Doesn't the Bible contradict itself?

1. 1

   The rule, in one sentence

   Two statements contradict when both cannot be true at the same time in the same sense. Anything less than that is a difference.

   One account says the women found the tomb empty at dawn; another says while it was still dark. That is a difference — dawn and dark overlap, and people describe the same hour both ways.

   One account says Jesus died and stayed dead; another says he rose. That would be a contradiction. There is nothing like that in the Bible, which is why nobody argues about it.

   Almost every case you will meet lives in the space between those two, and the whole skill is learning to tell where in that space it sits.

2. 2

   Harmonization is a real historical tool — and it can be abused

   Historians harmonize sources constantly, and not only religious ones. Two Roman writers give different casualty numbers for a battle; a historian asks whether one counted only citizens, whether one included the wounded, whether one is copying a rounded figure from a monument. That is harmonization, and it is ordinary work.

   It becomes abuse when it has no limits. The sixteenth-century harmonist Andreas Osiander was willing to multiply events as often as the details required — if two accounts of a similar episode would not line up, he proposed that the episode simply happened twice. Any two texts can be reconciled that way, which is exactly the problem.

   So here is a test you can apply yourself. A good harmonization is a claim about history that costs something: it has to be independently plausible, it has to explain why the writer put it that way, and it has to be the kind of thing that could turn out to be wrong. A bad one is invented backwards from the need for an answer and could never be checked.

   Augustine did this well in the fourth century, in The Harmony of the Gospels. He argued that the evangelists preserved the substance while varying the order and the words, and that a reader who demands identical wording is demanding something the writers never claimed to be giving.

   Use that test on everything below, including the answers this page prefers.

   • “He writes this way in all his letters, speaking in them about such matters. Some parts of his letters are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the rest of the Scriptures, to their own destruction.”

     2 Pet 3:16 — wherein are some things hard to be understood, which the ignorant and unstedfast wrest, as they do also the other scriptures→

3. 3

   The numbers in Kings and Chronicles

   Start with the cleanest example. Second Kings says Jehoiachin was eighteen when he began to reign. Second Chronicles says eight. Both cannot be right.

   There are others in the same family. One account gives Ahaziah's age at accession as twenty-two, the parallel gives forty-two. One gives Solomon's stalls as forty thousand, the parallel as four thousand. One counts the chariots of the Syrians in the hundreds, the parallel in the thousands.

   Notice the shape of the errors. They are always numbers, they are always in parallel accounts, and the two figures are usually related in a way that looks mechanical — a digit off, a factor of ten, a decade dropped.

   Why numbers, specifically? Because numbers are the one kind of content a copyist cannot repair from context. If a scribe miscopies a word in a sentence, the sentence goes strange and the next scribe notices. If he miscopies a number, the text still reads perfectly. Nothing in the sentence objects. So the slip survives, gets copied again, and travels.

   There is a further proposal about how such slips started, and it should be labeled as a proposal. The biblical text as we have it spells numbers out in words. But administrative documents in the same world — the Samaria and Arad ostraca, the later Elephantine papyri — used a shorthand notation of strokes and symbols for quantities. If some of the records behind Kings and Chronicles came from archives written that way, a smudged or worn stroke would produce exactly the family of differences we find. That is a plausible mechanism, not a proven one.

   What this case does not do is threaten anything anyone believes. No doctrine hangs on whether Jehoiachin was eight or eighteen, and the honest description is not that the Bible contradicts itself here but that a copyist's hand slipped and we can still see where.

   • “Jehoiachin was eighteen years old when he became king, and he reigned in Jerusalem three months. His mother’s name was Nehushta daughter of Elnathan; she was from Jerusalem.”

     2 Kgs 24:8 — Jehoiachin was eighteen years old when he began to reign; and he reigned in Jerusalem three months→

   • “Jehoiachin was eighteen years old when he became king, and he reigned in Jerusalem three months and ten days. And he did evil in the sight of the LORD.”

     2 Chr 36:9 — Jehoiachin was eight years old when he began to reign; and he reigned three months and ten days in Jerusalem→

4. 4

   The four accounts of the empty tomb

   This is the case people bring up most, and it deserves the full treatment rather than a shrug.

   Lay the differences out honestly. Mark names three women and describes a young man in white sitting inside the tomb. Matthew names two and describes an angel who rolls the stone back and sits on it. Luke names several, and describes two men in dazzling clothing who stood by them. John has Mary Magdalene alone at the tomb — and then has her say we know not where they have laid him, a plural that quietly implies she was not by herself.

   So: how many women, how many messengers, sitting or standing.

   Now the historical question. What did an ancient writer think he was doing when he wrote a life? Plutarch is the standard comparison because he wrote overlapping biographies of the same generation of Romans, which lets us watch him describe one event more than once. He compresses long sequences into single scenes, transfers a saying or an action from one participant to another, changes the order for effect, and leaves out anyone who does not serve the story — all inside accounts he plainly believes are true. This was not deception. It was how the form worked, and it was taught that way in the schools.

   Set the tomb accounts against that standard and they stop looking odd. A writer naming two of the women is not denying there were three; a writer who mentions the angel who spoke is not denying a second was present; sitting and standing are the same figure at two moments.

   Then there is a second observation, and it is worth having but worth limiting. Testimony that has been coordinated tends to match. Testimony from independent witnesses tends to agree on the center and scatter at the edges — which is exactly what these accounts do. All four have the tomb empty, all four have women finding it first, and they vary on counts and postures.

   Here is the limit, and it is a real one. Divergent details do not always mean independence — sometimes they mean somebody is wrong. There is a story in the Apocrypha, in Susanna, where two accusers are caught precisely because their details differ. Differences are consistent with independent testimony; they do not by themselves prove it, and any page that treats them as proof is overselling.

5. 5

   The two genealogies of Jesus

   Matthew traces Jesus through David's son Solomon and ends with Jacob begat Joseph. Luke runs the other direction and has Joseph as the son of Heli, coming down through David's son Nathan.

   Two different fathers for Joseph, and two different royal lines. This is a real difficulty, and it has been felt from the beginning.

   Three proposals have carried the discussion. They are printed here as proposals, because that is what they are.

   First, that Luke gives Mary's line — that Heli is Mary's father, and Joseph is called his son in the sense of son-in-law. This is the explanation most people hear today. Its strength is that Luke has already told us Joseph was only supposed to be the father; its weakness is that Luke does not say Mary anywhere in the list, and the reader has to supply her.

   Second, that Matthew is giving the legal succession to the throne — who inherits the crown — while Luke gives the actual physical descent. Two lists answering two different questions would look exactly like this.

   Third, the oldest recorded answer, from Julius Africanus in the third century and preserved by Eusebius: a levirate marriage. Under the law, a man who died childless had his brother raise up a son in his name, so one child could have a legal father and a biological father — and Africanus argued that Jacob and Heli were related in just that way.

   None of the three is proven, and a reader should not be told otherwise. What can be said is that Matthew is openly working as an artist, not a registrar: he counts his own list into three sets of fourteen and skips generations to make them come out. A document that stylized was never claiming to be a complete descent chart, and reading it as one creates a problem its author would not have recognized.

   • “and Jacob the father of Joseph, the husband of Mary, of whom was born Jesus, who is called Christ.”

     Mat 1:16 — and Jacob begat Joseph the husband of Mary, of whom was born Jesus, who is called Christ→

   • “Jesus Himself was about thirty years old when He began His ministry. He was regarded as the son of Joseph, the son of Heli,”

     Luk 3:23 — Jesus himself... being the son (as was supposed) of Joseph, the son of Heli→

   • “In all, then, there were fourteen generations from Abraham to David, fourteen from David to the exile to Babylon, and fourteen from the exile to the Christ.”

     Mat 1:17 — So all the generations from Abraham unto David are fourteen generations→

6. 6

   How Judas died

   Matthew says he threw the money into the sanctuary, went out, and hanged himself; the priests, unwilling to put blood money in the treasury, used it to buy the potter's field for burying strangers.

   Acts says he obtained a field with the reward of his iniquity, and that falling headlong he burst open in the middle.

   Two apparent conflicts: the manner of death, and who bought the field.

   The usual reading of the first is that both happened — a body left hanging on a slope or a tree gives way, and the fall does the rest. It is not a strained suggestion, and Luke, whose vocabulary elsewhere is unusually medical, describes the aftermath rather than the act. But be honest about its status: it is a plausible reconstruction, not something the texts state.

   The second is easier, and it is ordinary language. Buying a field with a man's money, in his name, and burying him in it, is routinely described as that man obtaining the field — we still speak that way about estates. Matthew tells you whose hands moved; Acts tells you whose money it was.

   Step back and see how much the two agree on: the betrayal, the thirty pieces, the money refused and returned, a field bought with it, the field's name as the field of blood, and Judas dead by his own hand. Two writers who never coordinated agree on the whole substance and differ on the physical detail. That is a normal shape for independent reports, and it is a long way from a contradiction.

   • “So Judas threw the silver into the temple and left. Then he went away and hanged himself.”

     Mat 27:5 — And he cast down the pieces of silver into the sanctuary, and departed; and he went away and hanged himself→

   • “(Now with the reward for his wickedness Judas bought a field; there he fell headlong and burst open in the middle, and all his intestines spilled out.”

     Act 1:18 — Now this man obtained a field with the reward of his iniquity; and falling headlong, he burst asunder in the midst→

7. 7

   The census of Quirinius — a difficulty that is still open

   Luke dates the birth of Jesus to a registration made when Quirinius was governor of Syria. Luke also places the birth in the days of Herod the Great.

   The problem is that Josephus places Quirinius's governorship of Syria — and the census of Judea that came with it — after Herod's son Archelaus was removed and Judea came under direct Roman administration, some ten years after Herod's death. That census was memorable: it set off the revolt of Judas the Galilean, which Acts itself mentions.

   So Luke appears to date one event by another that came a decade later. This is a genuine difficulty. It is not a trick question, and it has not been solved.

   The proposals, fairly stated. One holds that Quirinius held an earlier command in the region before his famous governorship, so that Luke is dating by a first registration during that earlier service. A fragmentary Latin inscription describing an unnamed official's second term in the East has often been pressed into this argument; the trouble is that it does not name him, and specialists disagree about whether it can be his at all.

   A second proposal works on the Greek. The word Luke uses can carry the sense of former or before, and some read the line as this registration was before Quirinius was governor of Syria. The grammar is possible to construct and awkward to defend, and most translators have not gone there.

   A third holds that a long registration process began earlier and was completed under Quirinius, and that Luke is naming the official under whom it concluded.

   None of these commands the field, and this page is not going to pretend one does. What can be said fairly is narrower: Luke is demonstrably careful elsewhere about titles and jurisdictions that we can check, which is a reason to keep the question open rather than to close it against him — and it is not a reason to call the problem answered.

   • “This was the first census to take place while Quirinius was governor of Syria.”

     Luk 2:2 — This was the first enrolment made when Quirinius was governor of Syria→

Each objection below is stated the way the people who hold it state it. If you hold one of these and think it is put unfairly here, that is a failure on our part — tell us.