Let’s conclude our look at the tactics Christian apologists use to respond to embarrassments in the Bible and Christianity. How well do they work? Let’s find out. (Part 1 here.)

Tactic 7: Contradictions? That’s a Good Thing!

Some Christians respond to contradictions within the Gospels by saying that that’s actually a good thing, because if they were identical, we’d suspect collusion. A few inconsistencies are the hallmark of honest eyewitness accounts. Jim Wallace of the Cold-Case Christianity ministry was a detective and used his reputation to give this tactic credibility.

But by making two categories indistinguishable, this creates a new problem. Category one is what they’re referring to, accounts that are honest attempts at accurate reporting with inadvertent errors or different editorial choices. Category two has accounts that aren’t bound by what actually happened but are written with a religious agenda. How do we know which bin to put a contradiction into?

Here’s an example. The synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) have the Last Supper as the Passover meal, so Jesus is crucified after the Passover meal. John has the Last Supper one day earlier so that Jesus is crucified before the Passover meal. With this change, John can make a deliberate parallel between the unblemished lambs being killed for Passover concurrent with the death of the perfect Lamb of God. Maybe that’s just how things worked out . . . or maybe John, the last gospel, deliberately changed the tradition to make that theological parallel.

This tactic mixes the two categories, and agenda-drive theology hides behind the skirts of history. Honest seekers would want those to be as distinct as possible.

Tactic 8: They’re both right

I used to be impressed when Christians would come up with some rationalization for a Bible problem, but I’ve seen it so often that now I just expect it. After all, the Church has had 2000 years to hear the problems and think up answers.

This tactic attempts to directly rebut the problem. Did Jesus heal two blind men near Jericho (Matthew) or just one (Mark and Luke)? Both are correct. Did Sennacherib attack Judah in the third year of Hoshea’s reign (2 Kings 18:1) or the fourteenth year of Hezekiah’s reign (2 Kings 18:13)? Both are correct. Was Jacob buried in Shechem (Acts 7:15–16) or near Mamre (Genesis 50:13)? Pick a contradiction, and this tactic will argue that they’re both right.

I’m sure that a few of the Bible’s many contradictions can be resolved this way, but I’m skeptical that this tactic works everywhere it’s applied.

Tactic 9: Patience

This tactic tells us that some things in the Bible are confusing and that we’ll just have to wait until we get to heaven to understand them. For example, the Christian might explain away Christianity’s inability to make sense of the Trinity by calling it a divine mystery. The Catechism of the Catholic Church says, “The Trinity is a mystery of faith in the strict sense, one of the mysteries that are hidden in God, which can never be known unless they are revealed by God.”

But if the Trinity can’t be explained so that we understand it, don’t bring it up. What sense does it make to present mysteries when the purpose of the Bible and Christianity are to educate us here, not in heaven?

(As an aside, it is extraordinary to see Christians who, in one breath, humbly admit that they don’t understand the mind of God then, in the next breath, suddenly regain their confidence and proclaim God’s very clear views on homosexuality, abortion, or some other social issue.)

Conclusion

Search Amazon for “Bible contradictions.” Half of the books will explore those contradictions from a skeptical standpoint, but the rest will pat you on the head and assure you that those contradictions don’t exist or aren’t important. Popular books defending the Bible include The Big Book of Bible Difficulties, Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties, and Demolishing Supposed Bible Contradictions. With titles like these, at least we’re in agreement that the Bible has many problematic passages.

While the contradictions might turn potential converts away, the contradictions can actually be a plus. They make the Bible malleable. You can emphasize some verses and ignore others to create one message and then change the mix as social conditions change. When slavery is fashionable, the Bible supports it, and when slavery becomes unpopular, the Bible supports that position as well. God is merciful or strict; God is loving or violent; God is forgiving or demanding—it’s all in there. (More.)

God becomes the Christian’s sock puppet, mouthing what the Christian wants to hear while speaking with the authority of the Bible.

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Let’s continue our look at the ways Christian apologists respond to embarrassments in the Bible and Christianity and see how well they work. (Part 1 here.)

Tactic 3: God put them there on purpose

Let’s start with a palate cleanser and hear from “Dr.” Kent Hovind (whose “doctoral dissertation” memorably opened with the line, “Hello, my name is Kent Hovind”). Hovind admits that, yes, there are contradictions in the Bible, but don’t worry about them because God put them there on purpose. According to Hovind’s thinking, the contradictions are there to throw off those who aren’t serious. Let those people become atheists and leave the flock with stronger believers.

Or something.

Tactic 4: Things were different back then

Slavery was always wrong, y’see, but God needed to work within the social context of the Israelites 3000 years ago. And that’s also true for genocide. And human sacrifice. God knew they were wrong, of course, but he needed to ease the Israelites into this new thinking.

This creates the Janus Bible, a Bible that doesn’t tell you the unchanging, difficult moral truth whether it suits you or not but a Bible that looks forward and backward at the same time. Or maybe it’s the Quantum Bible, the superposition of moral rightness and moral evil at the same time.

If God was working within the context of those social customs, why did he impose the Ten Commandments and the hundreds of other laws in the Old Testament with no grace period? And if he could impose prohibitions against murder, lying, and stealing in an instant, why not add prohibitions against slavery, human sacrifice, and genocide?

Do the Bible’s archaic customs sound like a god easing in a new policy, or do they just sound like the Bronze Age thinking that was popular back then? And what happens to the claim of objective morality, moral truths that are unchanging through time? If “slavery is wrong” is objectively true, then the Old Testament shows God dictating a flawed morality.

No, “things were different back then” or “God’s hands were tied” don’t help when God is omnipotent. The ancient Israelites had our brains and could’ve understood modern morality as well as we do.

The Bible can’t be timeless and stuck in the past at the same time.

Tactic 5: Use context selectively

The Stand to Reason ministry has some surprising Bible advice: “Never read a Bible verse.” What they mean is, never read just a Bible verse but use the context of its paragraph or chapter to understand it correctly.

That’s a good step, but it doesn’t go nearly far enough. The maxim should read: Never quote a Bible verse until you know that its point isn’t challenged anywhere else in the Bible. (More.)

The Bible is a big book, and you can find just about everything in it. God hates the slavery of the Israelites in Egypt, but he later establishes the rules for how to do it properly to other people in Israel. God knows everything, but he had to send scouts to Sodom to learn what was going on. Good comes from God, but so does evil.

The lesson here is to reject the maxim about a Bible-wide context, keep one’s outlook confined, and ignore the verses that contradict your message.

Tactic 6: “Interpret difficult passages in the light of clear ones”

By this, the Christian means that embarrassing passages like God’s support for human sacrifice or slavery should be subordinate to passages that reject human sacrifice or emphasize God’s love. So the distinction actually isn’t difficult vs. clear passages but rather embarrassing vs. pleasing. That every clash of passages always gives a result that preserves the Christian position is a clue that this isn’t an honest following of the evidence.

The Muslim rule of abrogation neatly sidesteps any contradictions in the Quran, but (like me) Christians are quick to wonder how the Prophet could get something wrong (even if it’s overruled with the correct message later) when he was basically taking dictation from an angel. With tactic 6, Christians bring the same challenge on themselves. Their job is easier—just pick the verse(s) that you like and handwave some rationalization for why you can overrule the competing verse(s)—but problems remain. They’ve opened the door for every Christian to make their own personal evaluation for which verses to keep, and, like the Muslims, they’ve admitted that the Bible is contradictory.

Here’s a clear declaration of this philosophy from the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy (1978):

The truthfulness of Scripture is not negated by the appearance in it of . . . seeming discrepancies between one passage and another. . . . Solution of [apparent inconsistencies], where this can be convincingly achieved, will encourage our faith, and where for the present no convincing solution is at hand we shall significantly honor God by trusting His assurance that His Word is true, despite these appearances.

So it’s head’s I win; tails I don’t lose. That’s a bold and surprisingly candid statement that they don’t care about evidence. (I explore this tactic in detail here; also here and here.)

Concluded in part 3.

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Image from Bring Back Words, CC license
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I’ve written about the Bible’s confused relationship with science and have explored Bible contradictions with a Top 20 list of the most embarrassing. Now let’s look at how Christian apologists respond to Bible contradictions and similar embarrassments.

The perfect message of an infallible god has a lot more contradictions than you’d expect. Was John the Baptist the reincarnated Elijah? Yes (Matthew 17:10–13) and no (John 1:19–21). How many donkeys did Jesus ride on Palm Sunday—one (Mark 11:7) or two (Matthew 21:7)? Who killed Goliath—David (1 Samuel 17:50) or Elhanan (2 Samuel 21:19)?

You won’t be surprised that Christians have a lot of tactics with which to resolve awkward questions like these. Let’s review some of them and see how they hold up.

Tactic 1: Technically, it’s not a contradiction

This excuse splits hairs about the word “contradiction.” A contradiction, they’ll say, is a sentence X that clashes with a sentence not-X, and nothing less precise will do. The two statements must directly and unambiguously contradict each other.

They might apply this to the number of women at the empty tomb. Each gospel identifies a different number of women. For example, John says that it was Mary Magdalene, but Luke says Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James “and the other women.” Apologists will defend the Bible by saying that John didn’t say Mary and only Mary was there, so it’s not a contradiction—at least not technically.

This approach might work if the question of women at the tomb were the only problem, but there’s much more than that. And, of course, apologists always resolve the contradiction in favor of their conclusion, which is a supernatural fantasy that is about as far-fetched as it is possible to be. (More “apparent” contradictions in the four resurrection accounts here.)

While you’re haggling with them over the definition of “contradiction,” the Bible problem is ignored, which they count as a win.

What does “contradiction” mean?

To remember how we evaluate contradictions in everyday life, suppose you’re a newspaper editor. Matthew and Luke have been assigned to the Jesus beat—this is such an important story that you want two journalists working on independent articles—and they drop off their stories (their respective gospels) on your desk. How satisfied would you be?

Not very. You’d call them back and tell them to try again. This isn’t merely Luke having the Parable of the Prodigal Son but Matthew omitting it, and Matthew having the Parable of the Unmerciful Servant but Luke omitting it. Space is limited, and those editorial decisions are understandable, but it’s more than that. Did wise men visit the baby Jesus, or was it shepherds? Was Jesus whisked off to Egypt for his protection or not? Did the dead rise at the crucifixion, who first witnessed the empty tomb, and how many angels were at the tomb? Matthew and Luke disagree on each of these and more. In common parlance, these are contradictions. Relabel the problem if you want, but don’t dismiss it.

We could debate how essential these story elements are (very essential for the flight to Egypt and less so for the shepherds), but with enough of these differences, the stories become unreliable—both of them.

Tactic 2: Use or discard evidence based on whether you like where it points

Here’s an example of an apologist wanting to have it both ways, inconsistently using contradictory information as it suits his agenda. After accepting that Jesus spent two years in Egypt (a claim given only in Matthew) but dismissing the idea that he also visited India, Greg Koukl concluded:

The record that we have of Jesus’ life indicates that he was there [in Israel] for his entire life except for that brief sojourn in Egypt, which is recorded. (@ 23:44)

Let me illustrate the problem with an imagined dialogue:

Bob: Why say that Jesus went to Egypt? Matthew is the only one with that. Luke has a birth narrative, but it doesn’t mention Egypt. If the flight to Egypt actually happened, it’s hard to imagine Luke omitting that.

Greg: Luke doesn’t say, “And by the way, Jesus never went to Egypt.” Luke apparently pared down his narrative, and the Egypt journey was cut. This was an editorial choice, not a contradiction.

Bob: Luke also doesn’t say, “And by the way, Jesus never went to India.” So maybe he did.

Greg: We have a record of his life before his adult ministry in two of the gospels. There’s no mention of India, so we have no reason to consider it.

The problem here is that you can’t ignore the omission of Egypt and then point to the omission of India as important evidence.

To be clear, I’m not saying that there’s strong evidence that Jesus went to India. I doubt there is, and support for such a hypothesis would need to be put forward with data from outside the New Testament. But you must be consistent—don’t decide whether to ignore or highlight an omission in your holy book based on whether it will support your conclusion.

Continued in part 2.

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Image from Jenni Jones, CC license
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Progressive revelation is the doctrine that God doled out his message over time. I agree with the problem—the Bible message does change over time. But apologists have traded one problem—the Bible contradicts itself (or a forgetful God can’t keep his story straight)—for another: God gave humanity an imperfect message and is now slowly correcting it.

The natural explanation is sufficient: the Bible is the blog of an ancient people, a fascinating and invaluable historical document but obviously not the perfect message from a perfect god.

Part 1 summarized the problem. This post will conclude with three problems that infect the doctrine of progressive revelation.

Problem 1: Conflict with Old Testament

Christian apologists rarely consider their claims all at once to see if the patch they made over here to cover up one embarrassment conflicts with the band-aid they put somewhere else. The first problem is that the Old Testament doesn’t say that God will dribble out the truth. It doesn’t say that he will contradict himself. Only in the minds of apologists does God reserve the right to change his mind in the future.

(Still, if you’re going to change your mind as the story unfolds, at least that gives you a chance to correct earlier embarrassments. Unfortunately, God’s barbarity isn’t overruled by any new teaching. Jesus does raise the standards on murder, adultery, and others in the Sermon on the Mount, but he doesn’t bother prohibiting slavery, genocide, human sacrifice, and other oldies but goodies from the Old Testament.)

Problem 2: Inconsistent rules

Progressive revelation looks like a makeshift, better-than-nothing rationalization. If Christians can justify Jesus’s message overruling what came before, how can they object to Joseph Smith pulling the same trick with his new ’n improved Mormon version of Christianity? How do they justify that Christians (and only Christians) get a pass?

Problem 3: What does this say about the current Christian message?

Once you’ve let the progressive revelation genie out of the bottle, how do you shove it back in? You can’t show that God’s message won’t change again. If the Jews were wrong that they had the correct message, maybe the Christians are, too. Maybe Christian doctrine has barely begun the process—a thousand years are to the Lord like a day, after all. This is the bed Christians have made for themselves with this argument.

This is theological relativism, but this isn’t an unintended consequence, an unfortunate side effect that’s attached to a larger good. Progressive revelation is theological relativism, deliberately and overtly, and the “perfect message” now changes with time. Accept this doctrine, and no Christian from any time in history can say that they understand God’s truth, regardless of whether they rely on scripture, church tradition, or personal revelation.

Another casualty is objective morality, moral values that are both obligatory for humans (whether or not humans even exist) and reliably accessible by those humans. Modern Christian morality in the West has evolved substantially from biblical morality even though Christians say that God approved of each, and with progressive revelation still in force, who knows what God will dictate next? And without objective morality, the popular Moral Argument collapses.

When Christianity is this flexible and Christians give themselves this much license, it’s no wonder you have 45,000 denominations with the attendant contradictions in doctrine.

Progressive revelation has created an unchanging god with a changing message. It’s not a clever save for Christians to show that they’re right but a declaration that they’re wrong.

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Did you know that the Quran has no contradictions? This isn’t due to God’s guiding hand but to a clever loophole within Islam called the law of abrogation. If two passages in the Quran seem to conflict, the one written later abrogates (overrules) the earlier one. While Muslim scholars disagree on the number of conflicting passages, this rule is the backstop that resolves such questions.

Christianity also has a contradiction problem. We can see some of those problems when we look at how the Bible reboots its fundamental message. First, God makes a covenant with Noah, and then with Abraham, and then with Moses. Finally Jesus comes, and the rules change again. Jesus redefined murder, adultery, divorce, and more in the Sermon on the Mount. He changed the afterlife from a vague and uninteresting existence in Sheol to the ultimate celebration of a worthy life (or the ultimate punishment of a wicked one). He changed Yahweh from the god of just the Chosen People into the god of everyone. Circumcision and kosher food laws became unnecessary. Sacrifices are gone. The worship day changed.

Even after Jesus, the change continued. Some reboots didn’t take (Marcionism, Gnosticism), but others did (Trinitarianism). But wait—there’s more! Islam was a reboot. Mormonism was a reboot. Reverend Sun Myung Moon and his Unification Church was a reboot.

The simplest explanation for the chaos in what is supposed to be the perfect plan from a perfect creator drops the idea of anything divine behind the Bible and chalks it up to a primitive people inventing supernatural stories to make sense of a scary existence. But that’s throwing in the towel, and modern Christians who want to support their belief respond in a different way.

Christianity’s secret weapon: progressive revelation

Let’s see how Christians explain progressive revelation.

The Scriptures testify to a progression of God’s revelation of Himself to humanity. He did not reveal the fullness of His truth in the beginning, yet what He revealed was always true. Each portion of Scripture was built on the previous one. (Don Stewart)

That’s one interpretation. The obvious alternative is that the Bible is (among other things) a 1000-year-long record of the evolution of supernatural thought within a primitive tribe in the ancient Near East. That it changed is hardly surprising—manmade religions do that.

The United Church of Christ embraces the idea of progressive revelation with a marketing campaign built around the slogan, “God is still speaking.” This evolved from a quote from Gracie Allen, “Never place a period where God has placed a comma.”

Okay—show us in the Bible where God makes clear that his perfect plan is a work in progress. Was the Ten Commandments just a first draft? Were the rules against homosexuality temporary? Was God’s plan for marriage a moving target?*

Another source has this interpretation.

God delivered what we were ready for, a bit at a time, when we were ready for it. In other words, his revelation has been progressive. (Tom Gilson)

That’s just what you’d say if you were trying to salvage a contradictory text. Your challenge is showing that this is God’s idea, not yours. Give us the verses in the Old Testament supporting this. Here, let me get you started: God made “a covenant for all generations to come” with Noah (Genesis 9) and then “an everlasting covenant” with Moses (Genesis 17).

Whoops—sorry. Those examples show how God doesn’t dribble out laws but makes them and then says that they are perpetual. Good luck finding the verse that says that God makes laws that he knows he’ll later correct.

And what does “when we were ready for it” mean? How are moderns any more ready to accept a supernatural message than people 3000 years ago?

We know more of God than the Old Testament prophets did: we know him through Christ.

But why stop there? If you like progressive revelation, then take the Muslim update from Mohammed. Or the LDS one from Joseph Smith.

Every student of church history knows that knowledge of God continued to grow long past the time John put down his pen after writing the Revelation.

You mean the doctrinal inventions from the 21 ecumenical councils from the Council of Nicaea in 325 through Vatican II in 1965? Or the many schisms within the Christian church? Or the countless denominational conferences? Yes, those were important for making doctrine. For example, the Bible has no clear statement of the doctrine of the Trinity, and it had to be invented in the first two councils.

But this isn’t an explanation as much as an admission. Much of “Christianity” comes from tradition and debate, not the supposed words of Jesus or God, both of whom are quoted extensively in the Bible. If the Bible were complete and unambiguous, these later interpretations wouldn’t have been necessary.

Why not deliver something useful in the new revelation?

Why would God want to dribble out his message? One answer is that the original audience for the Bible were just too primitive to understand. I’ll admit that the modern Christian message is confusing, but humans living in Palestine 3000 years ago were just as capable of understanding (or being confused by) today’s Christian message as we are.

Contrast that with a different message. The Bible gave us no science or technology that wasn’t part of that culture. That’s a message that might need dribbling out. A culture doesn’t go from the Iron Age to the Computer Age in one step.

When challenged with this, apologists often say that the Bible is a book of God’s message, not a science textbook. It’s hard to believe that basic health rules or a prohibition against slavery aren’t at the top of God’s list of tips to pass on, but let’s forget that. According to their reasoning, it sounds like God would be motivated to reveal the science and technology related to spreading God’s message. Where then is the progressive revelation of transportation or communication technology? As Judas in Jesus Christ Superstar observed, “If you’d come today / You could have reached a whole nation. / Israel in 4 BC / Had no mass communication.”

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Thanks to a couple of my favorite sources of wisdom, Jesus and Mo and Why Evolution is True, for mentions of this post.

Continue to the fatal objections to progressive revelation in part 2.

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*Actually, yes, the Ten Commandments was a first draft, because there were two of them. The Bible doesn’t object to homosexuality in the way that conservative Christians think (here, here). And biblical ideas of marriage were radically more expansive than they would have you believe. Nevertheless, the burden is on the advocate of progressive revelation to show that a constantly changing doctrine is what God planned from the beginning.

Image from Alicia Lee, CC license
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