Front matter
SCRIPTURES in QUESTION
Answers to Apparent Biblical Contradictions
R. Herbert
2020, Living Belief Books – an imprint of LivingWithFaith.org.
The text and cover image of this e-book are copyright. All rights reserved. ISBN 978-1-64826-223-4 This book is not to be sold. It is made available by the publisher without charge and free copies can be downloaded from: TacticalChristianity.org, LivingWithFaith.org, or FreeChristianEBooks.org. Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture quotations are from THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION® NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide. In a few cases, the ESV (English Standard Version ®), CSB (Christian Standard Bible ®), and NKJV (New King James Version ®) are cited, and these translations are also gratefully acknowledged.
About the Author: The author served as an ordained minister and church pastor for a number of years and holds an earned Ph.D. degree in the languages, cultures and archaeology of the ancient Near East and biblical world. He writes for a number of Christian publications and for the websites TacticalChristianity.org and LivingWithFaith.org. His other e-books are available for free download from those websites and from FreeChristianEBooks.org.
Cover: Base image © by rawpixel.
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION: Why You May Need this Book 1. Are They the Same Thing? 2. Does It Actually Say That?
3. Does It Really Mean That?
4. Did Something Change?
5. Is a Different Perspective Involved?
6. Do We Have All the Pieces?
7. Are We Missing Something?
CONCLUSION: Multiple Possibilities
APPENDIX: Does the New Testament Quote the Old Testament
Accurately?
ABOUT OUR BOOKS
INTRODUCTION: Why You May Need This Book If you are a Christian, you may need this book. Every year new and even well-established believers are unsettled and in some cases turned from the Christian faith by claims that the Bible contradicts itself and so it cannot be the inspired word of God.
Just this past year, news stories told how a noted pastor in the United States stepped away from the Church because he felt he could not explain some of these seeming difficulties, and as a result he felt his faith had been destroyed. If seasoned pastors can be troubled by such things, we cannot expect new Christians or those beginning to consider the Christian faith to simply ignore them, and we may all be at risk to some degree.
It is important to realize that the situation is not a product of our own modern scientific age. Those who have hated the word of God have always attempted to discredit it in any way they could, and a number of Christian leaders in the earliest centuries of the Church – scholars such as Eusebius, Chrysostom, and Augustine – made reference to claimed biblical contradictions and wrote down explanations for some of them. In fact, providing answers to the Bible's supposed contradictions is a small but important function of the Church.
So even if we feel comfortable in our own faith and don't worry about claims of biblical discrepancies, we owe it to others we might be able to help to learn how to answer this type of criticism of the Scriptures – and that is why we may all need a book such as this. An additional reason is that discovering there are answers to these questions can be not only encouraging, but also faith-strengthening for all of us.
As with any large collection of books we can find many examples of seeming disagreements if we look hard enough, and many efforts have been made to try to catalog and explain these seemingly contradictory verses of the Bible. Yet those who want to find discrepancies will always come up with new ones. The solution is not to try to compile explanations for every seeming contradiction. Rather, we should try to grasp the principles that will help us understand and answer the questions raised – principles that can be applied to other scriptural questions as well.
This is especially important because many readers of the Bible feel that they do not have the training or background information necessary to resolve seeming Bible discrepancies they may encounter or be asked about. Such readers need something that can help them without requiring hours (or years!) of study – something that can help them get past the apparent problem and get back to focusing on the message of the Bible.
That is why this book is different from any other that is currently available. Instead of trying to provide a long list of possible problems and answers to be studied and hopefully memorized, this book gives a few examples of seven principles that can be easily learned and applied to explain supposed problems in the Bible. The advantage of this approach, of course, is that it does not matter if the examples or the exact answers are remembered as long as the basic principles are kept in mind.
Before we begin this book, however, there is a central truth that must be stressed. Despite the fact that a great many seeming contradictions have been pointed out in the Bible, the good news is that for almost two thousand years Christian scholars have been providing answers to such assumed difficulties, and there is not a single supposed scriptural contradiction that cannot be answered. But in our own lives we may still need to learn the simple principles that can show how and why that is the case. That is what we hope to provide in the following pages.