02 // Isn't the Bible Full of Contradictions?
June 12, 2024 • Pastor Scott Hand
Episode Summary:
In this episode of "Dazed and Apologize," Pastor Scott Hand dives into the critical question: "Is the Bible reliable?" Pastor Hand unpacks common concerns about contradictions and corruption in the Bible, offering a thorough and scholarly defense of its authenticity and accuracy. He systematically explores how scholars determine the reliability of ancient texts using the criteria of manuscript copies and the time gap between original writings and their earliest existing copies.
Focusing on the textual criticism and historical context of various scripture passages, Pastor Hand reveals fascinating insights about the Bible's unmatched manuscript evidence compared to other ancient texts. He also addresses apparent contradictions with practical examples, emphasizing the importance of understanding literary genres and cultural contexts in biblical interpretation. This episode equips listeners with robust arguments and strategies for defending the Bible's reliability in everyday conversations.
Key Takeaways:
* **Manuscript Evidence:** The New Testament boasts 5,801 manuscripts, far surpassing other ancient texts like Homer's works and Caesar's Gaelic Wars in terms of documentary evidence.
* **Time Gap Analysis:** The gap between the original New Testament writings and the earliest surviving copies is only 30 to 60 years, providing strong grounds for their historical accuracy.
* **Contextual Relevance:** Apparent contradictions in the Bible often dissolve when considered in historical and cultural contexts.
* **Genres Matter:** Recognizing the genre of biblical passages (e.g., historical narrative, poetry, apocalyptic literature) is crucial for correct interpretation.
* **Common Sense in Scripture:** Simple, logical explanations can often resolve seemingly contradictory statements found in the Bible.
Notable Quotes:
1. "If we had the original documents, they would become idols. I think God is protecting us by not having these."
2. "The New Testament is head and shoulders above any other ancient document in terms of reliability and accuracy."
3. "There are no surviving autographs from any really ancient text of antiquity, whether it’s Caesar, Plato, or Homer."
4. "When you know the culture and context, many apparent contradictions in the Bible make sense."
5. "A little common sense goes a long way in resolving many supposed contradictions in the Bible."
Resources:
* There are no specific resources mentioned in this episode.
Dive into this enlightening episode of "Dazed and Apologize" to deepen your understanding of the Bible's reliability. Stay tuned for part two, where Pastor Scott will guide you on having impactful conversations about the Bible's infallibility in your day-to-day encounters.
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FULL TRANSCRIPT
0:00:10 - (Pastor Scott Hand): Welcome back to another episode of Dazed and Apologize, the podcast where we help you navigate culture's questions with faith and reason. Today we're going to tackle another really important question that you may have heard or maybe even had yourself, and it's about the Bible. Isn't the Bible full of contradictions? Isn't the Bible corrupted? What's really behind that question is, is the Bible reliable? Do you know you can trust the Bible?
0:00:36 - (Pastor Scott Hand): And so before we dive into that question too deeply, what we have to understand is we have no surviving original documents from the Bible. So old or New Testament, the actual parchment or, you know, papyrus or whatever that they wrote on David, whatever he wrote on Moses, Matthew, Paul, we have none of those original documents. They're called the autographs. We have none of them. And that may be surprising to some people. But on a personal note, I'm actually kind of glad that we don't. I think it's probably best that we don't, because if we did, America has a propensity for fame, for glamour, for the show.
0:01:12 - (Pastor Scott Hand): If we did, we would put these in a museum somewhere, and we would charge people a lot of money to come see them. And I think they would become idols. I think they would become things that people would worship. If we actually had some surviving originals, they would be a distraction from what we're actually called to do. And so I think maybe God is protecting us by actually not having these. But it really shouldn't come as a surprise, because these were ancient, ancient documents, and we have no surviving original documents. We have no autographs from any really ancient text of antiquity. Like you take Caesar, for example, his famous gaelic wars. We have no surviving documents from those Tacitus history. We have no surviving documents.
0:01:57 - (Pastor Scott Hand): Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, which we all had to read in school. We have no surviving autographs from that. Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles, none of those ancient texts. Do we have any surviving manuscripts. So what we have to do then, we have to ask ourselves, well, then, what criteria do we use? How do we check these copies, these modern translations? How do we check them for accuracy, to know how reliable are they? How accurate are they to the original? Well, there's two ways that we mainly do not we, there's two ways that scholars look at to determine the reliability and the accuracy of a modern text to an ancient text.
0:02:36 - (Pastor Scott Hand): And the first is, how many copies do we have? Because what would happen is when the original was around, people would make the copies, especially with the Bible, people would copy a letter from Paul, and you know, because they wanted to pass it around. They wanted other people to read it and to. And to be blessed by something that Paul said. Or they wanted to copy the stories from the Old Testament so they could read them to their families and pass them along to other churches. So make some copies.
0:03:01 - (Pastor Scott Hand): So how many copies do we have? That's the first thing that people ask, because the more copies you have, the more accurate you can be to the original. Let me explain it like this. Let's say that back in 2005, when my wife and I were dating. My wife's name is Christine. Back when we were dating in 2005, let's say I wrote her a love letter, and she loved it. She said, oh, scott, this is so sweet. I just love this letter.
0:03:29 - (Pastor Scott Hand): And so, for posterity's sake, she wanted to keep it. So she had two of her friends make a copy. So each of her friends made a copy. Well, let's say our house burns down and the original copy is destroyed. But 100 years later, somebody finds the two copies that Christine's friends wrote. And as they're reading them, they notice that there's a difference between the two. Let's say in one letter, my wife's name is spelled with a k.
0:03:55 - (Pastor Scott Hand): In the other letter is spelled with a ch. Well, with only two copies, how do you know which one's real? How do you know how my wife's name is actually spelled? If you only have two copies, you don't know. There's no way to tell which one is accurate. And. But. Okay, let's rewind the tape. Now go back to 2005. I write the love letter to Christine. She's. Oh, Scott, this is so great. And for posterity's sake, she wants to keep it. So let's say now she asks ten of her friends to make ten copies each.
0:04:21 - (Pastor Scott Hand): So now there's 100 copies of my love letter to my wife. Okay, so house burns down, original gets destroyed. Hundred years later, somebody finds all 100 copies of my love letter. And now, as they're reading them and looking over, they realize, wait a second. In these letters, Christine's name is spelled with a k. And in these, it's spelled with a ch. And then they noticed that. Okay, wait. All ten of these that were written by the same person. Let's say Emily.
0:04:48 - (Pastor Scott Hand): Let's say Emily's letters, all ten of hers, she spelled Christine's name with a k. The other 90 letters, her name is spelled with a ch. Well, in that case, it's easy to say Emily must have made a mistake. Emily didn't know how to spell her name, and she spelled it with a k. So it's easy at that point with the plethora of copies that you have to be able to accurately recreate the original. And so that's what we call textual criticism.
0:05:14 - (Pastor Scott Hand): That's the study of ancient documents and manuscripts and being able to compare them with each other to get an accurate recreation of the original. So the first thing that you look at, like I said, is number of copies. So when we look at these ancient texts that I mentioned, so Caesar's gaelic wars, we have around 250 copies. Sophocles, we have around 200. Tacitus, we have around 30. Plato, 200. Homer, we have around 1700. Okay, so these are these ancient texts that we talked about earlier.
0:05:50 - (Pastor Scott Hand): With the New Testament alone, we have 5801 manuscripts, copies of manuscripts. So we have an embarrassment of riches, so to speak, when it comes to the copies of the New Testament that we have to compare with each other to get an accurate recreation of the original. It literally dwarfs every other ancient text that we have. So after looking at the number of copies, the second thing we look at is the amount of time that passed between the original and the first copy.
0:06:21 - (Pastor Scott Hand): Okay, that is the second thing that we must look at. And this is just common sense, right? Because the longer you have between the copies, the more likely that the message will get lost. There'll be an error in between there. It's like the telephone game with kids. You ever played that, you know, where you. You have a bunch of kids, you put them in a circle. The first person whispers something to the first kid, he's got to whisper it to everybody around. And by the time it gets around, it's usually something completely different than the first thing that was said. Well, the more kids that you involve, the more time that passes, you're more likely to get something crazy. But let's say you only had one kid.
0:06:57 - (Pastor Scott Hand): I whisper something to him, he whispers something to the next person, bam, you're more likely to be accurate to what the original said. So the amount of time that passed is really important. The second reason that's important is because if not a lot of time has passed when you're recording history or historical events or people, people are still alive who witnessed the event. So let's say that, you know, ten years after Jesus died, they're writing down a copy of, you know, the gospel of Matthew, and someone says that Jesus was crucified upside down.
0:07:30 - (Pastor Scott Hand): Well, it's only ten years later. So, so many people were alive who witnessed his crucifixion. And they can raise their hand and say, whoa, whoa, whoa, I was there. That's not what happened. He wasn't crucified upside down. So the closer you get to the original, time wise, the more accurate it will be because you've got people who were actually eyewitnesses to the events. So going back to these ancient texts, the amount of time that has passed between the original and the first known copy of Homer is 400 years.
0:08:00 - (Pastor Scott Hand): Caesar, 900 years. Plato, 1300 years. But for the New Testament, the time gap between when the originals were written and the actual or the first copy we have is 30 to 60 years. So that's a lifetime. So the people who were alive, who witnessed Jesus, who heard him talk, who heard his teachings, who witnessed his miracles, they were alive when the first copies were written, so they could have easily verified what was being said.
0:08:30 - (Pastor Scott Hand): So I know that's a lot, but when you look at the two criteria, the amount of copies we have and the amount of time that has passed, the New Testament is head and shoulders above any of ancient document. It is by and large. I mean, by head and shoulders above it is the most ancient, it is the most accurate ancient text that we have. And here's what's funny. If you go to any mainstream university and you go to their history department, they're studying Caesar's gaelic wars, they're reading Tastus history, they're reading Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, and they're reading Plato and Aristotle. And the philosophy department, none of them are questioning the validity of those documents.
0:09:10 - (Pastor Scott Hand): None of them are questioning the accuracy of their interpretation. And yet, when it comes to the Bible, we have thousands of more documents in a far shorter time period between the original and the copy. And yet they doubt it. That is intellectually dishonest at worst and intellectually unfair at best. Okay? So now we've looked at the criteria for judging ancient, ancient texts, but now we got to get into these contradictions.
0:09:40 - (Pastor Scott Hand): You ever heard the question, isn't the Bible full of contradictions? Okay, well, the first thing is, no, it's not. The Bible is not full of contradictions. There are things in the Bible that we read that may at first glance or at face value, appear to be a contradiction, but they're not. They're apparent contradictions. And so what we're going to do over the next few minutes is we're going to. We're going to study and look at what you have to take into consideration when you're looking at the Bible and these apparent contradictions.
0:10:14 - (Pastor Scott Hand): The first thing you got to consider is history and context. Okay, history and context. So here's an example of an atheistic argument for a contradiction in the Bible. Second kings 24 eight and two chronicles 36 nine, they both record the same event. They're talking about King Jehoiakim and when he actually became a king. Now, in the earliest manuscripts of two kings, it says he became king when he was eight years old.
0:10:45 - (Pastor Scott Hand): In two chronicles, the early manuscript said he was 18 when he became king. And people get all upset. Oh, you should see the YouTube videos about this, the articles I've read. Oh, man, what a contradiction. How can you believe anything in the Bible? This is so bad. This is so bad. Well, there's two very simple explanations for this, and either one of them could be true. But when you know history and context, these make sense. So, first, it could have just been a copyist error.
0:11:15 - (Pastor Scott Hand): I mean, we cannot remove the human element from the story of the Bible in that through God's providence and the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, God used humans to author the Bible. Human beings took pen to paper or quill to parchment and actually wrote it down. And so, sure, it's perfectly reasonable to believe that a copyist made an error. The numbers eight and 18 are actually very similar in the hebrew text.
0:11:41 - (Pastor Scott Hand): So it literally could just be a simple mistake that was recognized and later corrected. If you look at a modern copy of the ESV, both of them have 18 in it. So the editors obviously thought it was simply just a copyist error. But here's the thing we're not hiding. We know we have all of these documents. They're on display in museums, and so we know we're not hiding anything. We can look at every textual variant, and we can compare every textual variant with other manuscripts to recreate the original.
0:12:15 - (Pastor Scott Hand): We're not trying to hide the fact that there's a discrepancy there and that there's an easy way to explain it. But the second way to explain it is by looking at the culture in the context of the Old Testament in two kings. When it says that he was eight years old when he became king, it could have easily meant that when he became co regent or co king with his father, this happened multiple times in scripture. David was.
0:12:44 - (Pastor Scott Hand): David appointed Solomon King while he was still king. That's a co regent in one kings, chapter one. And then when King Uzziah was afflicted with leprosy, his son Jotham became co regent with him in two Chronicles 26. So it simply could just be he was eight when he became co regent. He was 18 when he became the king all by himself. Very simple and easy explanation. So you have to know the culture, you have to know the history, but just a little bit of study helps you understand that that's not something to get all up in arms about.
0:13:21 - (Pastor Scott Hand): So second thing to consider is that the Bible was written in many different genres, right? You have historical narrative, you have poetry, you have epistles, you have biographical literature, you have apocalyptic literature. And all these types of literature factors in when you're doing interpretation. For example, one Peter five eight, Peter wrote, be sober minded, be watchful. Your adversary, the devil, prowls around like a lion, a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour.
0:13:50 - (Pastor Scott Hand): Does Peter mean that God is actually a lion? I mean that Satan is actually a lion, that that's what he actually is, and he's roaming around the earth as a lion? No, this is figurative language. And it's. You have to know that when you interpret it. But then later, revelation five five. One of the elders said to me, weep no more. Behold, the lion of the tribe of Judah, the root of David, has conquered, so he can open the scroll and its seven seals.
0:14:16 - (Pastor Scott Hand): Atheists go, wait, wait, wait. I thought Satan was a lion. Now you're saying Jesus is a lion. What a contradiction in the Bible. This is ridiculous. No, people, it's figurative language. So the genre and the intent of the author matters. If it's written figuratively, it needs to be interpreted figuratively. A third thing to deal with or a third thing to consider is simply common sense. Now, this one really bothers me. I was in my office and I'm doing this kind of research, and I just got so frustrated at the lack of common sense in some of these arguments.
0:14:53 - (Pastor Scott Hand): So one example that atheists and skeptics like to point out is in two Samuel 24 one, this is another apparent contradiction. Second, Samuel 24 one, it says that God told David to count the israelite army just to count them. But in first chronicles 21 one, it says that Satan told David to count the army. And like I said, again, folks get all mad. Oh, what a contradiction. The Bible is untrue, guys. A little common sense here can go a long way.
0:15:22 - (Pastor Scott Hand): One seminary professor likes to. He explained it like this. He told the story of his wife. She was driving. She went to Walgreens. Her minivan broke down outside of Walgreens. And so she called her husband. He drove his little Toyota Corolla to Walgreens to meet her. They swapped the keys. He found out it was a battery. He walked over to autozone. Got a new battery, went over, had it installed, and he was able to drive home. Well, because of that, he missed a meeting at the seminary.
0:15:55 - (Pastor Scott Hand): And when he went back the next day, his colleague said, hey, why'd you miss the meeting? And he said, well, my car broke down. Okay? So then later, his wife also said to someone, yeah, my van broke down. So if you were to read that, if someone were to write all that down in a historical record, and then hundred years later, they were to look at it, they'd go, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. This must be a contradiction.
0:16:18 - (Pastor Scott Hand): He said it was his car, but it was really her car. He said car. She said minivan. Oh, and then they throw the whole thing out because it's full of contradictions. No. A little common sense goes a long way. We often, in the english language, don't refer to a car specifically. I may have a truck, but I don't say a Ford F 150 or. Or a Chevrolet Silverado. I just say my truck often. I may say my car when I'm referring to a truck or when I'm referring to a van.
0:16:46 - (Pastor Scott Hand): And my name may be on the title, but my wife drives it, so I say her car, or I could say my car. They're both accurate. And often in a. In a marriage relationship, what's hers is mine, and what's mine is hers. So there is no contradiction whatsoever if you simply apply a little bit of common sense. Okay, so we're gonna. Actually gonna pause right here. That was part one of. Is the Bible reliable? And in part one, all I was seeking to do was to explain some of the details to teach you guys a little bit about the reliability of the Bible, to strengthen your faith so that you can be more confident as you think about the Bible and as you live as a believer, to follow the Lord. And in part two, we're going to dive into how you have a conversation with somebody. So you're at a coffee shop, you're at work. Someone asks you a question about the reliability of the Bible.
0:17:39 - (Pastor Scott Hand): Isn't it full of contradictions? We want to dive in a little bit and help you understand how to have a conversation with love and grace, but that can hopefully be used of God to help someone understand that the Bible is the inerrant, infallible, authoritative word of God, and it ought to be proclaimed and it ought to be obeyed. Thanks for watching. Hope you tune in next time.
