Craig

Let us recognise that there is another elephant in the room, which is whether or not the Bible contains contradictions.

Over the years there have been endless battles about whether or not scripture contains contradictions. But they are fruitless, they are arguments that could only be had by people who are entirely influenced by the need to adhere to standards we only began insisting were important since the industrial revolution. It is only in our era that it is possible to draw battle lines between those who saw the Bible as the literal word of God, by which I mean not only that it was inspired but that it was almost dictated by God, and those who read it differently. They have always been those who felt that this approach to the Bible is far too literal and was in danger of missing out really important truths, but they are all too easily portrayed almost as unbelievers.

So a very well-known example is the fact that Luke’s Gospel and Mark’s Gospel differ in the story they tell about Jesus sending his disciples ahead of him. Jesus lists things they should take and Mark says they should take a staff, whereas Luke tells them not to. Modern conservative scholars, who see this as a potential contradiction, tie themselves into knots in order to deny that the commands are contradictory.

But this is only a problem if we view the Bible as a text which was dictated and recorded as if the writer was hearing from God whilst in something like a trance state. If we understand, and are willing to accept, that it is a human document written by individuals who were either present, or who had heard and remembered the story differently, it is no longer a problem. We can still choose to believe that both gospels are inspired because the message of both Matthew and Luke are essentially the same. Why is it such a big deal?

But the question of contradictions isn’t always that simple. There are quite clearly places where the theology is different in different places. Maybe the theology develops over time and, as we have seen, Jesus was not averse to interpreting key texts in fairly distinct ways. 

It became personal for me as I was coming to terms with my physical disability, having pretty much denied that I was disabled for the first 40 to 50 years of my life. So it was during a very emotionally difficult period that I read the passage in Leviticus 21 where it basically said that physically imperfect people were not allowed to wait on God in the temple. Their physical form was in danger of “desecrating” the sanctuary.

And I could have thrown my Christian faith in the bin if it wasn’t for Jesus at that point. If somebody had insisted to me at that time that this must be what God really thinks because it’s in scripture, I would’ve had no answer for them because I was so emotionally triggered. 

I then had to remind myself of all the times when Jesus met, not just with disabled people, but with people who had fallen foul of all kinds of rules and social norms, whether it be through their own sin or just through misfortune, and I had to dig deep and recognise that those words in Leviticus must have been written by an individual with typical bronze age attitudes about disability, and who also had his own very limited view of God.

So I have to reject the way the writer of Leviticus understood the holiness of God, not because I didn’t like it, but because of what I saw in Jesus. So that scripture, supposedly about God, doesn’t tell me anything about God’s view of disability or imperfection. It tells me about what those particular people at that particular time thought God was like. For me, that was a massive theological leap.

Dave

And the scary thing Craig, is that there are some people who would actually insist it is the way God thinks because it’s in scripture. This indicates how far from my evangelical roots I’ve strayed. For example, let’s think about all the horrible stuff God apparently tells people to do in the Old Testament. It took me a long time to realise that I must accept that there are a contextual and cultural elements that help us to understand these verses.

Back in the day there was this big thing about my God being bigger than your God. And so when events were written about, instead of just saying ‘so we went in and we wiped them out’ they said ‘and God said go in and wipe them out’. The assumption is made that God must have said that he wanted it, because that’s what we are told happened.

And they’re including their opinions whist telling the story of their successes. They’re reading into the events their own conclusion that God is on their side. I remember putting this across to somebody once at a meeting and being asked:

“Are you saying that the Bible writers were lying?”

“No, no. I was saying that the Bible writers were people of their time who wanted to prove that their God was bigger than your God. And the way they did that was by attributing successes in warfare, attributing all sorts of stuff to the blessing, the favour of their God.”

And it’s something that we do have to confront when sometimes we want to read something into the text.

Simon

When we talk about history we may think we know what something means, but if you read a history book you are learning from someone who has read all the documentation and made their best judgement on what they think really happened. So even if they’re judging something that happened in ancient Greek or Roman culture, we expect a historian to do the cultural work, and to protect us from the chaos of all the sources and to give us a definitive story of what really happened. 

When we read history written by Herodotus, he was from one of a number of schools of history, and at the time his was not the biggest. He was in competition with a historian called Thucydides. And Thucydides’ understanding of history was that eyewitnesses are the most important people and the most important thing is therefore to present eyewitness accounts. His history of the Peloponnesian War was done in a really different way to Herodotus. Herodotus gave his definitive account, as if he could see history from a god’s eye view. Thucydides said this is what all of the eyewitnesses say happened and, guess what, it contradicts. A good historian shouldn’t try to harmonise these contradictory accounts because we’ll probably end up erasing the truth.

We know that if we’re talking about what happened at a football match Last Saturday, people tell slightly different stories. We know that in Jesus’ time, which was 400 years, 500 years, after Thucydides, his was still the prevalent view of how you gather evidence. So when we understand that the New Testament was put together by people who prioritised eyewitness accounts and not the opinions of an expert historian, it helps us understand how it was put together. The councils that created the New Testament canon believed that these 27 texts were the only ones written by people who had met Jesus. They were not stupid people, they knew that there were contradictions down to even what day Jesus was crucified, but they were not working by the values of modern history.

We sometimes treat these people as if they were idiots. But they weren’t idiots. They have given us the absolutely best accounts of what really happened. If someone had taken all the four Gospels and smashed them all together to create a single harmonious account (and many people have tried), how on earth would that be closer to reality than what we have, which were considered to be the best eyewitness accounts available? Yes, there are some contradictions, but the fact is that these really serious people knew that there were contradictions. And I honour them for that. I’m so glad that they didn’t try to rub those out. You know, I think we’ve got absolutely brilliant eyewitness accounts in there.

Roy

That’s quite inspiring, I think a lot of people who take a more fundamentalist approach are sometimes afraid to accept that the Bible is full of complexity, ambiguity, contradiction and paradox. But what you’re saying is that we should see the complexities as real gifts because they actually help us to understand a little bit more of the mystery, the majesty and the wonder of what God is about. 

It is a call to us to approach scripture with an understanding that it’s not straightforward, not simplistic, because it’s rich and nuanced. I love what Rowan Williams said about the parts that seem to be contradictions. He’s saying they demand that we approach scripture with an understanding of context, and that we value the traditions that underlie it, accepting the differing perspectives, the paradoxes and ambiguities because they all call us deeper.

An example is the relationship between law and grace. The texts that weave these ideas together may look like contradictions. But to live with uncertainty, and to allow the Spirit to reconcile what seems irreconcilable is what faith is about. 

Craig

Yeah, I agree. And, just to underline the importance of what Simon has just said, until recently I was an appropriate adult in the criminal justice system. And I remember talking to a policeman during one of those many, many hours when we were waiting for a solicitor to arrive, and there were two particular boys who were waiting to be interviewed. Both of them were telling exactly the same story. And the policeman said that’s a potential sign that they’ve agreed beforehand what they’re going to say and that the story might not be true. 

The reality is, if the five of us were together and we viewed an event, maybe an accident we were interviewed separately about, we would all come up with five slightly different accounts because we were standing in different places or noticed or remembered different things. 

Dave

Or our priorities might also be different.

Simon

Sometimes I’m talking to someone who can’t even remember the last sentence I said! How are we supposed to believe that people could remember everything?

It goes without saying that it was a very, very different culture. It was an oral culture, and if a great prophet was coming to town people would be in the frame of mind to remember what he said, so they could recite it later. It’s also very likely that Jesus repeated his messages as he went from village to village. We can see, particularly in the three ‘synoptic’ gospels, Mark and then Matthew and Luke, that the words of Jesus are incredibly well preserved even when Matthew and Luke changed elements of a story they borrow from Mark. They treat the words of Jesus with incredible reverence. So although it’s hard for us to believe that over decades people might remember exactly what Jesus said within that culture, we can have reasonable confidence that people really did remember accurately. It may have been decades before the gospels appeared, but we can see in the way the Gospels are put together that people were reciting those stories. They were telling those stories over and over, especially their story of Holy Week and the crucifixion and resurrection. They’re put together like a kind of passion play that must have been recited over and over again. So even though we’re saying people didn’t have perfect memories, their memories were so much better than ours.