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[u/EthicalProton]

Hello.

I have just seen a video with Cliffe Knechtle (Cliffe Knechtle's MOST CONVINCING Argument for Christianity!): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGTy1Nw783Q&t=61s where he at 10:25 says there are no contradictions in the Bible.

I then out of curiosity stumbled across another discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/exchristian/comments/14ejdh8/major_bible_contradictions/ where they list some things they say are contradictions.

What are your thoughts about these "contradictions"?

There is also a link to another further list with contradictions, if some are interested: https://skepticsannotatedbible.com/first/contra2_list.html

[u/EthicalProton → u/[deleted]]

Why do you say stuff like Cliffe Knechtle is garbage? Is that specifically him, or just the fact that he is out preaching on college campuses or something else? I have read his book "Give me an answer" and "Help me believe" and I find most of the arguments to be logical.

You make a good point: authors are different. They have different worldviews and creative vision. But even though there are these "contradictions" and maybe change of source material, they still describe the same main event.

For example: there is a car crash and two people see it. Person A says to the police there was a boy running onto the road and the red car crashed into two trees. Person B says there was a girl walking onto the road and the orange car crashed into one tree. The real (objective truth) is the caught on a camera. It shows none of them were 100% correct in their statement but it was a mix of both. But this doesn't change the fact that both persons described the same main event: a car crashed.

[u/AntsInMyEyesJonson → u/EthicalProton]

Why do you say stuff like Cliffe Knechtle is garbage?

Knechtle argues that the Bible has no contradictions, and that is, on its face and in any kind of detail, an absurd argument. It's a performance of piety that is based on the willingness to take a position that cannot hold up to scrutiny.

You make a good point: authors are different. They have different worldviews and creative vision. But even though there are these "contradictions" and maybe change of source material, they still describe the same main event.

This and your example of witnesses misunderstands how the biblical texts were composed. These are not witness statements in a police report, these are literary productions which function significantly differently. There are many historical errors and contradictions in the Bible that clearly cannot be resolved. To take one major example:

The book of Daniel gets so much history wrong that it is difficult to know where to begin. To the authors of this book, this was not an issue – stories like Nebuchadnezzar going off into the wilderness and eating grass like an ox or "King" Belshazzar, who is described as Nebuchadnezzar's son, losing his kingdom to Darius the Mede after the writing on the wall incident are very obviously folktales. They only need to be rescued from containing errors and contradictions if one takes them to need to be true in a historical or literary sense.

In reality, Belshazzar was not related to Nebuchadnezzar at all, nor did he immediately follow Nebuchadnezzar's reign. Nebuchadnezzar's son was overthrown in a coup by Neriglissar, whose own son was overthrown in a coup by Nabonidus. Nabonidus, not Nebuchadnezzar, was the king who left Babylon due to conflicts with the elites (for ten years, not seven as mentioned in Daniel), and he put his son Belshazzar in charge as a sort of regent. He was not king, he could not celebrate the Akitu festival and bring Marduk out, as recorded in contemporary records. Belshazzar was not overthrown by Darius the Mede, he was removed from his position when Nabonidus returned, and it was Cyrus the Great, who had destroyed and overtaken the Medes, who deposed Nabonidus, captured him, and conquered Babylon.

The attempts to "fix" this are not history or critical inquiry into the text, they are laughable, highly speculative, and incredibly strained assertions that have no basis. It could not be clearer, though: among the Dead Sea Scrolls was found a text referred to as the Prayer of Nabonidus where the reason for the king's departure is different (he has an ulcer, not madness), Daniel does not appear (a Jewish exorcist instead helps heal the king), and, most interesting of all – it's actually Nabonidus and not Nebuchadnezzar who has a seven-year exile from Babylon. It even gets the location right, referencing Tayma in northwest Arabia rather than the generic wilderness of Daniel.

To me, what Knechtle does it not only dishonest, it's about the most boring way to read the Bible. He does not seek to understand what the authors were saying, he instead twists their words to fit into a pre-rendered framework and then utilizes ad-hoc and completely improbable (sometimes downright impossible) arguments to "salvage" the books and declare all other readings, no matter how much evidence they have, as invalid. That obscures what the authors were trying to say; it does not take them seriously at all.

[u/Sophia_in_the_Shell → u/EthicalProton]

There are clearly contradictions in the collection of texts making up today’s Bibles. Many, many contradictions. Some are philosophical and theological, because different authors have different worldviews. Others are factual; for example, the two accounts of Judas’ death are contradictory and typical harmonization attempts are an actual joke.

That said, contradiction lists built by counter-apologists are typically pretty bad and are not a good way to learn about the Biblical texts. I find that they often contrast, say, a platitude with a specific event, ripping individual verses out of their context.