ex-idaho

What are your five favorite contradictions and absurdities from the Good Book.

David Vestal

1) God condoning rape, either through the taking of virgin prisoners as spoils of war, or through instructions on how to properly kidnap and forcibly marry enemy women.

2) Infinite punishment for a finite offense.

3) A salvific mechanism that guaranteed that whole continents would be damned, due to nothing more than ignorance of the means of salvation.*

4) The very concept of a human-made, chock-full-o-errors book as the Word of God.

5) Each newborn throughout time being born guilty of Adam's sin.

6) The Flood.

7) The disagreement as to which books compose the Bible, and which texts within those books are later interpolations. Also, the fact that some books were regarded as canon in the first few centuries CE, but no longer are.


* My brother, a seminary student and teacher at a christian college, believes that the people who died post-resurrection on then-inaccessible continents were guilty of failing to respond to "general revelation"--i.e., the obvious existence of god as revealed through nature. In other words, he believes that there were tens of thousands of sincere people saved in the years just after the resurrection, all of whom just happened to live where they could be preached at.

Amaleq13

Here are five earlier threads with a similar OP (listed oldest to most recent):

What is the GREATEST Bible contradiction?

Your Favorite Bible Contradiction?

Contradictions and their common apologetics

biblical contradictions

Most Concrete Contradictions

Kilgore Trout

1. Adam and Eve are supposed to be incapable of knowing good from evil, yet are somehow guilty of a sin because they disobeyed god's orders. If they didn't know good from evil they could not possibly know obeying was any better than disobeying.

2. The NT misuses, mangles or downright lies about nearly every OT reference it makes. The Book of Hebrews is a huge pack of lies about the OT.

3. Jesus sez... Immediately after that he goes into a long tirade where he changes many of the laws that god gave the Israelites, even though it says in Deut. 4:2 not to add or take away from any commands.

4. The fact that jesus only "fulfilled" the "easy" requirements for the Messiah (such as riding into Jerusalem on a donkey). He never fulfills any of the "real" things the Messiah is supposed to do (lion lying down with the lamb and such). Plus he is a false prophet because he changes the law and he makes predictions that do not happen. Yet somehow billions of people think he is the Messiah.

5. Here is a great contradiction from jesus...6. There are lots examples in the synoptic gospels that contradict this. He explains parables to his disciples in secret because he wants their meanings kept secret from everyone else so that they may remain blind.

Casper

Jesus being offered the world by Satan, when it isn't his to give. Fascinates me.

richard2

I see this a lot, but it's not really a teaching of orthodox Christianity. Also, human beings are finite beings; therefore, it would be impossible for them to experience 'infinite' punishment. Only an infinite being could experience such a punishment. The correct teaching is that Hell is eternal punishment, not infinite.

"Eternal punishment for a finite offense."

This is the correct phrasing. It's still absurdly unjust, though.


richard

ficino

The donkey thing is one of my favorite contradictions. The other gospels have Jesus riding in on one donkey, but Matthew introduces a second donkey - he uses the dual in Greek to talk about the disciples putting clothes on two donkeys, and then Jesus sits on them - i.e. clothes (plural not dual), but the implication is that two donkeys - mother and foal - were prepared for seating. Why? Because Matthew, that old snarfy falsifier of fact to fit OT prophecy, misunderstands the structure of Hebrew poetry. He thinks the prophecy "on an ass, on the foal of an ass" foretells two asses rather than just serves as an instance of usual Hebrew doubling. The ass is "Matthew," whom we catch red-handed in the act of twisting the story to fit his (mis)understanding of an OT verse, as is his MO throughout that gospel. Christians who try to say that there were really two donkeys, but the other gospel writers just bothered to mention one, fail to convince, because the text of Matthew clearly says that the disciples put cloths on two donkeys for Jesus to sit on. Surely the disciples weren't that stupid. (Whether the event happened at all is another question.)

Baidarka

1- the 2 incompatible deaths of Judas ( Matthew and Acts). This includes 2 incompatible reasons for the naming the Field of Blood.
A repentant suicide in Matthew and an unrepentant villain struck down by a vengeful God in Acts.

2- Lot, the only good man in Sodom and Gomorrah, offers his daughters to a murderous mob of rapists. Lot the good man then gets drunk and rapes both his daughters (I know the Bible blames his daughters).

3- The Murder of Ananias and Saphira in Acts. This is morally indefensible no matter how you interpret it.


4- Phinehas' rightous murder of Zimri and Cozbi for miscegenation vs God's defense of Moses when his brother and sister accuse him of the same crime

5- How King David kills everyone who does his dirty work and how the Bible writers seem to believe his sincerity.

Clivedurdle

Please explain the difference!

Harry Bosch

Clearly the Flood is the greatest contradiction. If true, it would have impacted the entire world and wiped everyone out. There would be signs of it everywhere. Tiny local floods stick out like a sore thumb. And yet, there is not a single thread of evidence for it outside of the Bible. The Eqyptians didn't even notice the damn thing and they are relative neighbors to Israel!