Contradictions in the Bible

For a supposedly error-free book supposedly written under the influence of a supposedly perfect God who supposedly wants everyone to know the truth, the Bible sure contradicts itself a lot.

When the Bible contradicts what we know about reality, Bible believers have the option of denying those inconvenient facts. But when the Bible contradicts itself, the only thing that can be wrong is the Bible.

And the Bible does contradict itself, constantly. On this blog, I plan to write about hundreds of biblical contradictions,1 many of which you won’t find documented anywhere else.

Here are all the biblical contradictions (questions that the Bible answers in multiple incompatible ways) that I’ve written about so far. I will be adding a new one every two weeks.

Resolving contradictions?

If you think you can resolve any of these contradictions, feel free to leave a comment explaining how you think it’s possible for everything the Bible says on the subject to be true. If I’m convinced that you’ve completely explained away the contradiction and it’s really not a contradiction at all, I’ll delete that contradiction from my blog.

If I find your explanation logically possible but not entirely convincing (especially if it seems implausible, or conflicts with other things the Bible says, or conflicts with common Christian beliefs), I will leave the post up, but add a note about your possible explanation at the end. If I find that your explanation fails to resolve the contradiction at all, I may list it as a non-explanation. If you claim that the Bible means something completely different from what it says, I’m probably not going to accept that as an explanation.

One popular explanation for the existence of contradictions in the Bible is that it was originally written without errors, but errors have been introduced over time as fallible humans repeatedly made copies and translations of it.2 However, even the oldest Biblical manuscripts that still exist are full of contradictions and falsehoods.

We have no evidence that any error-free versions of the Bible ever existed. And even if they did exist in the past, they can’t do us any good now that we don’t have access to those versions anymore. All we have now is a Bible that is clearly far from being free of errors, so we shouldn’t be treating this Bible as if it was a reliable source of information.

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