We’ve blown past the initial promise of 20 Bible contradictions and are now at #25 (part 1 here). Let’s continue the Christmas theme and investigate a contradiction in the details surrounding Jesus’s birth.

Jesus is crazy

Too little is made of a surprising passage from Mark. Jesus was preaching in Galilee, and then:

When [Jesus’s] family heard about [Jesus being nearby], they went to take charge of him, for they said, “He is out of his mind” (Mark 3:21).

The point of the story contrasts his actual family, who think he’s crazy, with his disciples, who have abandoned their professions to follow him.

“Who are my mother and my brothers?” Jesus asked. Then he looked at those seated in a circle around him and said, “Here are my mother and my brothers!” (Mark 3:33–4).

Contradiction #25: Was Jesus crazy, or was he God?

The interesting thing here is his family calling him crazy. How was that possible, when it was clear from other gospels that Jesus was divine? First, consider the evidence in Matthew.

• Joseph discovered that Mary was pregnant. He planed to divorce her quietly, but an angel appeared and told him, “Do not fear to take Mary as your wife, for that which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins” (Matt. 1:20–24).
• The magi followed a magical star that (somehow) pointed them to Bethlehem. (More on the Star of Bethlehem here and here.) An expensive and time-consuming trip to worship the king of the Jews required expensive gifts: “On coming to the house, they saw the child with his mother Mary, and they bowed down and worshiped him. Then they opened their treasures and presented him with gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh” (Matt. 2:11). Gifts worthy of a king would have dramatically improved this peasant family’s quality of life, though that is never evident.

And consider the clues in Luke’s very different nativity story.

• Now it’s Mary who gets the celestial visitation, and this time it’s before the conception. The angel Gabriel said, “The Holy Spirit will come on you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God” (Luke 1:28–38).
• Shepherds are told by angels that the Messiah had been born in Bethlehem and “When they had seen him, they spread the word concerning what had been told them about this child, and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds said to them” (Luke 2:8–18).
• Mary and Joseph took baby Jesus to the Temple in Jerusalem for “purification rites.” There they met Simeon, a devout man who had been promised by the Holy Spirit that he would see the Messiah. As he held Jesus, he praised God and said that the promise had been fulfilled (Luke 2:25–38).
• At age 12, Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem after the Passover celebration to converse with the Jewish teachers. “Everyone who heard him was amazed at his understanding and his answers” (Luke 2:46–51).
• Luke makes clear that these events aren’t lost on Mary. It says that “Mary treasured up all these things” after hearing the shepherds and the angels (Luke 2:19) and after seeing Jesus with the teachers (2:51). After hearing Simeon identify Jesus as the Messiah, “The child’s father and mother marveled at what was said about him” (2:33).

Not only are Mary and Joseph assured that their son is divine, but this isn’t a family secret. Word has spread far. The magi informed Herod’s court, and Herod killed infant boys for fear of a rival to the throne; the shepherds tell everyone they can about the angels’ message; Simeon publicly states in the Temple that Jesus is the Messiah; and the Temple teachers see his wisdom for themselves.

Making sense of the contradiction

Let’s return to Mark, where Jesus’s mother and brothers want to take charge of him because he’s crazy. Jesus can’t be both crazy and divine. But drop the requirement that these stories must harmonize, and the resolution is easy.

Matthew and Luke copy (sometimes verbatim) from Mark. In fact, 97 percent of Mark is copied by either Matthew or Luke or both. However, the nativity stories appear only in Matthew and Luke, and the “Jesus is crazy” story appears only in Mark. Mark threw the holy family under the bus to make the point that following Jesus is a higher calling than familial loyalty, but Matthew and Luke didn’t copy that story, perhaps because, as we’ve seen here, it conflicts with the clear evidence in the nativity stories that Jesus is different because he’s divine.

Mark and the other two synoptic gospels had different agendas. Remember that each of these gospels was written decades after the death of Jesus. During this time, dynastic succession was typical. David’s son succeeded him as king, and Herod’s son succeeded him as king, so who would succeed Jesus? (Let’s ignore that the End® was to have happened within months or a few years after Jesus’s death and assume that the movement needed a new leader.) Jesus had no children, so a brother would be an obvious choice.

This created a doctrinal conflict between Paul, who hadn’t even met Jesus in real life, and the James/Peter faction, who installed James, the brother of Jesus, as a leader in the Jerusalem church. The gospel of Mark takes Paul’s viewpoint, so it’s motivated to undercut James by saying that James and the rest of Jesus’s family didn’t believe him. Matthew takes a more Jewish, pro-James view.

In this case, you must set two New Testament books against each other to find the contradiction. Another example of this is how spices were applied to the body after the crucifixion. The gospels of Mark and Luke say that women failed to apply spices on Sunday morning, while John tells us that two men were successful on Friday evening.

But then you have cases where the contradiction is in a single book. For example, John the Baptist wondered if Jesus was The One despite having seen the dove of the Holy Spirit descend on Jesus during baptism, and these stories are both in Matthew.

As usual, the puzzle neatly resolves itself with a natural explanation.

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Image from Ben White, CC license
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With Easter coming up, let’s stick with the theme from last time and explore interesting contradictions in the Passion narrative.

23. Women brought spices to the tomb (or not)

The importance of spices from a plot standpoint is that they’re the motivation for the women’s visit to the tomb on the Sunday after Jesus’s crucifixion. You need to get someone there to discover the empty tomb.

When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices so that they might go to anoint Jesus’ body. Very early on the first day of the week, just after sunrise, they were on their way to the tomb and they asked each other, “Who will roll the stone away from the entrance of the tomb?” (Mark 16:1–3)

Several commenters (and the author of Mark himself) have noted another plot hole: why would the women bother to make the trip with no way to roll back the stone at the doorway? The previous verse makes clear that the women had watched the burial and knew about the stone.

But set that aside. The gospel of John tells a different story about who applied the spices. Rewind to Friday afternoon:

With Pilate’s permission, [Joseph of Arimathea] came and took the body away. He was accompanied by Nicodemus, the man who earlier had visited Jesus at night. Nicodemus brought a mixture of myrrh and aloes, about seventy-five pounds. Taking Jesus’ body, the two of them wrapped it, with the spices, in strips of linen. This was in accordance with Jewish burial customs. (John 19:38–40)

Seventy-five pounds of spices? Have you ever carried a 75-pound backpack or lifted a 75-pound weight at the gym? That sounds like an impractical weight and a pointlessly extravagant gift, but let’s set that aside as well. Now the story has men applying the spices. In John’s story, the women (or woman) goes for no reason: “Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb” (John 20:1). No reason, that is, except as a literary prop to discover the empty tomb.

As an aside, note that a body encased in an enormous mound of spice bound in place with linen strips (I’m envisioning the Michelin Man oozing aloe and smelling of myrrh) is not what the Shroud of Turin image shows, and John talks about strips of linen rather than the Shroud of Turin’s long sheet, so John’s story can’t coexist with such a relic.

Depending on the gospel you pick, women go to the tomb to apply spices Sunday morning (but didn’t actually use them) or men successfully apply the spices Friday afternoon.

24. Peter’s denials

This example is of less importance, but it’s well known and shows yet another set of contradictions. At the Last Supper, Jesus said that his disciples will scatter once he is taken away, but Peter protests that he won’t. Jesus tells Peter that he will disavow him three times before the rooster crows, and indeed that’s what happens.

But read the accounts, and the story differs in each of the gospels.

• In Mark, Peter is accused of being one of Jesus’s followers by a slave girl, then the same girl again, and then a crowd of people (Mark 14:66–71).
• In Matthew, it’s a slave girl, another slave girl, and then a crowd of people (Matthew 26:69–73).
• In Luke, it’s a slave girl, a man, and then another man (Luke 22:54–60).
• In John, it’s a girl at the door, several anonymous persons, and one of the high priest’s servants (John 18:15–17, 25–27)

We can try out a popular Christian tactic and try to resolve contradictory accounts by claiming that they’re both true. For example,

• there were wise men (Matthew) and shepherds (Luke) at the birth of Jesus,
• there was one angel (Matthew and Mark) and a second angel (Luke and John) at the empty tomb, and
• Mary Magdalene (John) and other women (the other gospels) went to the tomb.

Allowing for synonymous descriptions (Mark’s slave girl could’ve been John’s girl at the door, for example) and squashing these confrontations together, we have Peter denying Jesus to a slave girl, another slave girl, a crowd, a man, another man, and perhaps more. That’s a lot more than Jesus’s promised three.

Continue with more contradictions here.

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Image from Eva Blue, CC license
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I recently summarized my Top 20 list of the Bible’s most damning contradictions. But wouldn’t you know it—like zombies that just keep coming, there are more!

These aren’t trivial contradictions—something such as the number of years of a king’s reign reported differently in two places. No, these are contradictions that can’t easily be dismissed.

Christian apologists have had 2000 years to notice the problems and come up with something, but that doesn’t mean their answers are satisfactory. If anyone points out that my examples here are wrong or misleading, I’ll correct them and identify the helpful reader.

21. Jesus predicts his death and resurrection, but everyone forgot

Some of these aren’t contradictions so much as plot holes—two plot elements that can’t coexist. This is an example.

The gospels clearly and repeatedly show Jesus predicting his death and resurrection. Here are just a few of more than ten examples:

[Jesus said,] “We are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be delivered over to the chief priests and the teachers of the law. They will condemn him to death and will deliver Him over to the Gentiles to be mocked and flogged and crucified. And on the third day He will be raised to life.” (Matthew 20:18–19)

Then He began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, chief priests, and scribes, and that He must be killed and after three days rise again. (Mark 8:31)

They know that Jesus will soon be crucified, and they know how long until he’s raised from the dead. But if everyone knows this, why then are they morose after the crucifixion? Why are women going to the tomb with spices, expecting to find a dead body? Why does the empty tomb surprise them? And why wasn’t there a crowd to witness the miraculous event themselves—if not the multitudes that welcomed Jesus into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday just a week earlier, then at least his inner circle?

You see what I meant about the plot hole—a good editor would’ve noticed that a straightforward consequence of Jesus’s many clear declarations about rising again would’ve brought people eager to see the promise fulfilled—or at least unsurprised when it was.

(h/t Debunking Christianity)

22. Jesus and the zombies

Clear your mind of that problem and let’s review the empty-tomb story from a different angle. The women visit the tomb of Jesus to apply spices to the body and are shocked to see the tomb empty. They run back to tell the male disciples (or not, according to Mark) who are likewise astonished. Later that evening, Doubting Thomas, who surely performed more laudable actions in his life than just doubt, did what he’s best known for.

But why would it have been astonishing, on Sunday morning, to find Jesus risen from the dead? Remember this incident:

[At the moment of Jesus’s death,] the earth shook, the rocks split and the tombs broke open. The bodies of many holy people who had died were raised to life. They came out of the tombs after Jesus’ resurrection and went into the holy city and appeared to many people. (Matthew 27:51–3)

Here’s the chronology. Jesus died on Friday evening, and at that moment many worthy dead people came to life. Jesus resurrected (he was to be “three days and three nights in the heart of the earth” [Matt. 12:40], which Friday evening to Sunday morning isn’t, but let’s ignore that), and then the newly undead people left their tombs to walk around Jerusalem. Next, the women found the empty tomb, and then word spread among the male disciples. The gospels differ over whether the women were the first to see the risen Jesus at the tomb (Matthew and John), or the disciples were the first see him Sunday night (Luke), or nobody sees him (Mark). Finally, a week later, Doubting Thomas saw Jesus.

Though the zombies are never connected to the Jesus story, the literary goal is easy to imagine. The resurrection of Jesus was the first fruits of his triumph over death, with the zombie resurrection in Jerusalem a demonstration to emphasize the point.

The problem is that surprise is an important part of this story, but no one would be surprised by a risen Jesus once they’d seen the crowd of undead. What’s one more, particularly when he was the instigator of the process? Word of the remarkable sight of walking dead would’ve traveled quickly through Jerusalem.

When the women returned, breathless with the news of having seen Jesus (or just the empty tomb), the disciples could’ve replied that Jerusalem was crawling with zombies, so what’s one more? Or, if that news hadn’t reached the disciples by the time the women returned, everyone in the city would’ve surely heard by the time Doubting Thomas finally saw Jesus a week later. Knowing of the zombies days earlier, how could Thomas have been surprised that Jesus had risen as well? Jesus showing his wounds and Thomas touching them for confirmation wouldn’t have happened.

About a wide range of Christian commentaries on this passage, Patheos blogger Neil Carter said, “Almost none of them think this really happened.” Nevertheless, the contradiction remains: Thomas, knowing about the zombies as everyone in Jerusalem surely did, would’ve dropped his demand that Jesus prove that he really rose from the dead.

(h/t to Neil’s post, which is where I learned about this contradiction.)

Continue to part 6.

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Image from Daniel Jensen, CC license
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Jim Wallace of the Cold Case Christianity blog has some advice for us, “Ten Principles When Considering Alleged Bible Contradictions.” I point out Bible contradictions with pleasure (like here), but let’s step back to see if we’re reading these contradictions correctly. As you can tell from the title, Wallace doesn’t think much of charges of contradictions in the Bible.

Principle #1: Begin With A Fair Attitude.

When you see a traffic sign, you obey it. Even if something seems odd about its placement or message, you first assume it’s right and only later might you question it.

You treat traffic signs that way because you know from experience that they are almost always right. But how does this map to the Bible? Supernatural claims by contrast are almost always wrong! The Roman pantheon, the Central American gods, the Egyptian gods, the Taoist gods—atheists and Christians agree that supernatural claims about these religions are wrong.

If he’s asking that we keep an open mind, I’ll do that, but a fair attitude rejects any coddling for the supernatural. We’re not going to study a question presuming the Bible is correct. It will have to stand up to scrutiny like any other source.

Principle #2: Examine the Text in Its Context.

Don’t read a single verse but read its entire chapter to understand the context. “Careful reading (with an effort to understand what the original text truly says) will resolve the lion’s share of apparent ‘contradictions’ or ‘errors’ in the Bible.”

I go even farther with this advice. I say that the context of a verse is the entire Bible (more). For example, don’t cite John 3:16 to argue that faith alone is required for salvation without also addressing Matthew’s Parable of the Sheep and the Goats and every other place where the Bible makes clear that works get you into heaven. Don’t tell me that a verse says something unless you can convince me that the rest of the Bible never contradicts it.

To illustrate this problem, we’re given the example of the mustard seed, which Jesus calls “the smallest of all seeds.” Wallace admits that it’s not, but he says that the correct translation labels it “the smallest of all seeds you plant in the ground” and “the smallest of all your seeds.” He gives no source for these translations, and Bible Hub doesn’t show them in its 21 different translations for Mark 4:31 and Matthew 13:32, the two sources of the parable.

Wallace says that Jesus was talking to farmers and was referring to the seeds with which they were familiar. I can accept that, but don’t tell me that Jesus is quoted giving the correct information when the Bible says he doesn’t. And don’t tell me to read a verse in its correct context when you won’t do that yourself.

Principle #3: Let the Bible Clarify the Bible.

Every Bible shows related verses in the margin or in a footnote. Read these other verses to clarify any difficult passages.

The puzzle given is Paul’s statement that “[the human body] is sown a natural body, [but] it is raised a spiritual body” (1 Corinthians 15:44). Paul is rejecting the imperfect physical body and sees it perfected in the spiritual equivalent. While this was popular Greek thinking at the time, it was eventually rejected by the Christian church.

But Paul out of step with Christianity isn’t an embarrassing problem, Wallace tells us. Let the Bible clarify the Bible by considering another verse in the same book: “The person with the Spirit makes judgments about all things, but such a person is not subject to merely human judgments” (1 Cor. 2:15). Both verses use the same adjective pneumatikos, but the second verse refers to a wise person, not a ghost. Conclusion: Paul’s risen “spiritual body” is simply a man full of God’s wisdom.

There are a couple of problems here. First, like many words in the dictionary, pneumatikos has many meanings. These two instances might use different meanings. Wallace has simply picked the meaning that he likes and imposed it without justification.

But the far bigger problem is how he approached this problem. The first verse (15:44) is the “difficult” verse, and the second (2:15) is the “easy” one. We use the insights gained from the easy one to analyze the difficult one. But why is the first one difficult? Let’s instead assume the reverse and impose the idea of a body-less spirit from the first verse onto the second verse: “The [spirit/ghost] makes judgments about all things, but such a person is not subject to merely human judgments.” Now we’re talking about a risen spirit that has discarded its material body. Of course such an enlightened being can make judgments about all things without being second-guessed by mere humans.

Or why assume that either of them is difficult and needs special attention? The only problem Wallace solves is how to hammer the Bible to fit his preconceptions. He goes into his Bible study certain that God raises bodies physically rather than spiritually, and he’s determined to wring that meaning from it. That’s not how an honest person reads the Bible. (More on the hypocrisy of imagining easy vs. difficult verses here).

Principle #4: Don’t Confuse “Imprecision” with “Error.”

The culture at the time wasn’t interested in precise numbers like we often are.

The example given is a circular basin specified in 2 Chronicles 4:2. It was 10 cubits in diameter and 30 cubits around. But, of course, if it were 10 cubits in diameter, it should be 10×π = 31.4159 cubits (rounded to 31) in circumference.

Wallace argues that the culture rounded numbers, and 31 cubits could’ve been written as 30 cubits.

I agree with this one. These measurements could also be explained if the basin were slightly oval. Even if we assume a perfectly circular basin, it could have a diameter of 9.7 cubits and a 9.7×π = 30.47-cubit circumference. These values would round to 10 and 30.

Unfortunately, there’s little else to agree about in the remaining principles for evaluating Bible verses.

Continued in part 2.

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 3/2/15.)

Image from Agneta Von Aisaider, CC license

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We’ll conclude our look at Bible contradictions. Here are the final five (part 1 is here).

16. There are two incompatible Ten Commandments

You know the story: Moses got the Ten Commandments from God on Mt. Sinai in Exodus 20. The list of commandments had the familiar rules—no blaspheming, no murder, no lying, no stealing, and so on. Moses returns, only to find that the Israelites, impatient and anxious during his long absence, had made and were worshipping a golden calf, a familiar object of worship from Egypt.

Moses smashed the tablets in his rage, 3000 Israelites were killed in the opening round of punishment, and Moses eventually went back up for a duplicate set (Exodus 34), which was put in the Ark of the Covenant.

Except that it wasn’t a duplicate set. It’s a list that very few Christians are familiar with. For example, number 5 is “The first offspring from every womb belongs to me.” Number 7: Celebrate the Feast of Weeks. Number 10: “You shall not boil a young goat in its mother’s milk.” This set is referred to as the “Ten Commandments” in Exodus, not the other set.

We can debate which set fundamentalists should try to illegally place on government property, but despite God’s assurance, these are two very different sets of rules. (More here and here.)

17. There are two creation stories in Genesis

There are also two creation stories at the beginning of Genesis. First is the six-day creation story that enumerates the things God created day by day, after which God rested. Next is an older creation story, the one about the Garden of Eden.

Apologists try to harmonize these two, saying that the Garden of Eden story is just an in-depth look at the last day of creation, but details in the two stories disagree. The 6-day story says that humans can eat from every tree, while the Eden story says that one is forbidden. The 6-day story has plants and animals before humans, while the Eden story has the opposite. And so on (more).

18. There are even two Flood stories

You see the trend: the Old Testament often has two different, incompatible stories. Each was too precious for ancient editors to discard, so both were jammed together somehow. The two Ten Commandments stories are separated by over a dozen chapters, the two creation stories are back to back, and they’re interleaved in the Flood story.

In Flood story 1, the older story, Noah takes seven pairs of all clean animals plus one pair of all the others. Once on board with his family, it rained for forty days and forty nights, and everything outside the ark was killed. Noah sent out a dove to scout for dry land. On the second try, it returned with an olive leaf. Back on dry land, Noah sacrificed one of every clean animal to Yahweh, and Yahweh promised to never again destroy life on earth (with a flood, anyway).

In story #2, God is named, not Yahweh, but Elohim, and specifics about the design of the ark are given. With just one pair of each animal plus provisions, Noah (now 600 years old) and family go into the ark. This time, the water comes, not from rain, but from “the fountains of the great deep” and “the windows of the heavens.” Water had covered the earth for 150 days when Elohim made the water recede. This time it was a raven that helped scout for dry land, and they were back on dry land after a year in the ark. God told them to “be fruitful and multiply.”

A leading explanation of the Old Testament’s many story pairs is the Documentary Hypothesis. It answers a lot of questions and proposes four original documents that were merged to make the Pentateuch, the Bible’s first five books. Read more on the two Flood stories and the Documentary Hypothesis here.

19. Resurrection contradictions

Forty percent of the gospels focus on the last week of Jesus’s life, from the triumphant entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday to the crucifixion, resurrection, and final teachings, and they differ on many points.

A popular Christian response is to say that just because only Matthew wrote about the dead coming out of their graves and walking around Jerusalem doesn’t mean that it didn’t happen. (Yeah—the other gospel writers must not have thought that Jesus causing the dead to reanimate and walk around Jerusalem, seen by many, wasn’t worth writing about.)

Or that just because John says “Mary Magdalene went to the tomb,” that doesn’t mean that many other women weren’t also with her as Luke says (“Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the others with them”).

Or that just because only Matthew has Jesus riding on two donkeys, that doesn’t mean the other gospels’ reference to just one disagrees. (Yeah, it pretty much does.)

Or that Paul’s reference to 500 eyewitnesses to the risen Jesus might’ve been compelling to him, but it wasn’t worth writing about in any gospel (more).

From who Peter denied Jesus, to Jesus’s last words, to who the women saw at the tomb, to whether Mary Magdalene recognized Jesus or not, to how many days Jesus stayed after his resurrection, the various accounts differ. (More here.)

20. Jesus forgets the plot

At some point the three persons of the Trinity—Yahweh, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit—agreed that Jesus should live as a human on earth. Jesus was born as a divine being (except in Mark, where he becomes divine with his baptism) and lives out a life that ends with crucifixion. Just before that, he prayed with his disciples in the Garden of Gethsemane. To the few disciples with him, he said, “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death” (Matthew 26:38). Then he prays, “My Father, if it is possible, may this cup [he’s referring to the upcoming crucifixion] be taken from me.” He prays this three times. The story is the same in Mark, and in Luke, an angel strengthens Jesus.

Why did Jesus go off-script? He was part of the Trinity that decided this, so how could he be second-guessing the plan now?

We can look for a human comparison. It wouldn’t be surprising for an ordinary human to have second thoughts before a suicide mission, but in this story we’re talking about a god. Even if agony were a thing that he could perceive, why would an omniscient being question a plan that he knows is perfect?

The puzzle vanishes if we reinterpret the Jesus story as legend.

But wait! There’s more!

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