5. Beginner Bible Course: Does the Bible contradict itself, and is the Bible unscientific?

EPISODE 5. The simple Bible overview of… IS THE BIBLE UNSCIENTIFIC, AND CONTRADICTORY?

One thing that...

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...would-be Bible readers before ever opening the text is they've heard that the book is just chock full of inconsistencies and outright contradictions. A contradiction is when two things cannot be both true at the same time. In the last podcast I gave you six criteria for how various books, one of the books got into the new Testament. One of those tests was accuracy. It could not contradict with itself or other books in the scriptures. In our last podcast together. I suggested to you that if one of my students was writing about the death of Abraham Lincoln and she put it in two different dates, I would circle that and say, get your facts straight.

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For example, if in one place they said he died on April 14th, 1865, and a few paragraphs later stated he died on April 15th, 1865. I would circle those two dates and say, get your facts together. They're examples much like that. Illustration in the Bible. One classic one is Jesus discipled, Judas, and how his life ended. The gospel writer, Matthew in chapter 27, said Judas went out and hanged himself. The gospel writer, Luke, in his second volume, the book of acts chapter one said falling headlong, Judas burst in the middle in his bowels, gushed out.

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Matthew makes it sound like suicide by hanging Luke Bates. It sounded more like splatter side that he jumped off a high place. I asked my students two questions. When we get to this example, the first question is could both Matthew and Luke B. Correct? And I get some amazing answers back. Is it possible that Judas could have hanged himself and also had his vowels gush out? My students have some amazing answers. One says, Mr. Nelson, he could have jumped off a high place with a rope around his neck and the rope broke and he fell the rest of the way and splash another student suggests maybe hung himself in to, he hung there a while.

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And you know how animals get when they lay at the side of a hot road, they kind of blow up like balloons. Those are insightful possibilities could either of those have happened. Could both Matthew and Luke be accurate. Could Matthew be looking at the instigation of his suicide attempt and Luke at the conclusion of it. But I have a bigger question for my students. Question number two, students, if you are the new Testament writers, Matthew and Luke, and you were trying to explain to people the death of a key figure in your story, would you put it in such in consistencies? And if you are the council's deciding those books should both get in to the new Testament, document, the breed out word of God, wouldn't you and maybe clean those facts a little bit.

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And if you are the committed, copyists copying that letter by letter for a long, long time, almost 1500 years, don't you think maybe you would have found some way to edit that out. I've criss crossed the old and new Testament for over four decades and I've found a number of these prickly passages. I don't like to call them contradictions because I don't believe they were. I call them difficult passages. And as we'll see in a few podcasts, there's a reason that I, or even you might not be able to understand everything in God's breathed out word. And since I'm on the subject of things that trip people up, so they don't open the Bible.

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Let's talk about this prickly issue is the Bible on scientific. It depends on what you mean by that. Do you mean that the Bible is primarily a scientific journal or manual? The answer is categorically know the Bible is full of a number of styles of literature, history, poetry, proverb, prophecy, and the number more in most passages. The intent of God and the human writer is not to be scientific, but when the Bible comments on a scientific fact, it should get it right. And I believe it does. I'm going to read you something. I read to my students on just one area of science.

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If you'll pardon the quote in the 17th century, men like Kepler and Galileo gave birth to modern astronomy, especially the discovery of the infinite size and variety of the universe. But the Bible says that in Jobe, the vast distances of the universe, Jeremiah adds the infinite expanse of the universe and the infinite number of stars. By the way, Kepler said there were 1055 stars. In first Corinthians 15, we read that every star is different. Jeremiah 31 tells us the absolute orbit of planets is constant. Psalm. 19 tells us the sun moves in orbit through space.

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This shock scholars, until it was recently discovered that the sun along with our entire solar system is moving at 72,000 miles per hour through a gigantic orbit. That takes 2 million centuries to complete Joe bads in chapter 25, the moon is not self illuminating. We could go scientific area by scientific area geodesy meteorology physiology. And when the Bible mentions those things points to things in God's creation, it gets it right. One would hope. So if this is an owner's manual written by God who designed it, he should get it right.

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God in the human writers can get it right. But sometimes we, the readers can get it wrong, very wrong for several reasons. How can we get it wrong? Even if everybody who put the Bible together. Got it. Right. I'm going to try answer that question in my next wordpicture.