Like the Atheist’s position, then, the Christian apologist’s position also does little to further a conversation about the texts of the Bible themselves, their messages, and the competing beliefs and worldviews of their authors. Its cover, “the Holy Bible,” functions to prescribe a centuries-later understanding of these texts, and often at the expense of understanding the texts themselves and on the terms of their once individual authors and the historical and literary contexts to which they originally belonged. The old adage “You can’t judge a book by its cover” is no where more true than when it comes to speaking about the Bible. In the apologist’s paradigm, the meaning of these texts are now carried by this collection’s title or what is implied in that title, “the Holy Book,” and not by the competing messages, agendas, and belief systems of its various authors. This is a far cry from actually knowing, understanding, and even defending the actual beliefs and competing messages of the individual authors of the Bible’s once independent texts. In other words, they seek to defend the ideas inherent in a label that by its very nature imposes its own interpretive framework and theological understanding onto this collection of ancient texts based on the beliefs and perceptions of a reading community that lived centuries after these texts were written. But what this often boils down to is defending a particular belief about the Bible or more generally what the label “the Holy Bible” has come to mean or imply on a personal and/or communal level to these individuals. In general, they perceive their mission as one of “defending” the Bible. ![]() On the other side of this public debate are the Christian apologists. Although often impressionable, these lists do little to foster a conversation about the Bible’s texts, nor do they help remedy the increasingly systemic problem of biblical illiteracy currently sweeping across our country. While atheists are generally correct in claiming that the Bible does in fact contain numerous contradictions, from minute differences in narrative details to competing theological and ideological agendas, they often present these contradictions in a shallow and belittling manner-an empty list devoid of substance with little to no real knowledge of the texts themselves, their authors, audiences, and the historical and literary circumstances that produced them. Yet ironically, and most unfortunately, Contradictions in the Bible is a topic generally and almost exclusively treated in the public arena by two opposing camps, both of whom are non-experts in the field: Atheists and Christian apologists. ![]() In other words, biblical scholars have known and written about the Bible’s Contradictions for centuries now-what has traditionally been labeled as source-critical scholarship, that is the study of the Bible’s numerous, and often competing, textual traditions! Thus, this website’s primary aim is to reclaim the topic of Bible Contradictions for its proper field of study-biblical scholarship. ![]() In January 2013 I started posting 1 contradiction a day, with the aim of working through the entire Bible! I have unfortunately lost that habit, and to date have merely gone through 4 books of the Bible and am presently posting contradictions for the book of Numbers.ĭespite its provocative and even misleading title, “Contradictions in the Bible” is a website devoted to bringing biblical scholarship to the public, what experts in the field now know about the Bible’s various textual traditions, the historical and literary contexts that produced these texts, how they came to be assembled together, and even the competing aims and agendas of their diverse authors. And although formally trained in the New Testament and early Christianity (Ph.D.), I have become increasingly interested in the compositional history of the Hebrew Bible, especially the Pentateuch, for going on a decade now. Welcome to ! I am a biblical scholar and author.
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