Deus Ex

"How many contradictions and/or errors are in the Bible"

Just enough errors to convince me that the bible is a collection of the writings of men, and not a book authored by God.

bacht

How many contradictions and/or errors are in the Bible?


For the fate of the sons of men and the fate of beasts is the same; as one dies, so dies the other. They all have the same breath, and man has no advantage over the beasts; for all is vanity.
All go to one place; all are from the dust, and all turn to dust again.
Eccl 3


Lo! I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed,
in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed.
For this perishable nature must put on the imperishable, and this mortal nature must put on immortality.
When the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written: "Death is swallowed up in victory."
"O death, where is thy victory?
O death, where is thy sting?"
1 Cor 15


Is there a resurrection or afterlife? Sadduccees said no, Pharisees said yes

Equinox

Cogitans wrote:
Probably true. If that’s the case, the inerrantists are wrong, since any number will be larger than 0.

Deus Ex wrote:


Then you’ve found a lot fewer contradictions than I – only a small subset of those found (or even zero if other evidence is included) is enough to convince me.

In discussing any of these contradictions, inerrantists will show in a number of ways that they really, deep down, don’t believe that the Bible is the word of God. What they do think is the word of God is their own doctrine (whether it be from their pastor or from their own personal doctrine). Thus, they will freely add things to the text or ignore things as needed to make it seem inerrant (if inerrancy is part of their doctrine). If they really believed the Bible was the word of God, they would be outraged to find these problems, and work to discover who made the mistake of translation or copying or whatever, instead of making up convoluted and non-biblical explanations. For instance, here is cabio’s response to this contradiction:

cabio wrote:
The whole stories (from the CEV) are below.

In cabio’s Israel response above, he’s saying that it’s just the seasoned troops. Yet the Bible doesn’t say this, it says everyone who can serve in the army, or “people”, etc, depending on the translation. Cabio is adding something to the text. Or, if cabio says that we have to go back to only the original Hebrew – then God is too weak to ensure that the English Bibles are reliable?

In response to cabio’s Judah response – It doesn’t matter whether the counting was completed or not, since both report what Joab SAID to David. So, which number did Joab say to David? If the counting wasn’t complete, he would have said the smaller number. If the counting was complete, he would have said the larger number. If he said both (inerrantists love to conflate stories), then BOTH the 2 sam and 1 Cr accounts are incorrect, telling only a partial truth. If that were the case, then every verse in the Bible would have to have an asterisk, since any one of them could be incomplete, and lack a further sentence that changes the meaning anywhere.

Equinox
CEV 1Cr21:
2 sam 24:

Minimalist

So that's your source? Wikipedia???

Herod the Great had been dead for 10 years when P. Sulpicius Quirinius became governor of Syria. In a sense they were partial contemporaries since most of Quirinius' life overlapped Herod's but that is irrelevant. We know where Quirinius was and what he was doing while Herod was alive.... and it wasn't in Syria.

Even if you wish to stretch "Luke" to account for Herod Archelaus in Judaea, it still doesn't work. Archelaus was removed by Augustus and Judaea became a Roman praefecture, at their own behest as they had petitioned Augustus to remove Archelaus. Augustus granted their petition, exiled Archelaus and directed to Quirinius to take a census of the newly added territory. There is thus no overlap between Quirinius and Archelaus either.

You'd do well to read Richard Carrier's Date of the Nativity in Luke

http://www.infidels.org/library/mode...quirinius.html

which fortuitously is available right here.

BTW, if your boy was born in 6 AD it causes you some problems on the other end of the equation.

For the record, I reject the notion of a historical jesus. It's all silly mythology concocted and expanded much later. And I think I know a lot more about history than you do.

connick

The context isn't being ignored. In the Bible, God, the all-powerful, all-knowing, all-caring, creator, made everything. According to the Bible, if something exists then, goddidit. Evil exists so God made evil. If he thought the world was good and then it became bad then he is the only one to blame in the context of the Bible. If God created man then he incorporated "human evil" into them. If God thought everything was hunky-dory in Genesis 1 why did he then go and screw it all up? If you blame mankind for evil then you are claiming imperfection and evil in God's designs. Is that the case?

bacht

I believe the traditional answer is free-will: humans choose to do evil, starting with Adam and Eve

the book of Job struggles with the problem of evil (theodicy)

connick

According to the Bible, God is perfect and he created man. If evil exists then it was created by him. Positing free-will doesn't exonerate God. It's still a part of his creation. If God created all things and free-will exists, then God must have created it. The traditional answer falls flat on its face.

If God hates evil then why did he create it? If evil is part of God's creation why does he hate it? That's a pretty major contradiction if you ask me. I suppose the traditional response to that would be that he works in mysterious ways. Which, of course, is no argument at all.

Timetospend

The number is somewhere between zero (if you are a Bible believer) and infinity (if you are a critic with enough imagination). Of course, the better question might be along the lines of how many can be rigourously proved.

haitu

We only need 1 and there are at least 3 very good contradictions that no apologists can defend against well.

spamandham

This whole discussion about contradictions is misguided, as there is an underlying presumption that a lack of contradictions somehow implies the book is not the work of men - who are of course more than capable of writing internally consistent works.