On the above page, Greater-Bible Theologian, I said something to the effect that there are contradictions in the Bible. Here is one of those statements that I made:
“It is very easy to find a place in the Bible that those believers SAY that they believe in, yet there are other places in the Bible that appear to be contradictory.
You apparently disagree with me. That is OK with me. I can show you some of those errors if you really want. But, I learned long ago not to tamper with the beliefs of other people. If you are a person whose entire faith is based on a Bible that has no errors, I do not want to go any further with this discussion. I say that because I do not want to destroy the foundation for your belief system.
I think it is better to have SOME sort of a faith in the Word of God than to reject it because there might be some kind of error in there. So I do not want to undermine your faith.
IF you DO NOT want to know some of the reasons that I made the comment which indicates the Bible is not without error, close this tab and return to the earlier page that caused you to come here.
BUT, if your faith is NOT based on whether you believe that the Word of God is infallible, read on. There is very good evidence that the Bible, as a whole is worthy of your faith in SPITE of minor inconsistencies .
Personally, my faith is not degraded when I find an error in the Bible. I have learned that the Bible is very dependable for guidance in living a righteous life. But, there are Bible inconsistencies, if not with the actual wording, then with how the words are understood by many believers.
To me, there are several very real reasons that we do not understand some Bible teachings. I will now show you just two of those reasons:
1. The words in the Bible were hand-copied time after time in the days before the printing press was invented. Over thousands of years, many, many scribes devoted their lives to preserve the scriptures by hand-copying the text from one old parchment or scroll to a new one. Much effort was given to produce a ‘perfect’ copy, but sometimes, portions of the older text (the one being copied) were changed slightly with words added or omitted. Sometimes the copyist did not understand the original meaning of some of the words and decided the text really meant something just a shade different and used similar, but somewhat different words to convey what he thought was really being meant. Scholars have found evidence of each of these kinds of errors as well as other copying problems.
2. Each book of the Bible was originally written in one of three languages: Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek. Whenever they found new faithful Christians who spoke a different language, the Christian missionaries translated the written word as best they could. That means the Word was changed again. Most of the Old Testament was written in Hebrew, but the book of Esther, for example was written in Aramaic. Esther was a Jewess who spoke Aramaic and Esther’s story is about a group of Jews that did not return to the Promised Land following the Babylonian captivity–an era of roughly 70 years. The story of Esther was translated from Aramaic into Hebrew. Most probably, Aramaic was the language in which some of the New Testament was most probably originally written because the people of Jesus’ day in Jerusalem, were speaking Aramaic and not Hebrew–this was a hold-over from that same Babylonian captivity that ended roughly 500 years before the time of Jesus. Now Aramaic and Hebrew are closely related, but there are significant differences that can lead to translation problems if one is not fully conversant with both languages.
Our oldest manuscripts that we have from the New Testament days were written in Greek and thus, at least some of the New Testament books were translated from Aramaic into Greek. The writers in the first century AD were mostly Aramaic-speaking Jews (take Matthew, for instance). At present, we have none of the ORIGINAL manuscripts in Aramaic, so somebody translated the materials that they held to be sacred scripture, into Greek because most of the new non-Jewish (Gentile) Christians, spoke Greek.
The earliest Old Testament translation was the Greek Septuaguint. After Alexander the Great’s death, one of his chief generals was Ptolomy who became the ruler of Egypt. Many of the Jews no longer spoke Hebrew and wanted a translation into their common Greek language and Ptolomy comissioned a group of Hebrew scholars to translate the first five books of the Bible (the Pentateuch) into Greek for those non-Hebrew speaking Jews. In the cited reference to the Septuiguint (sometimes abbreviated as LXX, the Roman numeral for the number 70), we find the following quotation regarding difficulty of translation of the Hebrew words.
“The Septuagint is also useful for elucidating pre-Masoretic Hebrew: many proper nouns are spelled out with Greek vowels in the LXX, while contemporary Hebrew texts lacked vowel pointing.[22] One must, however, evaluate such evidence with caution since it is extremely unlikely that all ancient Hebrew sounds had precise Greek equivalents.”
One of the first translations of the New Testament Bible into another language (from the Greek) was the Latin Vulgate, which was written in Latin, but prepared from the Greek versions of the New Testament and from the Jewish (Hebrew) tanakh but that was in the late 4th century AD. A revision of the Vulgate became the Latin language Bible of Catholicism.
It is notoriously difficult to perfectly translate from one language to the other and carry the true meaning into the second language. To perfectly translate all areas of the Bible into all other languages is simply not possible. There is an example of this problem that remains with us today, in the book of Matthew 5:22 (King James Version), where it says:
22But I say unto you, That whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment: and whosoever shall say to his brother, Raca, shall be in danger of the council: but whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of hell fire.
The word ‘raca‘ comes from the Aramaic language which Matthew most probably using when he wrote the Gospel of Matthew. But to us today, we do not recognize what ‘raca’ means in English. That was most likely the situation with the King James translators who did not know how to translate ‘raca’ so they inserted the Aramaic word without translation. The Aramenian translator and scholar George Lamsa, informed the English-speaking world that ‘raca’ meant ‘to spit,’ Lamsa said that spitting on someone in their culture, was a terrible insult which could result in the offender being in ‘danger of council,’ i.e., taken before the Sanhedron, the same Jewish religious court that tried Jesus prior to his crucifixion. To this day, most English translations of that verse use the (to us) meaningless word, ‘raca.’
3. There were serious problems with determining just what books of the Bible were ‘canonical,’ that is, which were truly scripture and which were simply stories. The Septuiguint contained books that were not retained by the Jewish rabbis who determined the canonicity of the currently known books of the Old Testament (near the end of the first century AD). A similar situation in the New Testament was resolved by the Council of Nicea in the 4th century AD, where the content of our current New Testament was pretty well settled. In fact, however, the decision of what REALLY was scripture, was not authoritatively decided until the Council of Trullo in 692 AD for the Catholic Church. Both of these decisions were the consequence of much argument and disputation. In both situations, the decision-making body made a conclusion that the Christian community has had to live with–the 66 book Bible of today.
A Wikipedia article on the New Testament canon gives some insight as to the problems and debate as to what should be genuinely regarded as being scripture:
“Pope Damasus’s commissioning of the Latin Vulgate edition of the Bible, c. 383, was instrumental in the fixation of the canon in the West.[18] Pope Damasus I is often considered to be the father of the modern Catholic canon. Purporting to date from a “Council of Rome” under Pope Damasus I in 382, the so-called “Damasian list” appended to the pseudepigraphical Decretum Gelasianum[84] gives a list identical to what would be the Canon of Trent,[85] and, though the text may in fact not be Damasian, it is at least a valuable 6th century compilation.[17][86]
This list, given below, was purportedly endorsed by Pope Damasus I:
Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Jesus Nave, Judges, Ruth, 4 books of Kings, 2 books of Chronicles, Job, Psalter of David, 5 books of Solomon, 12 books of Prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Daniel, Ezekiel, Tobit, Judith, Esther, 2 books of Esdras, 2 books of Maccabees, and in the New Testament: 4 books of Gospels, 1 book of Acts of the Apostles, 13 letters of the Apostle Paul, 1 of him to the Hebrews, 2 of Peter, 3 of John, 1 of James, 1 of Jude, and the Apocalypse of John.