Contradictions

A contradiction is two claims that cannot both be true. "He stayed in the tomb" and "the tomb was empty" cannot both stand. Most of what gets called a Bible contradiction is not that. It is a difference of detail, of word, of hour, or of the kind of writing.

The pairs are on Supposed Contradictions, each tagged with one of the kinds below. The sentence here names the kind. Unroll it when you want the test and more examples.

Spotlighting

One writer names the person in the light. Another tells you he was not alone. Mark names Bartimaeus. Matthew says two blind men sat there. Naming one is not a count of "only one." Mark 10:46 Matthew 20:30

UnrollThe Person in View

Complement, not clash

The second account adds a person, a word, or a step the first never denied. The inscription over the cross is the usual classroom pair. Four writers quote the charge. None of them claims to have copied the whole board. John 19:19 Mark 15:26

UnrollComplement, Not a Clash

Different occasions

Two scenes can look alike and still be two hours. A clearing of the temple early in John is not, by that likeness alone, the clearing in the last week. Similar wording is not a stopwatch. John 2:13-16 Mark 11:15-17

UnrollDifferent Occasions

Different sense

The same English word can do two jobs. "No one has ever seen God" and "I saw the Lord" are not two reports of one kind of seeing. Read the word in its sentence before you make the sentences fight. John 1:18 Isaiah 6:1

UnrollA Different Sense

Genre, not a ledger

A proverb states the usual path. A lament states the day the path did not hold. "No harm befalls the righteous," and then Job loses everything. The proverb was not a diary. Proverbs 12:21 Job 1:13-19

UnrollGenre, Not a Ledger

Copyist numerals

Some number fights sit in the copies, not in a claim that God cannot count. Hebrew numerals were easy to miscopy. A garrison total in two chronicles is the usual place this shows. A load-bearing number, how many days in the tomb, is not where you start with this kind.

UnrollCopyist Numerals

Covenant horizon

A command for Israel under Moses is not automatically a command for the church, and a word of Jesus is not a denial that the older command was ever given. "Eye for eye" and "turn to him the other also" sit on two sides of a line God drew. Exodus 21:24 Matthew 5:38-39

UnrollThe Covenant Horizon

Rounding and convention

People count a day by nights, a crowd by thousands, and a journey by the round number. A difference of convention is not yet a difference of fact. If the digits are too far apart for a round number to explain, look at the copyist kind instead.

UnrollRounding and Convention

Selective line

A genealogy is an argument in names. It keeps the line it needs and skips the names it does not. Matthew and Luke are not two broken copies of one county form. Matthew 1:1 Luke 3:23

UnrollA Selective Line

What a limited view can get wrong

The kinds above are differences of true report. They are not a witness who missed the main fact and described another event.

J. Warner Wallace tells a robbery this way in Cold-Case Christianity. A man set a gun on a shop counter and told the cashier to empty the register. A woman stood in line behind him. She was in a hurry. She heard his tone and not his words. She never saw the gun. From the way the cashier handed him a bag, she thought he had bought something. Her report was a polite young man who made a purchase and left.

She was accurate to her place in line. She was not accurate to the robbery. Another witness, who could see the counter, reported the gun and the demand. Wallace's point, in the book, is that real witnesses disagree because they do not stand in the same place, and a tidy matching story is what you get when people have talked.

Do not import the woman's mistake into the Gospels. She got the event wrong. She turned a theft into a purchase because the gun was outside her view. The kinds on this page are not that. They are not one writer failing to see what happened and inventing a softer story. They are different points of view on a thing that happened: one name and the group, one detail added, one hour and another hour, one sense of a word and another. Both sides of those pairs can be true. Hers could not.

The rules underneath

Every one of these kinds rests on a few plain rules of thought. A claim and its opposite cannot both be true at the same time and in the same sense. Those rules are in The Laws of Logic. The common ways an argument goes wrong, like treating silence as denial or using one word in two senses, are in Logical Fallacies.

How to use the list

Start on the list when someone hands you a pair. Search the title or the verse. The kind tag on each pair brings you back here. If the short note above is enough, stop. If you want the test and more examples, unroll the teaching under that kind.

For the wider habit of reading, before any pair, see Reading the Bible.