Solving Alleged Bible Contradictions

There are a number of passages in Scripture which are cited by critics of the Bible as showing the the Bible has contradictions. As an example, the infidels.org website has a long list of alleged contradictions in the Bible.

They do this in an attempt to deny the Divine authorship of God's Word. If there are contradictions, then the author can't be Divine since God makes not mistakes.

Books with Solutions

There are a number of approaches to dealing with these sorts of contradictions. One older book that is excellent at dealing with most of these is Alleged Discrepancies of the Bible (about $8) by Haley. Most of the contradictions in this book turn out to be merely allegedly contradictory.

There are newer treatments of the subject, such as Norm Geisler's books, When Critics Ask, When Skeptics Ask and Baker Encyclopedia of Christian Apologetics (Editor).

In the touchy area Old Testament studies, there is Gleason Archer's A Survey of Old Testament Introduction.

All of these books are quite helpful when sorting out Bible difficulties. They have excellent Scripture indexes in the back.

Some General Principles

There are some general principles that help when approaching Bible difficulties.

1 - Sometimes the words of men contain errors in reporting. Just as there are contradictory battle reports or details of automobile accident scenes, so there are on occasion disagreements about details of a particular incident.

None of these sorts of contradictions shows that the event did not happen. The strength for Christians is that they show there is no collusion between the witnesses. The story was not cooked. The church transmitted down the Scriptures to us without any attempt to change or edit the story to remove these apparent contradictions.

Some of these alleged contradictions depend upon perspective of the person doing the reporting. Not all people see the same events. This does not affect the claim of Divine authorship for the Scriptures.

2- Two contains at least one. One accounts may state that there was an angel, such as at the tomb of Jesus. Another account may state that there were two angels. The list of women that went to the tomb may include three women in one account and four in another. In each of these, the same principle applies - two contains at least one.

3 - Often the contradiction is only apparent and looking at the greater context helps resolve the contradiction. The rules of exegesis all help in this area.

4 - The particular contradiction may be a problem for one understanding of the Bible but not for another.

Some Helpful Sites

Here is a helpful site to resolve Bible contradictions.

Suprisingly google.com is one great place to start in this task. Type in the scripture reference in quotes. Beware that you will get back both sides of an issue when you do this. Try both the shortened and longer version of Bible book names. For instance entering "Rom. 5:12 into google search engine will yield over 6000 pages which address the passage. Entering the longer "Romans 5:12" will produce over 8000 pages. The range of solutions will be Reformed, Universalist, Arminian and every other possible solutions including non-Christians who see this verse as contradictory.