Does the Bible Have Mistakes?

One the most common questions I get about the Bible, when we claim it is the word of God, is whether it has errors or mistakes in it. In fact, you do not have to be in a conversation with your non-Christian friend for more than about five minutes before they make the claim that the Bible has errors, mistakes, and contradictions.

That is an important question and Christians have had a very clear answer to that question. Our belief is that whatever the Bible affirms, since it is the voice of God, it always affirms what is true. This is what we call inerrancy: the belief that the Bible does not claim to say one thing in one place and a contradictory thing in another place. Yet, the charge is often still laid against Christianity that in fact the Bible does disagree with itself.

Any given Christian can not have an answer to every possible objection, but there are some standard responses and approaches. One is that you can ask your non-Christian friend about what contradiction they have studied that they found the most persuasive as a real contradiction. Now, most of the time when you do that, the quick answer that you will receive is that there is not a contradiction that most people have studied that they feel is a real contradiction; rather, it is just a general idea they have about the Bible. They have no tangible example they present. I think that reveals that most people who think the Bible contradicts itself really have not looked closely at those details.

However, you do come across some folks who have looked at those details. There are passages that are difficult and tricky and sometimes we have to dive into those and help people understand why those are not contradictions.

Often, there are misunderstandings about the way history works. For example, people look at the Gospels and say, “Look, one Gospel has the stories in this order and another Gospel has the stories in that order.” They do not realize that, it in the ancient world, it was not unusual to tell stories that are not in chronological order. You link things thematically, not necessarily chronologically.

Others look at the words of Jesus quoted in one Gospel and they are slightly different than another Gospel and they think that there is a contradiction. Once again, in the ancient world and in the way history was done, you would often paraphrase rather than quote directly like you would in our modern day. You would reword it on purpose to meet the needs of your audience. That was a very common and accepted practice, but no reason to think that counts as a contradiction.

As you sift through these things, you will discover that a lot of the things that look like contradictions eventually evaporate on closer examination. This is why Christians, over the years, have had a lot of confidence that when the Bible affirms something that we can have confidence that the Bible affirms something that is true.