctly. The first was born at 1.40 and the second at 1.10!

The explanation is that Daylight Saving ended that morning. At

2.00 a.m., when Number One was twenty minutes old, the clocks were

put back to 1.00 a.m. Ten minutes later Number Two arrived at

1.10 a.m. Simple, when you know the whole story, isnt it?

Then again, who would have thought that in the year 1970 a very respectable scientific journal would make statements like this:

"Devils do not occur in cleared places . . . Devils live successfully in close contact with human settlement and activity . . . Man is the principal predator of adult devils."

But it did. The journal was the Australian journal of Zoology. It was talking about an animal little known to Europeans, called the Tasmanian devil.

Another example. American and British motorists have often argued about the fuel consumption of cars. "All I can say is, Elmer, that if you can only get fifteen miles to the gallon out of that Ford, there must be something wrong."

Then another voice breaks in. "Hey, you guys, dont you know that a gallon aint a gallon on the other side of the Atlantic?"

It isnt, either. The British gallon is a quarter as large again as an American gallon. But that is not as bad as the confusion over the word "billion". It takes a thousand American billions to make just one British billion.

Pity the poor foreigner who hears us talking about Eton College, and The London School of Economics. How is he to know that Eton College is not a college but a school, and The London School of Economics is not a school but a college?

People have to have facts like this about the modern world pointed out to them, to explain "contradictions" they meet in life today. It is not surprising that we sometimes come across a so-called contradiction in the Bible, and have to hunt for facts about the ancient world to explain what lies behind it.

Differences Between the Gospels

The Gospels are a happy hunting ground for people who like to point out "contradictions in the Bible. This is because there are four of them, all covering much the same ground. We should expect to find differences between them, and we do.

A favourite criticism is that gospel writers cannot even agree on the wording of a little notice board. Pontius Pilate nailed this board to Christs cross, so that passers-by might know who was hanging there. This is what the gospels say was written on the board:

Matthew: THIS IS JESUS THE KING OF THE JEWS1

Mark: THE KING OF THE JEWS2

Luke: THIS IS THE KING OF THE JEWS3

John: JESUS OF NAZARETH THE KING OF THE JEWS4

It is not difficult to find the missing fact that explains these differences. John says that the notice was written in three languages:

Hebrew, Greek and Latin.5

There is nothing to suggest that the wording was the same in all three languages. One writer is presumably giving us an exact copy of the Greek inscription, while the others are giving us translations of the Hebrew inscription, or the Latin one, or even, perhaps, a mixture of them both.

At the other end of Christs life, the critics point to the differences between the two stories of the birth of Jesus. After the shepherds and the Wise Men had visited the new baby his parents departed from Bethlehem with Him.

Where did they take Him? Matthew says they went to Egypt and stayed there until the death of King Herod. Luke says they went to Jerusalem for a short visit and then went home to Nazareth, which is in the opposite direction from Egypt.

The critics are, as usual, on very shaky ground. The early disciples were not exactly feeble-minded men. They must have been well aware of this difference between Matthew and Luke. The difference did not worry them, however, because they evidently knew the explanation.

With a little effort we can easily rediscover that explanation for ourselves. To the careful reader it is obvious that Matthew and Luke are describing two different episodes in the story of Jesus. Luke says that the shepherds visited Him in the stable where He was born,6 on the very day that He was born,7 and he calls Him "a babe".8

Matthew, on the other hand, tells us how the Wise Men had to make a long journey. By the time they arrived, Jesus was no longer a "babe", but was a "young child".9

This is why Herod thought it necessary to slay all the Bethlehem children up to the age of two.10 Moreover, by this time they were no longer lodging in a stable, but were living in a house11-a point that is regularly overlooked by Christmas card artists and producers of nativity plays.

When these facts are noted, there is no contradiction at all. Luke tells us that, when Jesus was a few weeks old, His parents took Him via Jerusalem to Nazareth. From Matthew we can deduce that, some time later, they were back in Bethlehem.

We can only guess why they went back to Bethlehem to live. Perhaps Mary thought it right that the Son of God should be brought up in the place appointed by God as His birthplace.

Whatever the reason, they went back, and were found there by the Wise Men. Then, as Matthew tells us, they went to Egypt for a time, and eventually went back to Nazareth again.

The Way We Say Things

An English university student came late into the college dining room.

" Any dinner left?"

There wasnt. His friends were not the least bit sympathetic. "Youve had it!" they chorused.

A Chinese student looked puzzled, and turned to his English neighbour. "I do not understand. Why do they say that he has had it? He has not had it, and it seems that he is not going to get it!"

The English student smiled. "Thats an idiom-the way we say things. Youll get used to it in time.

Foreigners always have trouble with our idiom-the way we put things. We realise that, and smile at them. But where the Bible is concerned we often forget one thing.

The Bible was written by Hebrews, not by Europeans. The idiom of the Old Testament is Hebrew idiom, not English. Even the Greek New Testament contains a great deal of Hebrew idiom. Where the Bible is concerned we are the foreigners.

Consequently we need to make an effort to appreciate the Hebrew idiom that shows through into our English Bible. Unless we do, we shall sometimes be as baffled as the Chinese student when he first heard the saying, "Youve had it."

Hosea reports God as declaring, "I desired mercy, and not sacrifice."12 Jesus quotes the saying with approval.13 If we read this as if an Englishman had written it, we shall frown.

" If God doesnt want sacrifice, why did He command the children of Israel to offer sacrifices? And, above all, why did He allow His Son to be sacrificed on the cross?"

But it was written by a Hebrew, not an Englishman, and we must read it in the light of the Hebrew idiom he used. This idiom is explained for us in the book of Deuteronomy. Forty years after God made His covenant with one generation of Israelites, Moses spoke to their sons and grandsons: "The Lord made not this covenant with our fathers but with us, even us, who are all here alive this day."14

But God did make that covenant with their fathers. Moses obviously meant: "God did not only make that covenant with our fathers, but also with us."

In exactly the same way, "I desired mercy and not sacrifice", meant, to a Hebrew, "I not only desired sacrifice, but also mercy." You will find other examples of this idiom in the English Bible if you look out for them. Appreciation of this idiom alone will clear up a number of apparent contradictions in the Bible.

Quite a number of the supposed contradictions in the Bible arise through not appreciating (or not trying to appreciate) the subtleties of the language used. I have room for only one more example. Compare these two passages:

" And when Saul inquired of the Lord, the Lord answered him not."15

"So Saul died for his transgression . . . and also for asking counsel of one that had a familiar spirit, to inquire of it, and inquired not of the Lord."16

Although two different Hebrew words for "inquired" are used in these passages, this does not explain the difficulty. They are both rendered fairly in the English translation. It is only when we reconstruct the whole incident that we can see what happened. To do this we need to read both chapters right through.

Saul was a very impatient man. He always wanted quick results. This twist in his character had led him into conflict with God before.17

On this occasion he was desperate for a quick answer. He sought one from God, but God kept him waiting. So he turned away from God, and put his questions to a witch instead. This led to his undoing.

In the light of this story it is obvious what the words, "Saul .

inquired not of the Lord", would have conveyed to a Hebrew reader. Saul made a quick show of inquiring of God, but did not keep it up long enough to do any good.

An English poet has expressed the same sort of contrast:

" I often say my prayers;

But do I ever pray?"

We do not accuse the poet of contradicting himself. Why should we accuse the writers of the Biblical passages quoted above?

The New Testament quotes the Old

"How can we trust the New Testament writers? Why, they cant even quote the Old Testament correctly."

This is a frequent criticism. But, like so many other criticisms of the Bible, it is a very shallow one. The facts go right against it.

It is true, of course, that in many places the New Testament quotes the Old Testament in a way that you or I would not do. But what of that? We are not ancient Jewish writers. We have our own literary standards, and they had theirs. And the two are not the same.

They could not be the same, because our literary tools are so much better than theirs. One great advantage is that we are able to make a clear distinction between what is known as "direct quotation" and "indirect quotation". Thus:

(1) Direct quotation: Dr. Blank wrote, "The Bible is a very fine book."

(2) Indirect quotation: Dr. Blank has said that the Bible is excellent.

In the first example, inverted commas are used to indicate that I am quoting the exact words of Dr. Blank. In the second, no inverted commas are used; this indicates that my words convey Dr. Blanks message without using his actual words.

Punctuation was not invented in Bible times, so the Bible writers could not do this. They were also unable to use several other useful modern devices. Sometimes, to shorten a long quotation, I have missed out a bit in the middle. This might occasionally confuse the reader were it not for one thing: nowadays a row of dots signifies that this has been done. But we are left to guess when an ancient writer has done this.

Sometimes I have slipped a comment of my own, or an explanation of a difficult word, into the middle of a quotation from another author. You can tell these additions of mine because they are enclosed in square brackets, like this, [ ]or, inside Biblical quotations, in ordinary brackets, like this, ( ). But it is often very difficult to tell where an ancient author has done this sort of thing, before brackets were invented.

We saw in Chapter 17 how tremendously careful the Jews were to copy their Scriptures accurately. No devout Jew would dream of quoting Scripture carelessly. All the New Testament writers except Luke were Jews. We may not fully understand why they sometimes varied the words of the Old Testament when they quoted it. But of this we can be sure: they must have done it deliberately, for some good reason.

In many cases we can clearly see their motive. They wished to interpret the Scripture for us while they were quoting it. To give a simple example, there is a passage in Isaiah which says:

" I lay in Zion for a foundation a stone, a precious corner stone, a sure foundation; he that believeth shall not make haste."18

The apostle Peter quotes this verse, and tells us that the "stone" referred to is Jesus Christ-the foundation stone of Gods purpose. While he quotes the first part of the verse without altering the sense, because it is simple to understand, he alters the last words materially. He changes, "he that believeth shall not make haste", to, "he that believeth on Him shall not be put to shame."19

He adds the words "on Him" to make it plain that Isaiah means belief in Christ. And he changes, "shall not make haste", to, "shall not be put to shame". This lets us know that the "making haste" meant by Isaiah is the terrified, but pointless, running away of a sinner who cannot escape judgement.

We, with our modern literary customs, would not quote the Bible like that. We should give an exact quotation, and then follow with an exposition. But Peter went by the accepted rules of the times, and combined quotation and exposition in one. His method has a great advantage over ours: it uses far less words.

Because of their economy in words, the apostles sometimes appear to apply the Old Testament to the wrong thing. In fact they do nothing of the kind. They merely leave it to us to expand their arguments, and draw out the full meaning. Paul did this in the verse:

" Their sound went into all the earth,

And their words unto the ends of the world."20

Paul uses this to prove that the gospel is to be preached to all nations. But the quotation comes from a psalm which begins:

" The heavens declare the glory of God,

And the firmament showeth His handywork."21

It is these silent witnesses in the sky whose message goes out to all the earth, in the fourth verse of this psalm. Yet Paul applies it to the preachers of the first-century Church!

Is it possible that Paul has blundered? Most unlikely. Paul is far too good a Bible student to slip up like that. He has a reason for what he does.

If we read the whole of the psalm, we begin to see that reason. The first half of the psalm is all about the glory of God revealed in nature. Then there is an abrupt change of thought. The rest of the psalm is all about the glory of God revealed in the Word of God.

If Paul were a modern writer he would probably have explained his quotation like this:

"The two halves of the psalm are connected. The first half is a parable; the second half is its explanation. The light of the sun in the first half represents the light of Gods Word in the second half. Consequently the words spoken about the sun in this psalm apply equally well to the Word of God. And thats the way I have applied them."

Another kind of problem occurs in the opening of Marks Gospel. He says, "As it is written in Isaiah the prophet"22 and then makes a double quotation. First he quotes from Malachi, and only after that does he keep his promise and quote Isaiah. Why this peculiar behaviour?

Simply because he was a first-century Jew, not a twentieth-century European. A modern English writer would have introduced this double quotation with some such phrase as this:

"You know what Isaiah (and a later prophet, Malachi, who reflected Isaiahs words) said: . .

But Marks very much simpler introduction was quite sufficient for the readers of his day. They were used to that sort of quotation. And they were very much more familiar with the Old Testament than we are, so they needed less explanation, anyway.

Thus, although there are problems involved in the way the New Testament quotes the Old, they are not serious. They nearly all yield to patient investigation along the lines I have illustrated.

A Lot Depends on the Point of View

About 150 years ago two famous Englishmen spoke like this:

Wordsworth: "Earth has not anything to show more fair."

Cobbett: "The great wen." (A wen is a festering sore.)

Believe it or not, each was describing London. And they were not contradicting each other. They just happened to be looking at it from different points of view.

Wordsworth had been standing on Westminster Bridge admiring the magnificent skyline of great buildings. Cobbett was a country dweller, thinking, probably, of the filth and squalor of the London slums. Each from his own viewpoint was speaking the truth.

Is it surprising that Bible writers who set out to portray things from different points of view describe them differently? This is not contradiction. This is just the giving of extra information.

The four Gospels are written from four entirely different points of view.23 Matthew wrote for Jews. His aim was to portray Jesus as King of the Jews. He says that Christs preaching was all about the "Kingdom of Heaven". He puts this phrase into the mouth of Jesus dozens of times, and only calls it the "Kingdom of God" on two or three occasions.

Mark wrote for Romans. He portrayed Jesus as the servant of mankind. To him, as to Luke and John, the Kingdom is the "Kingdom of God", not of "Heaven".

Luke was a Greek, writing for Greeks. He interpreted for his readers the Hebrew phrases that they would not understand. Matthew says the Jewish children cried, "Hosanna!"24 No doubt they did. That was a Hebrew word they would know. It means, "Please save us." But Luke puts another word into their mouths: "glory". From the Greek point of view, that was what hosanna amounted to.

Matthew reported Jesus as telling the Jews, "When ye therefore shall see the abomination of desolation, spoken of by Daniel the prophet, stand in the holy place . . . flee into the mountains."25

The Greeks would have wondered what that was all about. So Luke puts an interpretation into Christs mouth: "When ye shall see Jerusalem compassed with armies. .. flee to the mountains."26 From a Greek point of view that was exactly what Jesus did say.

The Gospel of John is very different from the other three Gospels-so different that scholars have coined a special name for the "problem" this creates.27 But there is no contradiction involved. John is looking from a very different viewpoint. He reveals Jesus as the only-begotten Son of God. He is concerned more with the inner meanings of events than the events themselves.

Not all the apparent contradictions in the Bible are just a question of the writers point of view. But many of them are.

New Facts Solve Problems

Again and again a Bible problem is solved when we come across some new fact. This need not be an archaeological fact. It can be a fact from another part of the Bible that explains an apparent contradiction. Compare these two verses, both taken from chapters in which Moses described how Israel would be punished for her sins:

" I will not cast them away, neither will I abhor them, to destroy them utterly."28

"The Lord shall send upon thee cursing... until thou be destroyed."29

What are we to make of this? Was Israel to be destroyed or not?

The answer is: "Yes and no." That answer is supplied for us by the prophet Amos:

" Behold, the eyes of the Lord God are upon the sinful kingdom, and I will destroy it from off the face of the earth; saving that I will not utterly destroy the house of Jacob, saith the Lord."30

The precision of this language is uncanny. God would destroy the kingdom of Israel. But he would not destroy the "house of Jacob"-a Hebrew expression meaning the race of Israel.

This resolves the apparent contradiction between the "destroy" and "not destroy" promises. But it does more than that. It gives us another remarkable example of fulfilled prophecy. Just as Amos prophesied, the kingdom was destroyed, but-against all the probabilities-the race of Israel has been preserved.

Even little facts about the Hebrew language can resolve some problems for us. This one, for example. ~ Samuel 8: 13 says that Davids army smote 18,000 men of Syria in the Valley of Salt. But I Chronicles 18:12 says they smote 18,000 men of Edom in the Valley of Salt.

The Hebrew words for Syria and Edom differ by only one letter. One has the letter daleth where the other has the letter resh. Now daLeth and resh are the two most similar letters in the Hebrew alphabet. Both look rather like an upside-down L, but one has a square corner and the other a slightly rounded corner.

The slight roundness of that corner is the only thing to distinguish the Hebrew words for Syria and Edom. Obviously we have here one of those very rare copyists errors.

Yes, new facts keep solving old problems for us. There are still a few apparent contradictions in the Bible that cannot yet be convincingly explained. But we have lots of new facts to learn yet.

Can we reasonably doubt that, if only we had all the facts, we might be able to solve all the problems?