Christian Apologist on How to Handle Contradictions in Bible
There are what appear to be contradictions, some irreconcilable, in the Bible, but there are ways to handle them in an honest way, says Michael Brown, a Messianic Jewish apologist and host of the talk radio show "The Line of Fire."
"First thing, don't stick your head in the sand as if they don't exist," says Brown, the president of FIRE School of Ministry, in the latest episode of his show, "How Do We Explain Bible Contradictions?"
"Second thing, don't pull your hair out as if it's the end of the world," Brown suggests.
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We should look to see if there's a textual or manuscript issue, he says.
"Could it be that a predominant number of manuscripts repeat a wrong number or an error that easily crept in, and other manuscripts indicate that that's not the original text. … Sometimes, the contradictions disappear just like that," he explains.
Another way to look at it is, he adds, "sometimes there's an overall harmony even if the details we can't quite bring together."
"You often find this when people give an eyewitness account of what happened at an accident in a street corner, and they are all in different places," Brown says, explaining that it's all accurate but also a little different because of the perspective of the witnesses. Similarly, "the overall picture is the same" in the Bible, he adds.
Then, there are time when an apparent contradiction is simply a matter of rounding off numbers, Brown goes on to say. For example, "there's a New Testament account that, one says, this is on the six days, another says on the eighth day, talking about the same thing." The number days could depend on whether you include the day you're counting something on and the day something happened.
We also have to see why the editors have put these apparent contradictions side by side, he adds.
Then there are some accounts, he continues, "where I can't reconcile" because the contradiction seems really blatant, but that is a "tiny, tiny minority of the overall apparent contradictions."
"How I handle those personally? I let them sit with tension," he says.
"I believe them both. And when we get more information, we'll be able to resolve them the way we've resolved the rest, because I have an overall confidence in the authority of the Scripture, I have overall confidence in the reliability of the Scripture, not just by faith but by decades of academic study."
He concludes by saying, "Right now, we can live with that minor tension."
