Board index ‹ Specific Bible verses, texts, and passages ‹ Luke

[1.62]

I am glad to hear you clarify the archaeological comment.

Also please notice that the example, (Judas and the field of blood), I gave in my previous reply was a quote from the 1st chapter of the 1868 book and I was not actually making a claim for a biblical contradiction. I only included it for your convenience, to allow you to show me where there was disputable archaeological evidence, which you have since clarified.

I am, however, disappointed that someone who is devoted and good-hearted and willing to go to the lengths to thoroughly answer strangers' questions to hear you say the bible is void of contradictions. That is exactly what ignorant (not in a mean way) believers say, who themselves, have no justified reason to hold that kind of belief. It's like me saying I believe there's a pound of blueberries in my fridge. I don't know of anyone buying blueberries nor have there ever been blueberries in my house. So, do I actually have any warrantable reason for believing that to be the case? Without justification it is meaningless. Let's suppose there turns out to be a pound of blueberries in the fridge after all??? Did I know it? No. This is one of those rare Gettier cases. What if I said it was a miracle; would it be? No, it would only be coincidence. There are plenty of natural causes for blueberries arriving within my refrigerator.

Much the same for you claiming that the bible is error-free. That is almost claiming you have no idea of how the bible was put together or even what it is. You are making a claim for which you do not have knowledge, just faith. And that brings me back to what it means to have a meaningful conversation. Once you inject, sneak in, or allude to faith as your reasoning then you have abandoned what could have been an open, honest and meaningful conversation.

Without any original writing to compare it to you cannot say the bible is error-free. No one can know this. Now I could be wrong because you might have evidence that you would like to share, I'm open to that. But that burden is upon you.

[jimwalton]

Thanks for the reply, but we seem to be miscommunication. I was talking about veridical contradictions, and you seem to be talking about belief ("It's like me saying I believe there's a pound of blueberries in my fridge"). Then you talk about "warrantable reason" and justification, miracles, and coincidence. I'll honestly admit, I'm lost. What I was saying is that most alleged Bible contradictions are copying discrepancies, not authentic contradictions—that if we got the authors to sit down at a table and talk, we would discover after a little conversation that they really do agree, and thus not a genuine contradiction, but either a copying discrepancy, a difference of perspective, or a variation in purpose. But these aren't really contradictions. What I was NOT saying is that I believe these things contrary to evidence or reason (natural causes) that creates a different reality from what I believe. We seem to be talking about two different things.

As far as how the Bible came together, I am deeply aware of the process and the history. I have plenty of knowledge about it, and actually faith only plays into this picture in the smallest way. Mostly it's a matter of processes known to us to some extent by history. I never, as you claimed, "allude[d] to faith as [my] reasoning." I don't know where this thought even came from.

> Without any original writing to compare it to you cannot say the bible is error free

This is a much more difficult claim for the OT, since we are much further removed from the original manuscripts, but since there is so much agreement between the manuscripts we DO have, and we know about the processes of transmission. On those bases, it's fairly safe to say what we have is reasonably close to the originals.

In the case of the NT, we have such an abundance of manuscripts so very close to the originals that we can say with great confidence that we have better than a 98% accurate text.

It's based on those two realities that I can say, having defined terms, that the Bible is without contradiction. You'll notice that I never said it was "error free"—I didn't use that term; you brought it out of your brain, not my writing. In other words, I'm confused. You're talking about faith over reason and error-free-ness, when I was talking about an absence of contradiction based on the true meanings of the texts—completely different conversations.