Hi all,
Happy New Year!
There is a document called ‘194 CONTRADICTIONS, New Testament’ that can be found here: ** you do not have permission to see this link **
I am working my way through it (slowly!), but i wanted to see how well-known it is to this group, or if anyone has any suggestions about it.
Happy New Year!
I have looked over it in the past, and my general impression is that it takes “contradiction” pretty loosely, and the real difficulties it does identify it doesn’t always develop very clearly.
I suppose, if I were looking for discrepancies in the NT, it’s a place I might start, but I’d go in knowing that I will need to do my own work to sort through the list and sharpen them up.
If I were going to try to convince a fundamentalist that the NT isn’t inerrant (which isn’t the sort of thing I generally go out of my way to do), I would not just hand them that list. It has way too many things that they would immediately latch onto as not contradictory, and the result would likely be that they dismiss the whole thing as worthless or even as a bad-faith attack. I think it would be a lot more rhetorically effective to give two or three really strong cases really make them stop.
True story:
My wife and received a set of China dishes from my mom for our wedding 40 years ago to be used on holidays or special occasions. Yesterday my wife, looking at our China cabinet said, “We never use the China, perhaps we should clear space and donate it. I said “I thought we didn’t use it because it’s hard to get out of the cabinet display. Why don’t we move the other keepsakes in the display out of the way.”
She said, “No, the actual China is stored in the drawers below the display, you put the dishes there. The display contains only 3 dishes and is just for show.”
I looked closer at the display through the glass doors. “Holy mackerel, you’re right.” Then I said “I didn’t realize the drawers contained the actual set of dishes. I put the other dishes in the drawers?”
“Yep. And we stopped using the China because the dishes aren’t microwaveable.”
That statement triggered a memory.
“No,” I said. “You said the China wasn’t dishwasher safe and we didn’t want to spend time handwashing dishes on a holiday, so we stopped using them.”
She said “No, we stopped because they aren’t microwaveable.”
I said “When would we ever microwave a plate on a holiday? Isn’t the food warm when we serve it?”
The conversation went on for a while. One of our sons heard part of the conversation.
After my wife and I pass on, my son will be left to tell the story of the China. I wonder what his version will be considering my wife and I, primary sources, couldn’t get our story straight, he heard part of the conversation, and (Hopefully) another twenty years passed.
BDEhrman
FreedomBen
evgendob
Robert
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