Abstract

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Friday, May 14, 1999
Saturday, 01 April 2006

Contradictions in the Bible

1—God condemns Adam to a sure death if he were to eat the fruit of the tree of life:

But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it, for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.

Genesis 2:17

Instead Adam lived to produce all the people on earth, and they have to suffer for Adam’s defiance. The bible even makes a point of telling us how long Adam lived:

And all the days that Adam lived were nine hundred and thirty years, and he died.

Genesis 5:5

2—God is pleased with his work:

And God saw every thing that he had made, and behold it was very good.

Genesis 1:31

Furthermore, He declares that He does not lie or repent:

God is not a man that he should lie, neither the son of man that he should repent.

Numbers 23:19

Despite these assertions, we find:

And it repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart.

Genesis 6:6

He repents in other places such as:

And God saw their works, that they turned from their evil way; and God repented of the evil that he had said that he would do unto them.

Jonah 3:10

3—God reserves the right to change His mind:

The Lord God of Israel saith, I said indeed that thy house, and the house of thy father, should walk before me for ever, but now the Lord saith, Be it far from me, for them that honour me I will honour, and they that despise me shall be lightly esteemed. Behold, the days come, that I will cut off thine arm, and the arm of thy father’s house, that there shall not be an old man in thine house.

1 Samuel 2:30

But elsewhere, once He has made up His mind, He is immovable:

For I am the Lord. I change not.

Malachi 3:6

4—The chief apostle of Christianity tells us:

God is not the author of confusion, but of peace.

1 Corinthians 14:33

But that is not what Moses thought when he sings in joy that the Egyptian chariots had been drowned:

The Lord is a man of war.

Exodus 15:3

And Matthew has God himself, in His aspect of the Son of God, saying:

Think not that I am come to send peace on earth. I came not to send peace but a sword.

Matthew 10:34

5—In Psalms, God is merciful:

The Lord is good to all, and his tender mercies are over all his work.

Psalms 145:8

Elsewhere, He will always be merciful:

For his mercy endureth for ever.

1 Chronicles 16:34

And the brother of Jesus, James, confirms it for Christians:

The lord is very pitiful, and of tender mercy.

James 5:11

But Joshua believed that God told him not to be merciful:

And Joshua did unto them as the Lord bade him. He houghed their horses, and burnt their chariots with fire ... and smote all the souls that were therein, with the edge of the sword, utterly destroying them.

Joshua 11:9

The prophet, Jeremiah, is certain that God is not merciful:

I will not pity, nor spare, nor have mercy, but destroy them. For ye have kindled a fire in mine anger that shall burn for ever.

Jeremiah 13:14; 17:4

Numbers proves that Joshua probably had the right idea because God can be pretty gruesome when he gets angry:

And the Lord said unto Moses, take all the heads of the people, and hang them up before the Lord against the Sun, that the fierce anger of the Lord may be turned away from Israel.

Numbers 25:4

6—According to many Christian clergy, John is the truly authoritative gospel of the four. But what did John know? Supposedly recording a speech of John the Baptist, he tells us:

No man hath seen God at any time.

John 1:18

Well God did say to Moses:

Thou canst not see my face, for there shall no man see me, and live.

Exodus 33:20

It is a bit odd since earlier Moses is supposed to have written:

And the Lord spake to Moses face to face, as a man speaketh to his friend.

Exodus 23:11

Furthermore Jacob who God met and renamed Israel thus giving the tribe their name also claimed:

I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved.

Genesis 32:30

7—In case we had not noticed it, in the justification of the sabbath day in the creation story in Genesis, Exodus explains:

For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, and on the seventh day he rested and was refreshed.

Exodus 31:17

Nevertheless, such a famous man as Isaiah had evidently not read his Torah because he says:

Hast thou not heard that the everlasting God, the Lord, the creator of the ends of the earth, fainteth not, neither is weary.

Isaiah 40:28

8—A characteristic of the earlier stories in the bible is that God is not omnipresent. For example, in God has to go out to check Sodom and Gomorrah:

And the Lord said, because of the cry of Sodom and Gomorrah is great, and because their sin is very grievous, I will go down now and see whether they have done altogether according to the cry of it which is come unto me, and if not, I will know.

Genesis 18:20

By the time the Psalmist was writing Psalms, however, God’s ability to spread himself about had vastly improved:

Whither shall I flee from thy presence? If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there. If I make my bed in hell, behold thou art there. If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me.

Psalms 109:7

9—The same evolution occurs with God’s omniscience, Adam and Eve finding it easy to hide from their creator:

And Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God, among the trees of the garden.

Genesis 3:8

Again though, God was improving with practice because by the time Job was experiencing his miseries, there was nowhere to hide:

For his eyes are upon the ways of man and he seeth all his goings, there is no darkness nor shadow of death, where the workers of iniquity may hide themselves.

Job 34:21

10—Evidently it all had to do with technology, God managing to stay one step ahead of mankind usually but, in Judges, God had not yet entered the iron age:

And the Lord was with Judah, and he drove out the inhabitants of the mountain, but could not drive out the inhabitants of the valley, because they had chariots of iron.

Judges 1:19

It is remarkable what advances can be made in a thousand years and by the start of the Christian era we are told in Matthew:

With God all things are possible.

Matthew 19:26

11—In the writings of Paul we find:

There is no respect of persons with God.

Romans 2:11

But, in Malachi, God says:

Saith the Lord: I loved Jacob, And I hated Esau.

Malachi 1:2-3

And Paul quotes this in his argument in Romans 9:13. So far from being impartial, God makes a point of being partial.

12—Frequently the Jewish scriptures are keen to depict God as the God of truth, whence the Christian use of “Amen” as an affirmation of a prayer—it supposedly means “truly”, or today people might say “right on”. In Deuteronomy 32:4, we read:

A God of truth he is, and without iniquity.

Deuteronomy 32:4

Yet, in 1 Kings, God deliberately sends out a lying spirit:

And there came forth a spirit and stood before the Lord and said… I will go forth, and I will be a lying spirit in the mouth of all his prophets. And be said… go forth and do so.

1 Kings 22:21

13—The Christian idea of the Almighty is that he is a god of love and compassion:

The Lord is gracious and full of compassion, slow to anger, and of great mercy.

Psalms 145:8

In the Christian part of the bible, it is explicit:

And we have known and believed the love that God hath to us. God is love.

1 John 4:16

What are we to make then of a large number of citations from the Jewish part of the bible, the Old Testament, which give quite a different picture? Deuteronomy states:

For the Lord thy God is a consuming fire, even a jealous God.

Deuteronomy 4:24

Nahum has:

God is jealous, and the Lord revengeth, and is furious the Lord will take vengeance on his adversaries.

Nahum 1:2

The Israelites are struggling through the deserts of Sinai starving except for the manna provided by God, then apparently there is a blessing. A storm blows in a load of quails and the grateful Israelites tuck into a feast at last. But watch out, you Israelites! This boon was sent only as a temptation and He is vengeful:

A wind from the Lord brought forth quails from the sea, and let them fall by the camp… and while the flesh was between their teeth, the wrath of the Lord was kindled against them, and he smote them with a great plague.

Numbers 11:31

Incidentally, should a good god be tempting people? In the US today people should not be tempted according to the legal code—it is the crime of entrapment—though in the UK it is legal. According to James, the brother of Jesus, in his epistle, God does not agree with entrapment:

Let no man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of God: for God cannot be tempted of evil, neither tempteth he any man.

James 1:13

Well the passage cited above doesn’t actually say that the quails were sent as a temptation, though they were sent by God and they plainly were a temptation. Nevertheless, in Genesis, we read:

And it came to pass after these things that God did tempt Abraham.

Genesis 22:1

James, the brother of the Son of God, must have been wrong.

14 More Contradictions in the Bible

14—God is not kind but brutal. In an illustration of the true purpose of all priestly religions, God gives commands for the brutal punishment of those who had stolen booty from Jericho intended for the treasury of the priesthood:

And the Lord said unto Joshua… he that is taken with the accursed thing [the booty] shall be burnt with fire, he and all that he hath;… and Joshua and all Israel with him took action, and his sons, daughters… and burnt them with fire and stoned them with stones... so the Lord turned from the firmness of his anger.

Joshua 7:10

Nor was God averse to killing children to punish the disobedience of their parents:

I will send wild beasts among you that will rob you of your children.

Leviticus 26:22

Not only that but, if anyone continued in disobeying the tyrant god, He says He will make them eat the flesh of their own children:

Then I will walk contrary unto you also in fury… and ye shall eat the flesh of your sons and of your daughters.

Leviticus 26:28

But he wasn’t awful only to the Israelites, he killed off plenty of their enemies too:

And that night the angel of the Lord smote in the camp of the Assyrians 185,000 men,

2 Kings 19:35

this being the occasion when they woke up dead! God deliberately set up all the tribes of Canaan for destruction by the Israelites:

For it was of the Lord to harden their hearts that they should come against Israel in battle, that he might utterly destroy them, and that they might have no favour.

Joshua 11:20

He ordered the most brutal savagery by the Israelites on the Midianites, massacring all their males and, having captured the women and children, butchering the women and male children, and raping all the female children.

And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying, Avenge the children of Israel of the Midianites… and they slew all the males; and the children of Israel took all the women of Midian captives… and Moses said unto them, Have ye saved all the women alive? Kill every male among the children and every woman that hath known man,… but all the female children… keep alive for yourselves.

Numbers 31:2,17-18

It is difficult to believe that children can be brought up with this god as an example but it might explain a lot of the savagery of the soldiers of supposedly civilised countries. It is, for example, similar to the behaviour of the American soldiers at Mi Lai in Vietnam, and more recent examples in Iraq.

15—Perhaps God is right and it is the people’s fault:

The statutes of the Lord are right,

Psalms 19:8

so if the people follow them they will live correctly. The trouble is, as we saw at the creation, that God is peevish and out of spite, confirmed by Ezekiel, he sometimes gives statutes that are not right:

Wherefore I gave them also statutes that were not good, and judgements whereby they should not live.

Ezekiel 20:25

That leaves any Jew or Christian with problems. What are the right statutes and what are the wrong ones? It seems that Paul the apostle was aware of the same dilemma:

God our saviour —will have all men to be saved, and to come unto the knowledge of truth.

1 Timothy 2:4

And God assists with the work of the devil to tempt the unrighteous, accepting that some cannot be saved:

God shall send them a strong delusion, that they shall believe a lie; that all might be damned who believe not the truth.

2 Thessalonians 2:11-12

Evidently this lie is not an easy one to see through—it is a strong delusion. A reasonable guess at what it is would be the Jewish-Christian religion.

16—Perhaps that is the only way to reconcile the evidence with the claim that God is just in :

He is the Rock, his work is perfect, for all his ways are judgement, a God of truth and without iniquity, just and right is he.

Deuteronomy 32:4

And He is a righteous judge:

Shall not the judge of all the earth do right?

Genesis 18:25

What, though, is just and right about punishing children for their fathers’ errors? Yet that is the theme running throughout the Christian theory of redemption. God tells us himself:

For I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation.

Exodus 20:5

It is repeated:

Prepare slaughter for his children for the iniquity of their fathers.

Isaiah 14:21

But where did this iniquity come from in the first place? Again He tells us because we would never guess, especially if we are Christians:

I make peace, and create evil, I the Lord do all these things.

Isaiah 45:7

There is a curious circularity here which renders God an unsuitable judge but which God doesn’t seem to notice or doesn’t expect us to notice.

17—Psalms seeks to persuade us His anger endureth but a moment:

For his anger endureth but a moment: in his favour is life: weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.

Psalms 30:5

but, when the Israelites were in the wilderness:

The Lord’s anger was kindled against Israel, and he made them wander in the wilderness forty years, until all the generation that had done evil in the sight of the Lord was consumed.

Numbers 32:13

18—Christian churches no longer have the ritual sacrifice of animals that the Jewish religion required. But is that right? Does God want sacrifice or doesn’t he? As usual it depends where you look. In the Jewish scriptures in many places God commands His people to offer up sacrifices:

Thou shalt offer every day a bullock for a sin offering for atonement.

Exodus 34:36

And the priest shall burn all on the altar to be a burnt sacrifice, an offering made by fire, of a sweet savour unto the Lord.

Leviticus 1:9

That’s clear enough then. But what about Isaiah and Jeremiah, a couple of significant prophets if ever there were any:

To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices unto me, saith the Lord… I delight not in the blood of bullocks or of lambs.

Isaiah 1:11

Jeremiah says that God never told them to offer sacrifices anyway:

For I spake not unto your fathers, nor commanded them in the day that I brought them out of the land of Egypt, concerning burnt offerings or sacrifices.

Jeremiah 7:22

It’s all in the Holy Book, so what do you believe? Of course the purpose of sacrifices is to feed the priesthood, who therefore do not have to work. Only bits of the animal are burnt to offer up a savour to god. The rest is scoffed by the priests. The priests never had to atone for the sin of Adam by the sweat of their brow. Nowadays, sacrifices are not needed because priests get their income from the platter or by special donations from those trying to buy their way into heaven—altogether more sophisticated!

19—Psalms assures us:

Good and upright is the Lord,

Psalms 25:8

but Amos says that whenever evil occurs it is the Lord’s work:

Shall there be evil in a city, and the Lord hath not done it?

Amos 3:6

20—Any Christian, a follower of the God of love, must expect that their God forbids human sacrifice. And that is what God seems to command:

Take heed to thyself that thou be not snared by following them… for even their sons and their daughters have they burnt in the fire of their gods.

Deuteronomy 12:30

So do not look back in your bible, you Christians, because you find in Leviticus that God commands human sacrifice among the sacrifices that shall be offered to Him:

No devoted thing that a man shall devote unto the Lord of all that he hath, both of man and of beast, and of the field of his possession, shall be sold or redeemed, every devoted thing is most holy unto the Lord. None devoted which shall be devoted of men shall be redeemed, but shall surely be put to death.

Leviticus 27:28

21—Christianity depends strongly upon the supposed compassion of the otherwise vengeful God:

Every man that asketh receiveth, and he that seeketh findeth.

Matthew 7:8

Let the Christians only read Proverbs:

Then they shall call upon me, but I will not answer. They shall seek me early, but shall not find me.

Proverbs 1:28

22—The worst crime in our society has always been murder, though now rape perhaps is worse. Naturally God forbids murder, being adamant that:

Thou shalt not kill.

Exodus 20:13

It seems fairly definite. Curious it is then that in God tells people they must murder those close to him.

Thus saith the Lord God of Israel, Put every man his sword by his side, and go in and out from gate to gate throughout the camp and slay every man his brother… his companion, and… his neighbour.

Exodus 32:27

And murder his enemies, man women, infants and babes in arms:

Now, go and smite Amalek and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not, but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling.

1 Samuel 15:3

Do Christians really believe this barbarity? Admittedly, in Leviticus there is the crudest evidence of justice, God liking to have it both ways—an eye for an eye, a murder for a murder:

He that killeth any man shall surely be put to death.

Leviticus 24:17

23—What of lesser crimes? God firmly forbids stealing:

Thou shalt not steal.

Exodus 20:15

Yet the passage when the Israelites are preparing to leave Egypt seems to command stealing, “spoil” meaning “despoil” or plunder:

When ye go ye shall not go empty; but every woman shall borrow of her neighbour, and of her that sojourneth in her home, jewels of silver and of gold and raiment; and ye shall put them on your sons and your daughters; and ye shall spoil the Egyptians.

Exodus 3:21

24—God is certain in Exodus that he forbids adultery:

Thou shalt not commit adultery.

Exodus 20:14

But by the time we get to the book of Deuteronomy, things have changed a bit and now He commands adultery, if the woman is not the wife of anyone you know:

When thou goest forth to war against thine enemies, and the Lord thy God hath delivered them into thy hands… and seest among the captives a beautiful woman, and thou hast a desire unto her that thou wouldst have her to thy wife, then shalt thou bring her home to thine home …and she shall be thy wife.

Deuteronomy 31:10

25—It might seem surprising that such a vengeful god should command that vengeance is wrong, but he does:

Thou shalt not avenge nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.

Leviticus 19:18

It almost comes as a relief when we read as far as Psalms to find:

Let this be the reward of mine adversaries from the lord and of them that speak evil against my soul… Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow… Let his children be continually vagabonds and beg; let them seek their bread also out of desolate places.

Psalms 109

One might argue that in the one case the revenge is against one’s own people and that is wrong, but it is all right to take revenge on one’s enemies. But is that what turning the other cheek means?

26—All of this is simply taking advantage of the innocent inconsistencies in an old book, some might say. The Old Testament is not meant to be the full revelation of God. You have to look to the New Testament for that. So we hear from Paul the Apostle in his own words:

Whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.

Romans 10:13

This surely is the epitome of Christianity. Why then does Matthew disagree:

Not every one that saith unto me Lord, lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven, but he that doeth the will of my father which is in heaven.

Matthew 7:21

This is the fundamental disagreement between Paul and the Jerusalem church that no Christian can resolve. Paul says anyone can be saved but James says it depends on what you have done. Priests and Pastors like to have it both ways. It is easy when you are joining, but, thereafter, it depends on whether you do what you are told.

27—Who carried the cross upon which Jesus was crucified? Three of the gospels declare that Simon carried the cross, while the fourth gospel says that Jesus himself carried it. Is John right? If so, then Matthew, Mark and Luke are wrong. If Simon carried it, Jesus could not have done so, and if Jesus carried it, then Simon did not. It must be admitted by all that a rational mind could not have written or inspired both of these stories, and if one is true the other is false.

28—Jesus says:

Therefore go and make disciples of all men, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

Matthew 26:19

Yet, Paul can declare:

For Christ did not send me to baptise.

1 Corinthians 1:17

We could go on. Christians put forth the bible as a work which in some way came from God, as a book which is reliable in its statements, and correct in its narrative of events. Now, it is patent to everyone that in the gospels there are two distinct accounts of the carrying of the cross. How can Christians reconcile this fact with their theory that God is the author of the bible?

There are too many gospels, too many stories of Jesus. It would have been better for Christianity had all but one of these narratives been destroyed. They contradict each other in so many essential points as to make them totally unreliable as records of facts.

Skeptical Resources—Internet infidels | Jesus Never Existed | Steven Carr’s Website | Christianism | Early Christian Writings | God is Imaginary | “Religion Detoxification” | Our Judaio-Christian Heritage | Archaeoastronomy | No Deity | No Beliefs | Evil Bible | Bible God | ex-Christians | Jesus Police | Islamic Faith Freedom | Atheist Experience | American Atheists | Jovial Atheist | Askwhy! books
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