ALLEGED DISCREPANCIES IN THE BIBLE

ORIGINS OF THE ALLEGED DISCREPANCIES

INTRODUCTION

[John W. Haley states, "Alleged Discrepancies of the Bible", Whitaker House, New Kensington, Pa, 1992., pp. 1]:

"God reveals Himself in his word, as He does in His works. In both we see a self-revealing, self-concealing God, who makes Himself known only to those who earnestly seek Him; in both we find stimulants to faith and occasions for unbelief; in both we find [supposed]contradictions, whose higher harmony is hidden, except from him who gives up his whole mind in reverence; in both, in a word, it is a law of revelation that the heart of man should be tested in receiving it; and that in the spiritual life, as well as in the bodily, man must eat his bread in the sweat of his brow."

Keep in mind that since the Fall, the mentality of men is contaminated with unrealistic thinking which will conclude that what God has said in His Word is contradictory. Until the mind of depraved man is renewed unto the way God thinks which is true reality then man is going to see discrepancies and contradictions where they do not exist.

DIFFERENCES IN TIME MUST BE TAKEN INTO ACCOUNT

[Haley, cont. p. 3]:

"Many of the so-called discrepancies are obviously attributable to a difference in the dates of the discordant passages. Nothing is more common than that a description or statement, true and pertinent at one time, should at a later period, and in a different state of affairs, be found irrelevant or inaccurate. Change of circumstances necessitates a change of phraseology...

[For example]

A certain infidel, bent upon making the Bible contradict itself, contrasts the two passages: 'God say everything that He had made, and, behold, it was very good'; and 'It repented the LORD that He had made man on the earth, and it grieved Him at His heart.' [Gen 1:31 & 6:6]

Taking these texts out of their connection, and, with characteristic [un]fairness, making no mention of the interval of time which divided them, he thus seeks to make it appear that the Bible represents God as, at the same time, satisfied and dissatisfied with His works. Had the unscrupuoous pamphleteer told his readers that the fall of man and a period of some fifteen hundred years intervened between the two epochs respectively referred to in these texts, his 'discrepancy' would have become too transparent to serve his purpose.

Obviously, after man had fallen, God could no longer be 'satisfied' with him, unless a corresponding change had taken place in himself. We thus see that difference of date and circumstances may perfectly explain apparent discrepancies, and remove every vestige of contradiction."

DIFFERENCES IN PHRASEOLOGY DO NOT PROVE OUT REAL DISCREPANCIES

[Haley, cont. p. 6]:

"With regard to utterances clearly referable to inspired sources, yet which apparently disagree, several things are to be noticed:

...The same idea, in substance, may be couched in several different forms of phraseology. Thus we may vary the Mosaic prohibition of murder: 'Thou shalt not kill'; 'Do not kill'; 'Thou shalt do no murder.' Any one of these statements is sufficiently exact. No one of them would be regarded by any sensible person as a misstatement of the precept. They all convey substantially the same idea..."

CONTRACTIONS OFTEN CAUSED COPYIST ERRORS

[Haley, cont.]:

"...The frequent use of contractions in writing [i.e., using short form of words omitting letters oftenreplaced by an apostrophe or other mark] was a very common source of errors; for many of these abbreviations were extremely complicated, obscure, and ambiguous, so that an unskilful copyist was very likely to mistake one word for another."

NUMBERS IN THE ORIGINAL ANCIENT LANGUAGES OF THE BIBLE WERE SUSCEPTIBLE TO COPYIST ERRORS

[Haley, cont., p. 24];

"No parts of ancient books have suffered so much from errors of inadvertency as those which relate to numbers; for as one numeral letter was easily mistaken for another, and as neither the sense of the passage, nor the rules of orthogrphy nor of syntax, suggested the genuine reading, when once an error had arisen, it would most often be perpetuated, without remedy. It is, therefore almost always unsafe to rest the stress of an argument upon any statement of numbers in ancient writers, unless some correlative computation confirms the reading of the text. Hence nothing can be more frivolous or unfair than to raise an objection against the veracity or accuracy of an historian, upon some apparent incompatability in his statement of numbers. Difficulties of this sort it is much better to attribute, at once, to a corruption of the text, than to discuss them with ill-spent assiduity."

IMAGINATION OF THE CRITIC RATHER THAN THE TEXT OF THE BIBLE ITSELF IS THE SOURCE OF MANY SO CALLED DISCREPANCIES

[Haley, op. cit., pp. 25, 29]:

"Multitudes of alleged discrepancies are the product of the imagination of the critic, influenced to a greater or less degree by dogmatic prejudice....

A careful and protracted examination of the works of numerous authors, who from various positions and under various pretences assail the Bible, warrants, as neither unjust nor uncharitable, the remark that a large portion of their alleged 'discrepancies' are purely subjective - originating, primarily, not in the sacred books, but in the misguided prejudices and disordered imagination of the critic."

CRITICS OFTEN USE THE TACTIC OF IGNORING ANY RESPONSE TO THE ACCUSATION OF A DISCREPANCY AND THEN REPEATING IT ALL OVER AGAIN AS IF THERE WAS NO EVIDENCE PRESENTED AGAINST IT AT ALL

[Haley, op. cit. p. 26]:

"'Pertness and ignorance,' says Bishop Horne, 'may ask a question in three lines which it will cost learning and ingenuity thirty pages to answer; and when this is done, the same question shall be triumphantly asked again the next year, as if nothing had ever been written on the subject.' Often, when fairly answered and refuted, these authors remind us of the homely old maxim:

'A man convinced against his will, is of the same opinion still.'

SIMILAR EVENTS ARE NOT NECESSARILY IDENTICAL

[Haley, op. cit., p. 26]:

A favorite [but false] exegetical principle adopted by some of these critics appears to be, that similar events are necessarily identical.

NOT INCLUDING ALL DETAILS IS NOT A DISCREPANCY

[Haley, op. cit., p. 29]:

"We might also have adduced the very great compression of the narrative [especially referring the the gospels - that they are indeed compressed, not intending to include all details] as a fruitful source of apparent incongruities. Such was the condensation which the writers were constrained to employ, that, in any given case, only a few of the more salient circumstances could be introduced. Had the sacred historians undertaken to relate every circumstance, the Bible, instead of being comprised in a single volume, would have filled many volumes, and would consequently have proved unwieldy, and well nigh useless to mankind.

If 'the world itself could not contain the books' which should minutely detail all our Saviour's acts, how much less could it 'contain' those which should narrate circumstantially the history of all the important personages mentioned in the scriptures."

WHY HAS GOD PERMITTED ALLEGED DISCREPANCIES IN THE BIBLE TO PREVAIL?

[Haley, op. cit., p. 30-]:

"They were doubtless intended as a stimulous to the human intellect, as provocative of mental effort. They serve to awaken curiosity and to appeal to the love of novelty.

The [so called] discrepancies of the sacred volume have played no insignificant part in this incitement of mental action. Though but a subordinate characteristic, they have prompted men to 'search the scriptures,' and to ask: How are these difficulties to be resolved? Things which are 'hard to be understood,' present special attractions to the inquiring mind. Professor Park observes, in an admirable essay on the choice of Texts, 'Sometimes a deeper interest is awakened by examining two or more passages which appear to contradict each other than by examining two or more which resemble each other...

Whately says: 'The seeming contradictions in scripture are too numerous not to be the result of design; and doubtless were designed, not as mere difficulties to try our faith and patience, but as furnishing the most suitable mode of instruction that could have been devised, by mutually explaining and modifying or limiting or extending one another's meaning.'

Elsewhere, urging the same thought, he observes: 'Instructions thus conveyed are evidently more striking and more likely to arouse the attention; and also, from the very circumstance that they call for careful reflection, more likely to make a lasting impression'...

Says Professor Stuart: 'In the early part of my biblical studies, some thirty to thirty-five years ago, when I first began the critical investigation of the scriptures, doubts and difficulties started up on every side... Time, patience, continued study, a better acquaintance with the original scriptural languages and the countries where the sacred books were written, have scattered to the winds nearly all these doubts.'