In this post i linked to a list of 194 contradictions in the NT (it’s not mine, it’s been circulating on the internet for a while now).
Each ‘contradiction’ has the two accounts summarized in a brief sentence and their references in the NT, so it’s easy to see what the author of this document means and where to find the text too and compare the two.
I started going through them and i quickly realized that some of them are not really contradictions. Some are. But not all of them, i’d say not the majority of them.
The contradictions are easy to spot. One account says something that cannot be true if what the other account says is also true. So contradictions are two or more accounts or just small details of events that cannot all be true at the same time.
There are situations, however, that are not contradictory. These are accounts that offer more detail on an event, or just different material on the same situation, and it doesn’t mean that if account A is correct account B cannot be correct at the same time, they both can be correct.
An easy, made-up example: There was a neighborhood BBQ Grill. You didn’t make it this time. Your friend Jill tells you that they grilled hot dogs. Your friend Jack tells you that they grilled hamburgers. Both could happen, the accounts are not contradictory.
As a matter of fact, you now know more about the original event by having two accounts. You know that had you made it, you could have a hamburger, which you like much more than hot dogs. So that’s good information to know.
The two accounts would be contradictory if Jill said there where no hot dogs grilled and Jack said that they were. They cannot both be true, either they grilled hot dogs or not.
There are people very passionate about letting Jill talk for herself and Jack talk for himself, and not mix the two. I’m not saying it’s OK to put Jack’s words on Jill’s mouth, and you are not, you are considering both accounts for what they are. On the other hand, it’s not always beneficial separating the two accounts. Like in this case, that you wouldn’t know the other half of the menu!
I offered a method to weed through actual and not real contradictions in the post ** you do not have permission to see this link **. I’m not saying it’s the best method (if you have ideas on how to improve it please post them there).
Is there a scientific, commonly accepted way for biblical scholars to conclude if a contradiction is really a contradiction? I think that’s something we need as a research tool to help us categorize the 194 contradictions list into actual contradictions or not.
Whence your fascination with this question?
You earlier said you didn’t think the harmonized story that you suggested was actually true: I’m not examining here if it’s true or not. My personal opinion (not that it matters) is that is more likely that the authors tweaked their accounts to fit a prophesy
The only reason I can imagine that someone would be fixed on the question of whether they contradict one another, or whether someone can construct a hypothetical story (whether true or not doesn’t matter) is if one is, one way or another, interested in claims of scriptural inerrancy. That isn’t a question most Scripture scholars have much interest in.
So I’m really interested to hear what is motivating you in this line of questioning. If you think the most likely explanation for the differences between the accounts is that the authors molded their stories to fit different prophecies, why does it matter if there is some hypothetical series of events (true or not) that could technically reconcile them?
They don’t. It’s typically not a serious topic in the actual work of scholars exploring the meaning of texts or doing historical research about Jesus.
Yes this is more in the realm of apologetics and starts with the assumption that the Bible is inerrant in some sense and so these episodes have to be addressed. A scholar who looks at the two creation accounts in Genesis won’t get hung up on the “contradictions” because they’re more interested in the fact that these are two distinct textual sources. Resolving them in some way just misses the point altogether.
I put together direct links to the debate because it was a pain clicking through to find them all.
** you do not have permission to see this link **
** you do not have permission to see this link **
** you do not have permission to see this link **
** you do not have permission to see this link **
** you do not have permission to see this link **
** you do not have permission to see this link **
** you do not have permission to see this link **
** you do not have permission to see this link **
My summary of and thoughts on the debate organized according to the alleged contradictions Bart raised:
1: Did Jairus’s daughter expire before (Mt 9) or after (Mk 5) Jairus asked Jesus for a miracle? Was Jairus asking Jesus to cure her or to raise her from the dead?
Firth offers three solutions: His first is to suggest that “arti eteleutesen” in Matthew actually means, not that she has just died, but that she “just now was at the point of death”. Bart’s retort is that that isn’t what it means. I’ll gloss over the grammatical arguments simply noting that the conversation does go there and Bart runs circles around Firth. But I think they eventually reach an impasse: Both agree that teleutao can mean “to come to an end”; Firth isn’t just arguing about aspect and tense (which is what Bart fixed on); he is arguing that “to have come to an end” doesn’t necessarily mean “has died” it could mean, “has come to the time of death (without having actually died)”; Bart seems to be assuming that “to come to an end”–teleutao, used of a human–is simply synonymous with actually dying. I’m sorry that Bart didn’t address the lexical issue directly: is there any evidence of the verb being used to mean something like “come to one’s last hour (without actually expiring)”? I haven’t done the work to answer the question, but I sort of doubt there is (which is probably why it never occurred to Bart that this was what Firth was arguing), but it would have put paid to Firth’s argument if Bart had made that point and challenged Firth to produce an example of the word being used the way he wants to read it here.
His second response is that Matthew condensed the story, a practice common not only in Matthew but in ancient literature in general.
Bart’s response is on point: Yes, that is what happened–Matthew changed some details in the story for literary purposes. But that only explains why there is a contradiction; it doesn’t remove the contradiction.
Third, Firth suggests that Jairus was an emotional wreck and blurted out all sorts of things–“my daughter is about to die!” one moment and “my daughter just died” another moment. Thus, Matthew and Mark each accurately report one part of what Jairus said.
I don’t think Bart offered a very good response to this last point. The fact is that, in the two accounts, we only learn about the initial state of Jairus’s daughter from Jairus, so blaming any inconsistency on Jairus saves Matthew from contradicting Mark–Matthew doesn’t tell us in his own words whether she is alive or dead, he only tells us what Jairus said about her, so Matthew might have accurately recorded some of Jairus’s inaccurate and inconsistent words (and Mark recorded other of his inconsistent words). I think this was Firth’s strongest argument on this problem, but it still seems wildly improbable to me that a father would speak in a confused way about whether his daughter has died or is in the process of dying: It is one thing to come to someone in a panic asking him to cure your daughter while there is still time before she dies and another thing to ask someone to come raise her from the dead when he has the chance. It just doesn’t seem like the sort of detail a father asking for a miracle would speak about sloppily. (Of course there is also the issue of how would Matthew–who is clearly cribbing this story from Mark–have known that Jairus said the opposite of what Mark records him having said.)
Note that Firth’s responses to this problem are mutually exclusive: In the first, he insists that properly interpreted the Greek used by Matthew and by Mark both indicate that she is about to die but not yet dead. In the second response, he admits that the problem is in the Greek (i.e., in Matthew’s account, she is already dead at the start), but this was deliberate change on Matthew’s part (which somehow makes it not a contradiction). And finally, in the third, he again says the problem is in the Greek, but this time he blames it on Jairus’s inconsistent statements, not a deliberate choice by Matthew to condense the story.
Overall, this first point came off as a really strong one for Bart, despite my dinging him on a couple of points. Firth seemed like he was floundering–throwing all sorts of stuff at the wall to see what might stick.
2) The genealogies. “Who was Joseph’s father, grandfather, and great-grandfather, and so on –all the way back to King David? Was it Jacob, Mathan, and Eleazar … (Matthew 1:15-16)? Or was it Heli, Matthat, and Levi… (Luke 3:23-24)”
Firth’s response is a complicated arrangement: Joseph has one paternal grandmother but that grandmother married two men and had a son with each: thus in the generation before Joseph there were step-brothers who had different biological fathers. Then he appeals to Levirate marriage. One of those step-brothers marries Joseph’s mother, but dies childless, so his step-brother begets Joseph with his step-brother’s widow. Thus Joseph biologically comes from one of the step-brothers but legally he is the son of the other step-brother; and because they are step-brothers, their genealogies diverge all the way back.
Bart clearly didn’t grasp the convoluted scenario that Firth was laying out here. In his later response he objects: “If Heli’s blood-brother Jacob married Heli’s widow and they had a child Joseph, so that the child was sometimes referred to as Heli’s and sometime as Jacob’s – wouldn’t Heli and Joseph have the same father? And the same patrilineal line all the way back?” Avoiding that was the whole point of starting with step-brothers, NOT full blood-brothers. This was an unforced error on Bart’s part. And I will give it to Firth: it does seem like it would reconcile the accounts, even it if it is an unlikely scenario and unlikely that neither author would have hinted at the complicated family tree.
I’ll have to return to the final two points later.
BDEhrman
FreedomBen
evgendob
Robert