The Bible is full of inaccuracies and contradictions
Click here to listen to the sermon.
Notes
Christians see the Bible as our primary source for information concerning God and concerning what it means to live faithfully with him. We regard it as authoritative in what it teaches because:
Jesus did (John 5:39)
The Early Christians did (2 Peter 1:20-21, Romans 15:4)
The Bible claims this authority for itself (2 Timothy 3:15-17)
But isn't the Bible full of mistakes; doesn't science contradict so much of what it says?
The 66 books which make up our Bible encompass a wide variety of literary styles. Some are historical, and claim to be historically true. Others are poetry and thus express truth in a rather different way.
Some of the Biblical literature is parable or story, most obviously some of the stories which Jesus himself taught. This does not make them untrue (although they do not necessarily claim to be factual). Many would see the books of Job, Jonah and the early chapters of Genesis as falling into this category. It is thus very important to identify the purpose of specific Biblical books rather than simply the form.
The Bible claims to be authoritative in terms of what it teaches about salvation (2 Tim 3:15) that is about God and his activity. It does not claim to be a scientific textbook. There is a huge amount which lies outside its scope and we should not claim for it what it does not claim for itself.
Weren't the writers biased, though?
The writers certainly had a point to make and were selective as to what they included (John 20:31)... which is very different from suggesting that they were biased.
“The evangelists have the first great characteristic of honest witnesses: they mention facts which are, at first sight, damaging to their main contention.” (CS Lewis)
They clearly took their task seriously (Luke 1:1ff; 2 Peter 1:16-18)
They relied on eyewitness accounts
“It would be a miracle far more incredible than any recorded in the Gospels if a few simple men should in one generation have invented so powerful and appealing a personality, so lofty an ethic and so inspiring a vision of human brotherhood.” (Will Durant)
They wrote at a time when there were plenty of other eyewitnesses around, including some who were hostile.
“It can have been by no means as easy as some writers seem to think to invent words and deeds of Jesus in those early years, when so many of his disciples were about, who could remember what had and had not happened.” (Prof FF Bruce)
Archaeology has confirmed so much of what the Bible records and has not cast doubt on any major Biblical truth.
Hasn't the text of the Bible been meddled with over the last 2000 years?
Some see the process of Bible transmission rather like a gigantic game of Chinese whispers. What we are left with today is very different from what was first written down by the Biblical writers.
There are two questions which need to be asked in order to see how reliable our contemporary Bibles are:
How early, that is how close to the date of writing, are the manuscripts we have?
How many copies or fragments do we have of them?
 | ||||||||
|
Author
|
Work
|
Time of writing
|
Copies
|
Earliest manuscript
|
||||
| ||||||||
|
Josephus |
Jewish War |
AD 70 |
7 |
5th Century |
||||
| ||||||||
|
Tacitus |
Annals of Rome |
AD 80 |
2 |
15th Century |
||||
| ||||||||
|
Caesar |
Gallic War |
BC 54 |
9 |
9th Century |
||||
| ||||||||
|
Thucidydes |
Pelopenesian War |
BC 450 |
8 |
9th Century |
||||
| ||||||||
|
Various |
New Testament |
45-70 AD |
5365+ |
Late 1st Century |
||||
|
“We have a far better and more reliable text of the new Testament than of any other ancient work whatever, and the measure of uncertainty is really rather small… Anyone who reads the new Testament in any modern translation can feel confident that, although there may be uncertainties in detail, in almost everything of importance she is close indeed to the text of the New Testament books as they were originally written.” (Bishop Stephen Neill)
Isn't the God of the Old Testament entirely different from the God of the New?
The revelation of God and of his nature as presented in Scripture is progressive. The Old Testament presents broad brush strokes whilst the picture is more precise by the time we arrive in the New Testament era. Because God reveals himself in a specific cultural context he can only act in ways which will be understood by those people at that time.
Some final thoughts
The Bible is not primarily intended to give us disembodied information but to lead us into an encounter with God and to equip us for faithful living in fellowship with him. God is not an object to be speculated about but a person to be worshipped.
The proof of the pudding, when it comes to the reliability of the Bible, is in the eating. The Bible has an air of reliability about it, a 'ring of truth' to it. As we read it and allow it to affect us, we discover it to be reliable and effective in what it sets out to do. Read it as if it might just be true... it will change your life!
Ian Parkinson
May 2004
See also
Why doesn't God stop all the suffering in the world?
