Tag: bible

Can we trust the Bible #3: Is the Bible full of contradictions?

07/09/2017

Does the Bible contradict itself?

We all love to catch a politician contradicting themselves – but what about the Bible? Does it contradict itself, as you’ll sometimes hear people say, and if that’s the case, how can we trust anything it says?

Personally when people say “The Bible is full of contradictions” to me, I like to ask them which contradiction they have in mind – because often they don’t actually know of any – they just heard or read it somewhere.

But when they do name a contradiction, that’s when the fun starts, because as someone who is committed to the trustworthiness of the Bible, contradiction is a big issue to me!

Thankfully most of the possible contradictions people identify fall into one of five categories and turn out not to be contradiction at all. Let’s take a look at them. The first is:

1) The Typo.

The Old Testament book 2Chronicles (36:9) says Jehoiachin became king of Judah when he was 8 years old. But the other account we have of his reign, in 2Kings (24:8) says he was 18. Which is true?

This contradiction is likely to be a result of what we call “scribal error.” That is – at some point an error crept into the copying process of either 2Chronicles or 2Kings. We looked at these “errors” in the article about whether the Bible we have today has changed since it was originally written.

Broadly speaking we said: No – the Bible has not changed – certainly not in any of its major details or doctrines. But occasionally it’s hard to deny a discrepancy has crept in, and most good modern translations highlight them.

Another category of contradiction is:

2) Intentional

Proverbs 26.4-5, says,

Do not answer a fool according to his folly, or you yourself will be just like him. Answer a fool according to his folly, or he will be wise in his own eyes.”

That seems to suggest that wise old King Solomon was so dumb that he put two contradictory proverbs next to each other. But far more likely is that he’s trying to teach us something about how to use his proverbs. You see proverbs never pretend to be one-size fits all solutions. True wisdom is knowing which one works when!

These “intentional contradictions” raise an important issue: that we can’t call something in the Bible a contradiction, until we’ve properly understood the type of literature we’re reading. So for example, we don’t read the erotic love poetry of Song of Solomon in the same way we read the Nativity Story (and we certainly wouldn’t want to get them muddled up in a school assembly!)

 

Here’s another kind of contradiction:

3) Ignoring the bigger story!

In the Old Testament, sin is forgiven by offering animal sacrifice. In the New Testament, sin is forgiven by the sacrifice of Jesus on the Cross. Which is right?

Answer: Both – but at different times in the bigger story of God’s dealing with his people! Some contradictions only exist because we haven’t thought about how they fit into the bigger story – the unifying plot that runs all through the Bible – from the opening chapters of Genesis to the final chapters of Revelation with the death and resurrection of Jesus as the hinge-point.

 

A related type of contradiction is:

4) Failure to understand the context

This isn’t so much a failure to grasp the bigger story, as a failure to grasp the more immediate story. So for example, Ecclesiastes 7:29 says,

God made man upright”

whereas Psalm 51:5 says,

Behold I was brought forth in iniquity.”

That looks like a contradiction, until you explore the context of the two verses. In the first the writer is talking about Adam and Eve and God’s original, perfect creation. In the second, the writer is talking about his own sinfulness. And because the two verses are speaking of something utterly different, they are not in contradiction.

 

A final type of contradiction is caused by:

5) Misinterpretation.

For example, when Jesus entered Jerusalem, Matthew 21:7 says he had two donkeys, but Mark 11:7 says he had one. Surely this is a contradiction.

At face value, it does look one – though it could just be a typo. But what’s more likely is that we’re misinterpreting the words to see contradiction where there is none. For example, are these two statements contradictory:

At John’s funeral we sang Abide with Me”,

and,

We sang Abide with me and The Lord’s my Shepherd at John’s funeral”?

No – they just emphasise different things – and most likely that Matthew and Mark are doing something similar.

So, is the Bible full of contradictions? No! Scholars have spent years analysing them, and most of them can be attributed to one of these five broad types.

If you’ve got a contradiction in mind that’s really bugging you, why not email me at barry@hopechurchfamily.org and let’s see if we can’t find a way though it!

To find out more:

First published in the Bridge Magazine, May 2017

 

Can we trust the Bible #2: Is the Bible true?

07/09/2017

Is the Bible True?

In the first part of this series, we looked at whether the Bible has changed through the ages, and we saw that through the insights offered by the academic discipline of textual criticism, we can be confident that the Bible books we have today are almost certainly identical to the books the first century church had.

Now we turn to the more fundamental question – is what was originally written true? And that’s quite a tricky question to answer because although the Bible is telling one big story in its 66 books, those books each contain hundreds of statements, written in many different writing styles, and it’s impossible to verify that all are true. Let me give you an example: There’s a romantic poetry book called Song of Songs, in which a girl’s nose is compared to the tower of Lebanon. As we don’t have a photo of the nose and the tower, how can we ever know if that is true (or whether the girl needed counselling to get over it)?

So what I’m going to do is focus in on one part of the Bible – the gospels – and explore whether they are reliable.  So let’s put Matthew, Mark, Luke and John in the dock and cross-examine them.

First we’ll hit them with the “Forrest Gump” gaffe test. Why Forrest Gump? Well in the film the hero receives a letter from the computer manufacturer Apple dated Sept 23 1975. Sadly, Apple wasn’t founded until April 1976.  So are there any major geographical or historical gaffes like that in the gospels? No – or at least none that are overwhelming problems.

From a geographical standpoint, the locations the gospels describe are all real, and the journeys the gospels describe are all possible. The historical figures referenced – people like Caesar Augustus, Pontius Pilate and Herod the Great – were all in power at the right times.  And whilst the events of the gospels were too provincial to merit a mention by the Roman historians, the crucifixion of Jesus is mentioned by the Jewish historian Josephus.

There has however been some debate about the precise date of the census that Luke links with the timing of Jesus’ birth, but that’s most likely a problem with our ignorance of Roman censuses, rather than with Luke’s fact-checking. Archaeologist Sir William Ramsay sums the situation up well when he says,

You may press the words of Luke in a degree beyond any other historian’s and they stand the keenest scrutiny and the hardest treatment.”

So the gospel accounts fit with the history of the period, but that doesn’t mean they are true. In Hollywood language, could they just be myths “based on true events”? The problem with this argument is that the myths and legends of the ancient near east, and indeed the Greek and Roman world, all have a distinctive writing style, which the literature experts know how to spot. The countless minute details recorded in the gospels are a dead giveaway that they aren’t myths, but instead collections of eye-witness accounts. CS Lewis, who as well as writing marvellous children’s stories, was also Professor of English Literature at both Oxford and Cambridge universities, said either the gospels are eye-witness accounts or,

else some unknown writer in the second century, without known predecessors or successors, suddenly anticipated the whole technique of modern, novelistic, realistic, narrative.”

Next, let’s consider whether our eye-witnesses might have had a motive to invent a myth. Let’s ask, what did the gospel writers gain by writing, and by continuing to insist it was true? Most people who invent myths do it to gain money, sex or power; but the gospel writers got nothing but persecution, torture and death. It’s hard to imagine why they would go to their deaths insisting something they knew to be false, was true.

So far so good. I’ve argued that the gospels are historically plausible eye-witness accounts and that their writers didn’t have any plausible reason to deceive us. But that still doesn’t prove that the ideas Jesus puts across in the gospels about who he is and why he’s come are true – and if I’m honest, there are no clever words I can write in my final paragraph that will do that.

All I can do is invite you to explore for yourself what Jesus said about himself to see if it makes sense of the world and of your life. Most modern people encounter Jesus not through his own words, but through the filtered environment of the school classroom, or through documentaries and other people’s books. But the way to really encounter him is by reading one (or more) of the gospels in a modern translation. When people do that in a reflective and thoughtful way they often find themselves captivated by the sheer magnificence of Jesus. I know this from my own experience, and from the experience of countless others who have met him through reading the gospels for themselves. And when that happens, the question of whether what Jesus says is true is swiftly transformed into “What am I going to do about what Jesus says?”

If reading a gospel isn’t something you fancy dong on your own, on May 8th, I’m starting another Christianity Explored course, which will introduce Jesus through the gospel of Mark. To book in, visit our website at www.hopechurchfamily.org/courses

To find out more:

First published in the Bridge Magazine, April 2017

Can we trust the Bible? #1

07/09/2017

Can we trust the Bible?

And my short answer is predicably enough, “Yes!” I bet you weren’t expecting me to say that!

Normally when someone asks me “Can we trust the Bible?” I like to ask them why they struggle to trust it themselves – and their answers usually fall into one of a few categories:

  1. The Bible can’t be trusted because it has been changed since it was written (people usually blame Chinese Whispers for this, or Emperor Constantine if they read Dan Brown’s book the Da Vinci Code and forgot it’s a work of fiction.
  2. The Bible can’t be trusted because the gospels (or some other part of it) are factually inaccurate (ie the original writers set out to deceive us).
  3. The Bible can’t be trusted because it’s full of contradictions.

Each of those is actually a big question worthy of attention in it’s own right, so I’ll tackle them one at a time over the next few issues, starting today with:

Hasn’t the Bible been changed since it was written?

Let me start by saying why this is a tricky question to answer: we simply don’t have the original manuscripts. Barring an unlikely series of archaeological finds, we will never know with 100% certainty that the Bible we have today is the same as what was originally written.

What we can a lot more confident of is that the Bible’s text hasn’t changed greatly over history. To explain why, let’s think first about how a bible book was written, and we’ll take Luke’s gospel as an example because it’s author (Luke) tells us who he wrote it for (his sponsor, Theophilus) and why he wrote it: Theophilus had sponsored him to go to Israel to investigate all the stories about Jesus. So if you like Luke is the first investigative journalist!

So how did Luke’s work go global? Presumably after his research was complete, he sent his completed gospel manuscript to Theophilus, who found it so helpful, that he arranged for it to be copied and copied and copied so that all the churches in his area had access to it. And many of those copies were copied too…and it’s from all of those copies, spread over the 1900 years (or so) since the New Testament was completed, that the accusation of “Chinese whispers” arises.

So how can we test whether changes have been made? Well the obvious answer is also the right answer here: by comparing today’s Bible with Bibles from ancient history. And thankfully we don’t need a time machine to do that, just a trip to the British Library to see a document called the Codex Sinaiticus. Dated to between 330-360AD, it is the oldest complete manuscript we have of the Bible. And by comparing it with a modern Bible, we can be confident that the Bible hasn’t substantially changed since 350AD. The words written in ancient Greek then are the same (allowing for translation) as the words we have today. So that’s 1650 of the 1900 years of Chinese whispers wiped dealt with.

While you’re in the British Library, you could also go to see the Chester Beatty Papyrus. This is a collection of New Testament books dated to the end of the 2nd century. They also are the same as what we have today. So that’s 1800 of our 1900 years of Chinese whispers taken out of the equation.

A trip to the Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale in Cairo would enable you to see “Papyrus 98”, which is a portion of the book of Revelation – dated to around 150AD (1850/1900!)

And if you flew home via Manchester, and popped into the John Rylands Library, you could see “Papyrus 52”,a small fragment of the gospel of John, dated to 125AD (1875/1920).

And what those manuscripts show us is that we can be certain that chunks of the Bible has been copied pretty accurately for 1875 of the 1900 years (98.5%)  it’s been in existence.

However “pretty accurately” is not totally accurately. One of the features of the Codex Sinaiticus is that there are marks on it that show corrections being made. So how can we be certain that bits haven’t been altered?

Well answering this question involves a whole university discipline called textual criticism. Textual critics compare multiple copies of the same ancient documents in an attempt to work out where Chinese Whispers has gone on. And the more copies of the ancient document they have, the more confidence they have in its accuracy.

So let’s compare the Bible with another ancient book that no one accuses of Chinese whispers – Caesar’s history of The Gallic Wars (written around 50BC). We have ten full copies of it, the earliest of which dates to 900AD (so we know it hasn’t changed for 1150 of the 2170 years since it was written – ie 53%). But those ten copies are enough for the Textual Critics to declare the text reliable.

Let’s compare that with the Bible. We’ve already seen we have manuscripts going back for 98.5% of the Bible’s history. But how many manuscripts do we have? Well to date archaeologists have over 25,000 handwritten New Testament manuscripts (in a number of ancient languages). If 10 is enough for Caesar then surely 25,000 can give us confidence that the Bible we have today has not been subject to Chinese Whispers!

Bible historians are actually so confident about the accuracy of our modern Bibles, that they have no difficulties highlighting the few areas of the Bible where doubts do exist. For example, if you look at the end of Mark’s gospel in a modern bible you will see it begins with this note – “The most reliable early manuscripts and other ancient witnesses do not have Mark 16:9-20”. Reading an honest note like that isn’t a sign of doubt, but of confidence!

So has the Bible been changed since it was written? Not substantially  – and where historians think it has been – they tell us. But that doesn’t mean what was originally written was accurate – we’ll come back to that next time!

To find out more visit:

First published March 2017 in the Bridge Magazine.

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