Internal consistency of the Bible

An American family Bible dating to 1859 A.D.

There has long been interest in the subject of the internal consistency of the Bible. Christianity and Judaism respectively present the Bible and Tanakh as divinely inspired. The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy is supported by many Evangelical Christian denominations. A few mainstream Christian denominations do not accept Biblical inerrancy and infallibility, while others have no official statement to either regard or leave it up to the individual. Because of these divergent views, examination of scripture to determine internal consistency is an important part of ecumenical and apologetic discussions.

Concerns regarding biblical consistency have a long history. In Contra Celsus, the church father Origen spoke of a second century pagan critic named Celsus, who, according to Origen, complained, "certain of the Christian believers, like persons who in a fit of drunkenness lay violent hands upon themselves, have corrupted the Gospel from its original integrity, to a threefold, and fourfold, and many-fold degree, and have remodelled it, so that they might be able to answer objections". Origen disagreed with Celsus in the next sentences, stating, "I know of no others who have altered the Gospel, save the followers of Marcion, and those of Valentinus, and, I think, also those of Lucian. But such an allegation is no charge against the Christian system, but against those who dared so to trifle with the Gospels. And as it is no ground of accusation against philosophy, that there exist Sophists, or Epicureans, or Peripatetics, or any others, whoever they may be, who hold false opinions; so neither is it against genuine Christianity that there are some who corrupt the Gospel histories, and who introduce heresies opposed to the meaning of the doctrine of Jesus."

Another classic text which discusses internal consistency is The Age of Reason by Thomas Paine.

Major religious views on the Bible

See also: Biblical inerrancy

Christians share the view that the Bible is the Word of God. The idea that it might contain inconsistencies challenges this belief: God cannot be inconsistent. The various denominations have dealt with this challenge in a variety of ways. One reaction has been to assert biblical inerrancy, holding, like the Southern Baptist Convention, that the Bible "has God for its author, salvation for its end, and truth, without any mixture of error, for its matter", so that therefore "all Scripture is totally true and trustworthy." Less extreme is the doctrine of biblical infallibility held by the Catholic Church, which holds that the Bible is without error only in matters pertaining to salvation. All modern Christian and Jewish confessions find themselves ranged at some point between these two positions, the former closing off, and the latter leaving open, the question of how to interpret perceived inconsistencies.

Types of consistency

Canonical

The term Bible is applied to a wide range of canons (i.e., collections of texts regarded as representing the word of God), from the Samaritans, who consider the Torah alone to be God's word, to the Ethiopian Bible, which contains all the books of all other churches plus such titles as the Book of Josephus and the Book of Clement. Books can lose their divine status, which was the fate of the many apocryphal Gospels of the first few centuries of the Church (the Gospel of Thomas is a famous example); and books with strong claims to be included, such as the Book of Enoch, quoted as scriptural in Jude 14–15, were excluded from the more prestigious canons (Enoch did make it into the Ethiopian Bible).

The shared homolougomena (scriptures received with unqualified acceptance) is made up of 66 books plus the apocrypha for the Roman Catholic, Anglican, Episcopalian, Oriental Orthodox and the Eastern Orthodox canons; 66 Books for the Protestant canon, although it shrinks to just 39 books if only the Jewish canon (i.e. Tanakh) is considered, and shrinks still further to just five books if the Samaritan canon is counted. Thus while there is universal agreement among religious scholars and the faithful that the Bible is the Word of God, there is diversity over which books are regarded as composing the Word.

Manuscript

Further information: Biblical manuscript and Textual Criticism

Manuscripts also differ. Usually the differences are minor - matters of spelling and the like - but occasionally they are significant, as in the case of the Comma Johanneum, a clause in the First Epistle of John which bears explicit witness to the doctrine of the Christian Trinity, but while known since the 4th century, it is not found in any manuscript earlier than the 10th century (codex 221), where it is shown as a marginal note. A similar example from the Old Testament is the difference between the Septuagint and Masoretic descriptions of the battle of David and Goliath: the Septuagint version is shorter and avoids the narrative inconsistencies of the familiar Masoretic story, notably the famous incident of Saul asking who David is as though he does not know his own harpist and shield-bearer.

There are also important differences between the Masoretic and the Samaritan version(i.e. Samaritan Pentateuch) of the Pentateuch in the readings of many sentences. Some of the distinctions seem to be motivated by (or reflect) the actual philosophical differences between Judaism and Samaritanism. Some of these are glaringly obvious, like the inclusion of a passage in the Samaritan version of the Ten Commandments restating the command to build of an altar on Mt. Gerizim, and stating plainly that Mt. Gerizim is the site at which all future sacrifices are to be offered. Since the location of God's holy site is probably the central original difference between Judaism and Samaritanism, it makes sense that this passage should be in one version and not the other.

Narrative

See also: Skeptics Annotated Bible

Narrative inconsistencies are what is most frequently meant when (in)consistencies in the Bible are discussed, and make up the vast bulk of the considerable body of apologetics devoted to proving that no such threats to the coherence of the biblical narrative in fact exist.

For example, 6 Genesis 6 describes the corruption of mankind and the deluge. 6:1-2 Genesis 6:1–2 relates how the "sons of God" mated with the "daughters of men" shortly before the Flood. 6:3 Genesis 6:3 tells how Yahweh decides that the "days of man will be 120 years". fourth verse Genesis 6:4 tells of the Nephilim who "were on the earth in those days, and after as well..." Is there a connection between the mating of the "sons of God" with "daughters of men", and God's apparent anger with mankind in 6:6-7 Genesis 6:6–7? Or is this anger a direct result of the wickedness of man described in 5 Genesis 6:5? If the 120 years means that the human lifespan is limited, why do many individuals live longer than this between the Flood and Moses (who lives 120 years Deut 34:7)? If, instead, it means that God has decided to bring on the Flood after 120 years, why is Noah, who is at least 500 years old at this point (5:32 Genesis 5:32), only 600 when the Flood begins (7:6 Genesis 7:6)? These questions also illustrate that there is no sharp distinction between interpretation and apologetics. Scholars both within and outside faith communities find the meaning of some texts difficult, and exchange proposals that might answer such questions. Agreement on meaning precedes disagreement about historicity or truth.

Theological

Despite the inconsistencies, there are also certain consistencies to the Bible. Common themes recur. These include (although no list can be exhaustive) monolatrism, morality, election, the idea of the coming Messiah, and the concepts of sin, faithfulness, and redemption. The study of these consistencies is the central subject of Jewish and Christian theologies, even if the religions differ in their approaches to these themes (see Christianity and Judaism). For example, although both religions believe in the coming Messiah, the Jewish expectation is different from the Christian view of a Messiah.

Approaches to consistency

Further information: Higher criticism

Perceptions of inconsistency arise naturally in the interpretation of any text, and are a normal part of literary criticism in any field. Evaluations of irony, for example, whether in Shakespeare or in the Bible, involve appreciating certain types of inconsistency, sometimes deliberate ones.

Existing literature from the ancient world includes not only the books of the Bible, but commentary on these books. Some of this commentary simply urges readers to conform their thinking or behaviour to what commentators understand the Bible to say (homily); but there is also considerable discussion in ancient writers about the process or methodology of correctly understanding various Biblical passages, and various agreements and disagreements between these ancient literary critics. Famous examples from early centuries after the time of Jesus, are the Talmud and the Church Fathers.

It is not just Bible scholars who have worked at understanding how to interpret and evaluate literature. Over the course of history, writers in many fields have developed methodologies of literary criticism (for example Scholasticism). In some cases these have actually arisen from study of the Bible and then become standard in other fields; in other cases they have been adopted first elsewhere, and then been applied to Biblical studies.

In principle, Bible scholars, whether believers or unbelievers, apply the same methodologies. However, differences between them tend to arise when the meaning the text (or its form) conflicts with the prior commitment of the interpreter. This works both ways. So, for example, both believing and unbelieving scholars will agree that a text says, God said to Abraham, offer your son Isaac as a sacrifice to me, but they will disagree about whether this actually happened, and about what it says regarding the moral value of God as described by Genesis.

Every reference to God in the Bible is an inconsistency with reality for an atheist commentator on the Bible, so we cannot list all biblical inconsistencies as perceived from every possible point of view in this article. However, there are well-known types of inconsistencies that can be described more concisely.

Theological

Jewish scholars divide the Hebrew Bible into words of God and words about God, where only the Torah is the literal word of God, dictated to Moses on Sinai, the prophets were inspired by God, but their words are not the direct words of God himself, and Writings (the category which includes books such as Lamentations and Chronicles) words about God. Christianity inherited from Judaism the belief in the direct divine origin of the Pentateuch; some congregations, notably the Catholic Church, follow Jewish thinking in describing certain books as apocrypha (although these are not the books that the Hebrew Bible calls the Writings, nor do all churches regard the same list of books as apocryphal).

Christian theological approaches to biblical consistency can be broadly divided between inerrancy and infallibility. The former holds that the true, original biblical text is without error. Its more erudite proponents, such as Gleason Archer, allow that textual scholarship and an understanding of the historical context of individual passages is necessary to establish that reading. At a more populist level, inerrantists sometimes simply hold that the Bible is true, without showing any awareness of questions of canon, transmission, or context.

The infallibility approach avoids many of the pitfalls of inerrancy by holding that the Bible is without error only in matters essential to salvation, and that the guidance of the Church is necessary for to the correct interpretation of difficult passages such as apparent inconsistencies. Mainstream non-Catholic churches such as the Lutheran and Anglican communions follow a broadly similar approach, but without recourse to any equivalent of the Catholic magisterium.

Secular

Since the 18th century, biblical scholars—most of them practicing Christians or Jews, and few of whom would call themselves "secular scholars"—have studied the inconsistencies in and between texts and canons as a means by which certain truths about the biblical text and the societies which created them, can be studied. The field has been immensely fruitful, giving rise to theories such as the documentary hypothesis and the Deuteronomistic history (concerning the origins of the Torah and the history of Israel contained in the books from Joshua to Kings respectively, and similar theories to explain the Synoptic problem (the inter-relationship of the first three Gospels). Biblical scholarship produces few certainties—to this day no-one is quite sure of the relationship between the Samaritan Pentateuch and the more familiar Masoretic text, or the answer to such rather dry questions as whether ancient Hebrew was or was not divided into dialects.

Old Testament

Torah

See also: Documentary hypothesis

Some modern scholars attribute perceived Old Testament inconsistency to the documentary hypothesis, arguing repetitions and contradictions are the result of texts that have been woven together from diverse sources written by different authors at different times. Joseph Jensen wrote, "no better explanation has as yet been found of the complexities of composition of the Pentateuch, and it continues to command a good consensus among scholars".

According to Ronald Witherup, "A good example is the approach to Genesis 1-2 in what most scholars view as two separate stories of creation written by different authors in different time periods. Most biblical scholars accept Genesis 1 as originating around the sixth century B.C. with a group of scribes who were concerned about the preservation of the liturgical traditions of the Jews (thus the concern for the seven-day schema of creation and the notion of the sabbath). Genesis 2, on the other hand, originates from an earlier, more primitive tradition dated to around the tenth century B.C. Fundamentalist, however, do not view the two stories as separate, the first one (Gen 1:1-2:4) being poetic and the second one (Gen 2:4-25) being more anthropomorphic, i.e., describing God in very human terms as a divine sculptor who forms the first human being out of dust. For fundamentalists, this is not a second story of creation but merely 'further detail' about the story of creation. This makes the differences in the accounts only apparent rather than substantive."

New Testament

The New Testament has been preserved in three major manuscript traditions: the 4th century BCE Alexandrian text-type; the Western text-type, also very early but prone to paraphrase and other corruptions; and the Byzantine text-type, which makes up around 95% of all manuscripts, the majority comparatively very late in the tradition. Scholars regard the Alexandrian text-type as generally more authoritative when treating textual variations. The majority of differences are minor - matters such as variant spellings - although at a few points the oldest manuscripts show important inconsistencies compared with the more recent ones: these include the absence of Mark 16, describing Jesus' post-resurrection appearances, from the Gospel of Mark; the absence from the John of the story of the woman taken in adultery; the ending of John, describing that Gospel's third post-resurrection appearance of Jesus; and an explicit reference to the Trinity in 1 John (the Comma Johanneum).

All major modern Christian communions accept a uniform canon of 27 books, although a few small and isolated communities have either fewer or more. Nevertheless, the idea of a complete and clear-cut canon of the New Testament existing from Apostolic times has no foundation in history, and the canon of the New Testament, like that of the Old, is the result of a historical process. The very idea of a closed canon did not exist prior to the 2nd century, when it became necessary to counter popular heresies such as Marcionism. By the end of the fourth century unanimity had been achieved in the West concerning the New Testament canon as it is today, and by the fifth century most of the East had come into harmony by accepting the Book of Revelation. Nonetheless, a full dogmatic articulation of the canon for Roman Catholicism was not made until the Council of Trent of 1546, as until then the authority of the Scriptures was not considered to be higher than that of Sacred Tradition, papal bulls, and ecumenical councils. Martin Luther revived the antilegomena dispute by suggesting the removal of Jude, James, Hebrews, and Revelation; this was not generally accepted by his followers, but these books are still ordered last in the German-language Luther Bible. The canons of other important communions were defined in the Thirty-Nine Articles of 1563 for the Church of England, the Westminster Confession of Faith of 1647 for Calvinism, and the Synod of Jerusalem of 1672 for the Greek Orthodox.

Internal consistency

The number of perceived inconsistencies in the biblical narratives is immense—Gleason Archer's encyclopedic work on the subject (from an inerrantist position) runs to almost 500 pages. Some concern plot (e.g. the question of which day of the week Jesus was crucified), some are arithmetical (the question of Noah's age after the Flood), some theological (why is there so much killing mentioned in the Bible and how does this square with "Thou shalt not kill"?).

Biblical scholar Bruce M. Metzger makes mention of several internal inconsistencies within the New Testament in which later scribes attempted to correct

In the earlier manuscripts of Mark 1:2, the composite quotation from Malachi 3:1 and Isaiah 26:3 is introduced by the formula "As it is written in Isaiah the Prophet". Later scribes, sensing this involves a difficulty replaced "As it is written in Isaiah the Prophet" with the general statement "As it is written in the prophets". Since the quotation which Matthew(27:9) attributes to the prophet Jeremiah actually comes from Zechariah(11:12f), it is not surprising that some scribes sought to mend the error either by substituting the correct name or by omitting the name altogether. A few scribes attempted to harmonize the Johannine account of the chronology of the Passion with that in Mark by changing ’sixth hour’ of John 14:14 to ‘third hour’ (which appears in Mark 15:25). At John 1:28 Origen altered Bethany to Bethabara in order to remove what he regarded as a geographical difficulty, and this reading is extant today in MSS. 33 69 and many others, including those which lie behind the King James version. The statement in Mark 8:31, that ‘the Son of man must suffer many things…and be killed and aftee: three days rise again’, seems to involve a chronological difficulty, and some copyists changed the phrase to the more familiar expression, ‘on the third day’ . The author of the Epistle to the Hebrews places the golden altar of incense in the Holy of Holies (Heb. 9:4), which is contrary to the Old Testament description of the Tabernacle (Exod. 30:1-6). The scribe of Codex Vaticanus and the translator of the Ethiopic version correct the account by transferring the words to 9:2, where the furniture of the Holy Place is itemized.

In the second century CE, Tatian, produced a gospel text called Diatessaron by weaving together all four gospels into one. The gospel compilation eliminated all the discrepancies that exist between the four gospels. For example, it omits the conflicting genealogies in Matthew and Luke. In order to fit all the canonical material in, Tatian created his own narrative sequence, which is different from both the synoptic sequence and John's sequence.

The Gospels

Scholarly debate exists over whether there are inconsistencies both among the three Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke), and between the Synoptic Gospels and the Gospel of John, or whether harmonisation of the Gospel narratives is possible through the use of grammatico-historical exegesis.

Grammatico-historical exegesis is determining the meaning of scripture by understanding the author's environment outside the Bible, as well as the scripture itself. R. T. France states this form of exegesis involves the "fullest possible use of linguistic, literary, historical, archaeological, and other data bearing on that author's environment".

France, regarding the "distinctive contribution" of each of the four gospels, commented, "In accepting that God intended his church to have four Gospels, not just one, Christians have also recognized that each has something different to say about Jesus. It is only after we have listened to each in its individuality that we can hope to gain the full richness which comes from the 'stereoscopic' vision of Jesus as seen through four different pairs of eyes!"

The Two-source Hypothesis remains the most popular explanation for the origins of the synoptic gospels: according to this, there are two sources, the Gospel of Mark and a lost, hypothetical sayings collection called Q (see also, other hypotheses). However, the Two-source Hypothesis is not without its problems.

David Brown of the Jamieson-Fausset-Brown Bible Commentary, recognising the differences in the writing styles of the Gospel of Matthew and Gospel of Luke, attributed the differences to Matthew's background as tax gatherer and Luke's background as a physician. He explained how he felt Matthew's background helped him write in "strikingly Jewish character and coloring", while selected facts, prominent points, and thought and phraseology cast "all bespeak the Jewish point of view from which it was written and to which it was directed". Brown called Luke's "classical style" of Greek writing, "just what might have been expected from an educated Greek and travelled physician". He suggested Luke's "wonderful flexibility of style" demonstrated a "fluency in classical Greek [which] confirms his Gentile origin" while writing "Jewish Greek as one would do who had never been out of Palestine or mixed with any but Jews". In his view, the Gospels' genuineness was "attested by a mass of evidence, external and internal, altogether unparalleled and quite overpowering" which "no work of classical antiquity, even the most undoubted, is half so well attested, or can lay claim, one might say, to a tithe of the evidence which the Gospels possess". He went on to say this evidence included "the Jewish Greek in which they are written, and which could have been written only in the first century", "the accurate and numerous incidental allusions which they make to the geography and topography of Palestine", "the mixed political condition of the people, their manners and customs, religious principles, observances and prejudices, and the sects and parties into which they were divided", and "by the great number of undesigned coincidences between them".

Examples

Gospels

Internal consistency within the synoptic gospels has been analysed by many scholars. One topic of concern is the nativity narratives found in the Gospel of Matthew (1:1-6 Matthew 1:1–6) and the Gospel of Luke (3:32-34 Luke 3:32–34), with criticism encompassing both the differences and the similarities between the two narratives.

One example of a perceived conflict is where Matthew and Luke give a genealogy of Jesus, but the names, and even the number of generations, differ between the two. Apologist commentaries have suggested that the differences are the result of two different lineages, Matthew's from King David's son, Solomon, to Jacob, father of Joseph, and Luke's from King David's other son, Nathan, to Heli, father of Mary and father-in-law of Joseph. However, the scholar Geza Vermes points out that Luke makes no mention of Mary, and questions what purpose a maternal genealogy would serve in a Jewish setting.

In Ethics, Dietrich Bonhoeffer pointed out another perceived conflict, between 12:30 Matthew 12:30/11:23 Luke 11:23 ("He who is not with Me is against Me; and he who does not gather with Me scatters") and 9:40 Mark 9:40/9:50 Luke 9:50 ("For he who is not against us [you] is for us [you]"). Bonhoeffer called these two sayings "the claim to exclusiveness and the claim to totality". He argued that both are necessary and that "The cross of Christ makes both sayings true." D.A. Carson commented similarly, adding he thought there are two different contexts where 9:40 Mark 9:40/9:50 Luke 9:50 describe the attitude listeners are to have to other possible disciples: when in doubt, be inclusive, while 12:30 Matthew 12:30/11:23 Luke 11:23 describe the standard listeners should apply to themselves: be in no doubt of one's own standing. Other commentaries argue that, juxtaposed, the sayings declare the impossibility of neutrality.

Modern New Testament scholarship tends to view these not as separate statements, but rather one statement that has either been preserved in two different forms, or which has been altered by the Gospel writers to present a point of view expressing the needs of the Christian community at the time. The Gospel of Mark, generally considered the earliest of the Gospels, presents the 'inclusive' formulation, in association with an account of Jesus rebuking his followers for stopping someone from carrying out exorcisms in his name. The Gospel of Matthew has the other, 'exclusive' version, preceded by a story about a strong man; the Gospel of Mark also includes this story, but without the concluding observation. The Luke version presents both versions. There is still lively discussion about which version is the more authentic.

The Acts of the Apostles

According Catholic Encyclopedia, Acts, which "uniformly employs the first person plural" point of view, is attributed as the "work of one author", Luke, "as is clear from Tradition, internal evidence in the Acts themselves, and in their relation to the third Gospel".

The Voice on the Damascus Road

In the "Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties", Archer examines two verses in Acts which are sometimes perceived as a contradiction:

9:7 Acts 9:7 "The men who travelled with him stood speechless, hearing the voice but seeing no one"

22:9 Acts 22:9 "And those who were with me saw the light, to be sure, but did not understand the voice of the One who was speaking to me"

Archer argues that the original Greek shows "there is no real contradiction between these two statements" because "Greek makes a distinction between hearing a sound as a noise (in which case the verb "to hear" takes the genitive case) and hearing a voice as a thought-conveying message (in which case it takes the accusative)" and "in neither account is it stated that his companions ever heard that Voice in the accusative case". Archer points to similar circumstances where "the crowd who heard the sound of the Father talking to the Son in John 12:28 ... perceived it only as thunder".

Judas Iscariot

See also: Judas Iscariot

In 27:3-8 Matthew 27:3–8, Judas returns the bribe he has been given for handing over Jesus, throwing the money into the temple before he hangs himself. The temple priests, unwilling to return the defiled money to the treasury, use it instead to buy a field known as the Potter's Field, as a plot in which to bury strangers. In 1:18 Acts 1:18, there is no mention of Judas returning the money, and his death is attributed to falling over in this field and his intestines burst out.

Raymond E. Brown puts this forward as an example of an obvious contradiction: "Luke's account of the death of Judas in Acts 1:18 is scarcely reconcilable with Matt 27:3-10." Various attempts at harmonization have been tried since ancient times, although Charles H. Talbert concludes that these are unsuccessful.

Epistles

Main article: Antinomianism

The Tübingen school of historians founded by F. C. Baur holds that in Early Christianity, there was conflict between Pauline Christianity and the Jerusalem Church led by James the Just, Simon Peter, and John the Apostle, the so-called "Jewish Christians" or "Pillars of the Church" In Galatians 2:14, part of the "Incident at Antioch." Paul publicly accused Peter of judaizing.

Although in many places Paul writes that he was an observant Jew, and that Christians should "uphold the Law" (Romans 3:31), Paul, in his Letters, claims several times that believers are saved by the unearned grace of God, not by good works, "lest anyone should boast", and placed a priority on orthodoxy (right belief) before orthopraxy (right practice). The Epistle of James, in contrast states that our good works justify before men, our faith after salvation, and we are to obey the Law of God, that "a person is justified by what he does and not by faith alone", that "faith without works is dead" (James 2:14–26). Historically, the presence of this statement has been difficult for Protestants to reconcile with their belief in salvation by faith alone. Martin Luther even suggested that the Epistle of James might be a forgery, and relegated it to an appendix in his Bible (although he later came to accept its canonicity, see also Antilegomena).

See also

• Biblical criticism
• Biblical literalism
• Biblical manuscript
• Criticism of the Bible
• Criticism of Christianity
• Science and the Bible

For biblical canons:

• Biblical canon
• Development of the Jewish Bible canon
• Development of the Christian Biblical canon

For the consistency between the Hebrew(OT) and Christian(NT) Bibles:

• Biblical law in Christianity
• Christianity and Judaism
• Antinomianism