Biblical Contradictions Part 2

The Bible contains history, poetry, prophecy, and figures of speech galore. These must all be taken in context the way we would do with any other written work. Historical books should be read in the normal (literal) way while poetic passages that include imagery should be understood as such. According to Chuck Missler, there are hundreds of kinds of figures of speech in the Bible. These should be viewed as nothing more or less than figures of speech used anywhere else, so that referring to the four corners of the earth doesn’t mean the Bible thinks the earth is flat nor does talking about hiding beneath God’s wings mean that God has feathers.

Sweeping generalizations are another area where people often protest there are contradictions when there aren’t. The book of Proverbs is one area that contains many basic rules for how to live life. God approves of us being righteous and says that this kind of behavior is rewarded and yet there are righteous people who have been persecuted and even killed. In other words, these general principles work most of the time, but they’re not inviolable universal rules.

Yet another cause of contradictions comes from the fact that we’re reading the Bible in translation. Scholars disagree in many instances on a particular translation. When this happens, it’s a good idea to use a Hebrew/Greek lexicon to check out meanings for ourselves. This is in addition to the fact that there are slight variations in the many ancient manuscripts we use as our basis.

A contradiction of inference is where someone infers a contradiction that the text doesn’t actually state and is another area where Christians need not worry. Matthew says that Joseph, Mary, and Jesus went to Egypt after his birth in Bethlehem. Luke doesn’t mention Egypt, but has them in Nazareth. We can infer that these two gospels are talking about the same period of time, but that’s not necessarily true and the text doesn’t say this. There are many possible explanations on how this timeline in Jesus’ life might have unfolded, but it’s not a contradiction, but simply a matter of who emphasized which details.

A subset of the contradiction of inference is the X and X only fallacy which occurs when a reader mistakenly assumes that a number stated in the Bible (X) indicates only X. In Mark 5 and Luke 8, only one demon-possessed man is mentioned while according to Matthew there were two. Perhaps the one man was more violent than the other or perhaps he kept himself more in the background and thus wasn’t mentioned in the first two accounts. Mark and Luke don’t say there was ONLY one man, they just happened to focus on one man.

Apparent factual contradictions happen when a critic claims the Bible contradicts a well-established fact. However, such secular ‘facts’ as the Big Bang, evolution, naturalism, and the secular order of events are not beyond question and to argue that the Bible is wrong because it doesn’t agree with them is a vicious circle argument.

Best of all, these many types of critical attacks on the Bible backfire on the very critic who asserts the Bible is false because it contains contradictions. Only if the Bible is true, are contradictions unacceptable in the first place! Assuming the law of non-contradiction means the person takes it for granted that a contradiction can’t be true and the only reason this is true is because God is truth and can’t go against Himself. Only by accepting the biblical world view can we know that contradictions are always false because only in a biblical world view is there a basis for the law of non-contradiction.

If your head isn't spinning yet, check out Answers in Genesis where they will be going deeper into the topic of contradictions with more examples of the various types.