Internal consistency of the Bible

Classic texts that discuss questions of inconsistency from a critical secular perspective include the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus by Baruch Spinoza, the Dictionnaire philosophique of Voltaire, the Encyclopédie of Denis Diderot and The Age of Reason by Thomas Paine.

[18] Justin Martyr, a 2nd-century Christian writer, declared the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible generally preferred in the early Church, to be "completely free of errors".

[23] German Lutheran theologian Andreas Osiander took a different view, proposing in Harmonia evangelica (1537) a number of attempted harmonisations, including the suggestion that Jesus must have been crowned with thorns twice, and that there were three separate episodes of cleansing of the Temple.

[24] Modern Christian approaches to biblical consistency are reminiscent of the split between Luther and Osiander, and can be broadly divided between inerrancy and infallibility.

The infallibility approach followed by some theologians and scholars, primarily of the Catholic and Anglican churches, and some mainline Protestant denominations, avoids many of the pitfalls of inerrancy by holding that the Bible is without error only in matters essential to salvation,[26] and that guidance is necessary for the correct interpretation of apparent inconsistencies; the latter part being common to all Orthodox and Catholic Christians, regardless of views of biblical inerrancy, being the primary role of the magisterium.

According to Roman Catholic biblical scholar Raymond E. Brown, this approach found expression in Dei verbum, one of the documents adopted at the Second Vatican Council, which stated that scripture teaches "solidly, faithfully and without error that truth which God wanted put into sacred writings for the sake of salvation,"[27] meaning that Scripture is inerrant only "to the extent to which it conforms to the salvific purpose of God,"[28][29] without necessarily being reliable on matters such as paleontology or political history; this view is challenged by some conservative Catholic scholars.

The theme of tahrif was first explored in the writings of Ibn Hazm (10th century), who rejected claims of Mosaic authorship and posited that Ezra was the author of the Torah.

Ibn Hazm's arguments had a major impact upon Muslim literature and scholars, and these and other polemical ideas were modified only slightly by some later authors.

[37] The 14th-century commentator Ibn Khaldun argued in the Muqaddimah (Introduction) that no distortion had taken place: "the statement concerning the alteration is unacceptable to thorough scholars and cannot be understood in its plain meaning".

[citation needed] The contents of canons have varied over time, books regarded as authoritative by some Christians at some points in history being excluded from the collections of later communities—this was the fate of the many apocryphal Gospels from the first few centuries of the Church (the Gospel of Thomas is an example); books long regarded as canonical in one branch of Christianity may be dropped by others on doctrinal grounds (the fate of the deuterocanonical books, canonical in the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Church but repudiated by the Protestants because they are not included in the Hebrew Bible[45] and supported doctrines to which the Protestant reformers objected such as the intercession of saints, purgatory, prayers for the dead etc.

Writers such as M. N. Ralph say that in reading the Gospels one will be struck by "a great deal of evidence" that they are compilations inherited from written and oral sources "rather than eyewitness accounts".

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 that bears explicit witness to the doctrine of the Christian Trinity, which is found written only in Latin in the 4th century at the earliest, but is not observed in any Greek manuscripts prior to 1215.

Since the location of God's holy site is probably the central original difference between Judaism and Samaritanism, it makes sense that this passage is in one version and not the other.

[62] The Oxford Bible Commentary notes that: as has long been recognized, there remain a number of variations or inconsistencies of detail, which suggests that two or more accounts have been combined.

"[65] Levy also suggests that "Torah scrolls remain prized and frequently used ritual objects, and scribes have continually worked as carefully as possible to copy them, always holding dear the belief that they were producing as accurate and correct a text as they could.

For examples of such mistakes, Cherry notes that, in the Cain and Abel story, where 'sin' is mentioned, "sin (chatat) is feminine, but the predicate is masculine".

[69] Despite the lack of a single unifying theology, common themes recur, including (although no list can be exhaustive) monotheism, the divine origins of human morality, God's election of a chosen people, the idea of the coming Messiah, and the concepts of sin, faithfulness, and redemption.

[74] Sixteen New Testament verses in the King James Version (published in 1611) are not included in more modern English translations, as scholars believe they were later additions to the text.

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 Presbyterianism, and the Synod of Jerusalem of 1672 for the Greek Orthodox.

Biblical scholar Bruce M. Metzger mentions several internal inconsistencies in the New Testament in earlier manuscripts that later scribes attempted to correct:[75]

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.

[84] W. D. Davies and E. P. Sanders claim that: "on many points, especially about Jesus' early life, the evangelists were ignorant ... they simply did not know, and, guided by rumour, hope or supposition, did the best they could".

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".

[98] However, Geza Vermes points out that Luke makes no mention of Mary, and questions what purpose a maternal genealogy would serve in a Jewish setting.

There is still lively discussion about which version is the more authentic;[104][105] Barton and Muddiman cite inconsistencies between the gospel writers about what happened at Christ's tomb.

[106] Raymond E. Brown notes the apparent disagreements between the New Testament books in reporting the words of Jesus concerning his prediction of the destruction of the Temple.

[112] 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".

[113] In Matthew 27:3–8, Judas returns the bribe Christians believe he had immorally accepted for handing over Jesus, throwing the money into the temple before hanging himself.

Martin Luther, for example, asserted that the Epistle of James might be a forgery, and relegated it to an appendix in his Bible (although he later accepted its canonicity – see Antilegomena).

[130][131][132] One Christian view is that Jesus mediates a New Covenant relationship between God and his followers and abolished the Mosaic laws, according to the New Testament (Hebrews 10:15–18; Gal 3:23–25; 2 Cor 3:7–17; Eph 2:15; Heb 8:13, Rom 7:6 etc.).