Steven McClellan’s review of The Bible: God’s Word or Man’s?, as put out by the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania.
Chapter 7 - Does the Bible Contradict Itself?
Independent witnesses - Okay, but keep in mind that witnesses can be wrong, especially when traumatic and/or life-changing experiences are involved.
Read the Context - Regarding the faith vs. works dilemma cited, still, if faith is completely valueless without works, then it follows that works are required to have your faith be worth anything. If it’s not worth anything, then it certainly can’t save you, as the ability to save would be a very large value to possess. So, faith without works can’t save you, but faith can. Therefore, it follows that the only thing that can save you is faith accompanied by works. If faith has to be accompanied by works to be of any use, then one’s salvation must owe itself to works as well as faith, so Paul’s statement must be false. The only other option is that the book is incorrect in its statement that “dead” faith is “valueless”, and that even “dead” faith can save a person. If that’s the case, then James’s statement has no effective meaning (since dead faith is just as able to save as non-dead faith), and I would expect much more from a book claiming to be God’s word.
Different Viewpoints - No real problems on the points mentioned, but while we’re on the topic of Genesis 2, what about verse 17, where God tells Adam that if he eats from the tree of knowledge, he’ll die that day. Later on, an evil snake comes in and tells him and his main squeeze that if they eat from the tree of knowledge, they’ll gain knowledge. So, the two decide to munch out. And what happens? (Gasp!) They gain knowledge. (For those of you now scoring at home, that’s Evil Snake 1, God 0.) As an aside, that is the first outright lie mentioned in the Bible. And who told it? The main man himself. It’s still early, but he’s sure scored no Brownie points with me so far.
“Discrepancies” Do Not Have To be Contradictions - While the first story given may have been entirely accurate, another car accident is a MAJOR detail to just be carelessly omitting. I’d be rather wary of anyone who gave a story that misleading. If similar instances are in the Bible, you then have a new problem—incomplete, misleading messages. Still not something I’d be bragging about in a supposedly flawless book.
Read the Account Carefully - All of the accounts of Jerusalem ARE, at the very least, confusing. If they were only talking about half of the city, it might help if they actually MENTIONED that they were only talking about half of the city. You know, when the technicians at Boeing Aircraft Company release a new training manual, it gets dispatched to thousands of engineers, and each one of them immediately knows what it’s saying. With the Bible, you have to pick out ONE of many possible explanations just to avoid the thing contradicting with itself. Why is this? Because the technicians at Boeing are better writers than the people who authored the “perfect” Bible.
Proof of Independence - Oh my, where do I begin?
“Often [an apparent inconsistency] is merely a case of lack of complete information… [I]f [the Bible] were to give us every detail about every event mentioned, it would be a huge, unwieldy library, rather than the handy, easy-to-carry volume that we have today.” Okay, if you want to have a convenient volume with just the most important stuff to carry around with you, that’s fine. Firstly, you don’t even have that. 1 Timothy 1:4 states that one shouldn’t give heed to fables and endless genealogies. Genesis 10 and 1 Chronicles 1 are two examples of things which the Bible itself says you should ignore (endless genealogies), and according to Roget’s Interactive Thesaurus, First Edition, fable and parable are synonymous. So, get rid of the genealogies (some of which are contradictory, anyway) and Jesus’ parables, and let’s throw in some more details about, say, the Resurrection (a rather important Biblical claim, if I do say so myself). Now you have a volume of about the same size with more details about what could be its most important event. Wait a minute, I just found a way to improve on God’s perfect Bible! I must be smarter than he is! Secondly, even if you want a single, easy-to-tote book, does that mean your desires are more important than those of us who’d like to see more detail? If God were treating everyone equally (as he claims to do), he’d accommodate both types, and we’d find the Bible in a home encyclopedia format as well as the portable version.
“[The Bible] contains enough information to enable us to recognize it as more than merely a human work.” Really? Single humans have written books longer (and much more comprehensible). It’s a major claim to say that well more than three dozen humans couldn’t assemble such a work, and before I believe it, I’d like to see at least a shred of evidence for this unsubstantiated claim.
“Any variations it contains prove that the writers were truly independent witnesses.” Or possessing a failing memory (as the gospels were written about half a century after the “fact”). Or well-meaning individuals erroneously passing down urban legends (which contain similarly-varying stories that never even happened). Or, writers of fiction (like Homer, whose Odyssey was taken as religious text by ancient Greeks). Or flat out liars and frauds.
“The Bible provides enough knowledge to fill our spiritual need.” So what you’re saying is that humans, by their very nature, possess a spiritual void that needs to be filled somehow. Sounds like a perfect excuse to write a book of lies that preys on just that human need (not to mention that the Apostles’ letters brought in tidy donations for first-century churches). It seems that men would have rather lucrative reasons to write fraudulent scriptures and pass them off as God’s.
My conclusion - The Skeptic’s Annotated Bible lists 316 distinct “apparent contradictions” within the Bible. (They are listed at http://www.skepticsannotatedbible.com/contradictions.html.) You can either try and squirm your way out of all fifteen score and sixteen (and any more that are discovered in the future), or you can realize that the Bible was written by a combination of the types of people I’ve listed in #3, above. The Principle of Parsimony states that one should always choose the simplest explanation of a phenomenon, the one that requires the fewest leaps of logic. Which one is that? I’ll leave you to decide for yourself.
