Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible
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Some students accept these new views from day one. Others—especially among the more conservative students—resist for a long time, secure in their knowledge that God would not allow any falsehoods into his sacred book. But before long, as students see more and more of the evidence, many of them find that their faith in the inerrancy and absolute historical truthfulness of the Bible begins to waver. There simply is too much evidence, and to reconcile all of the hundreds of differences among the biblical sources requires so much speculation and fancy interpretive footwork that eventually it gets to be too much for them.
PROBLEMS WITH THE BIBLE
For students who come into seminary with a view that the Bible is completely, absolutely, one hundred percent without error, the realization that most critical scholars have a very different view can come as a real shock to their systems. And once these students open the floodgates by admitting there might be mistakes in the Bible, their understanding of Scripture takes a radical turn. The more they read the text carefully and intensely, the more mistakes they find, and they begin to see that in fact the Bible makes better sense if you acknowledge its inconsistencies instead of staunchly insisting that there aren’t any, even when they are staring you in the face.
To be sure, many beginning students are expert at reconciling differences among the Gospels. For example, the Gospel of Mark indicates that it was in the last week of his life that Jesus “cleansed the Temple” by overturning the tables of the money changers and saying, “This is to be a house of prayer…but you have made it a den of thieves” (Mark 11), whereas according to John this happened at the very beginning of Jesus’ ministry (John 2). Some readers have thought that Jesus must have cleansed the Temple twice, once at the beginning of his ministry and once at the end. But that would mean that neither Mark nor John tells the “true” story, since in both accounts he cleanses the temple only once. Moreover, is this reconciliation of the two accounts historically plausible? If Jesus made a disruption in the temple at the beginning of his ministry, why wasn’t he arrested by the authorities then? Once one comes to realize that the Bible might have discrepancies it is possible to see that the Gospels of Mark and John might want to teach something different about the cleansing of the Temple, and so they have located the event to two different times of Jesus’ ministry. Historically speaking, then, the accounts are not reconcilable.
The same can be said of Peter’s denials of Jesus. In Mark’s Gospel, Jesus tells Peter that he will deny him three times “before the cock crows twice.” In Matthew’s Gospel he tells him that it will be “before the cock crows.” Well, which is it—before the cock crows once or twice? When I was in college I purchased a book that was intent on reconciling differences of this kind. It was called The Life of Christ in Stereo. The author, Johnston Cheney, took the four Gospel accounts and wove them together into one big mega-Gospel, to show what the real Gospel was like. For the inconsistency in the account of the denials of Peter, the author had a very clever solution: Peter actually denied Jesus six times, three times before the cock crowed and three more times before it crowed twice. This can also explain why Peter denies Jesus to more than three different people (or groups of people) in the various accounts. But here again, in order to resolve the tension between the Gospels the interpreter has to write his own Gospel, which is unlike any of the Gospels found in the New Testament. And isn’t it a bit absurd to say that, in effect, only “my” Gospel—the one I create from parts of the four in the New Testament—is the right one, and that the others are only partially right?
The same problem occurs in the accounts of Jesus’ resurrection. On the third day after Jesus’ death, the women go to the tomb to anoint his body for burial. And whom do they see there? Do they see a man, as Mark says, or two men (Luke), or an angel (Matthew)? This is normally reconciled by saying that the women actually saw “two angels.” That can explain everything else—why Matthew says they saw an angel (he mentions only one of the two angels, but doesn’t deny there was a second), why Mark says it was a man (the angels appeared to be men, even though they were angels, and Mark mentions only one of them without denying there was a second), and why Luke says it was two men (since the angels appeared to be men). The problem is that this kind of reconciling again requires one to assert that what really happened is unlike what any of the Gospels say—since none of the three accounts states that the women saw “two angels.”
As we will see, there are lots of other discrepancies in the New Testament, some of them far more difficult to reconcile (virtually impossible, I would say) than these simple examples. Not only are there discrepancies among different books of the Bible, but there are also inconsistencies within some of the books, a problem that historical critics have long ascribed to the fact that Gospel writers used different sources for their accounts, and sometimes these sources, when spliced together, stood at odds with one another. It’s amazing how internal problems like these, if you’re not alerted to them, are so easily passed by when you read the Gospels, but how when someone points them out they seem so obvious. Students often ask me, “Why didn’t I see this before?” For example, in John’s Gospel, Jesus performs his first miracle in chapter 2, when he turns the water into wine (a favorite miracle story on college campuses), and we’re told that “this was the first sign that Jesus did” (John 2:11). Later in that chapter we’re told that Jesus did “many signs” in Jerusalem (John 2:23). And then, in chapter 4, he heals the son of a centurion, and the author says, “This was the second sign that Jesus did” (John 4:54). Huh? One sign, many signs, and then the second sign?1
One of my favorite apparent discrepancies—I read John for years without realizing how strange this one is—comes in Jesus’ “Farewell Discourse,” the last address that Jesus delivers to his disciples, at his last meal with them, which takes up all of chapters 13 to 17 in the Gospel according to John. In John 13:36, Peter says to Jesus, “Lord, where are you going?” A few verses later Thomas says, “Lord, we do not know where you are going” (John 14:5). And then, a few minutes later, at the same meal, Jesus upbraids his disciples, saying, “Now I am going to the one who sent me, yet none of you asks me, ‘Where are you going?’” (John 16:5). Either Jesus had a very short attention span or there is something strange going on with the sources for these chapters, creating an odd kind of disconnect.
These kinds of problems turn out to be even more common in the Old Testament, starting at its very beginning. Some people go to great lengths to smooth over all these differences, but when you look at them closely, they are very difficult indeed to reconcile. And why should they be reconciled? Maybe they are simply differences. The creation account in Genesis 1 is very different from the account in Genesis 2. Not only is the wording and writing style different, as is very obvious when you read the text in Hebrew, and not only do the two chapters use different names for God, but the very content of the chapters differs in numerous respects. Just make a list of everything that happens in chapter 1 in the order it occurs, and a separate list for chapter 2, and compare your lists. Are animals created before humans, as in chapter 1, or after, as in chapter 2? Are plants created before humans or afterward? Is “man” the first living creature to be created or the last? Is woman created at the same time as man or separately? Even within each story there are problems: if “light” was created on the first day of creation in Genesis 1, how is it that the sun, moon, and stars were not created until the fourth day? Where was the light coming from, if not the sun, moon, and stars? And how could there be an “evening and morning” on each of the first three days if there was no sun?
That’s just the beginning. When Noah takes the animals on the ark, does he take seven pairs of all the “clean” animals, as Genesis 7:2 states, or just two pairs, as Genesis 7:9–10 indicates?
In the book of Exodus, God tells Moses, “I appeared to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as God Almighty, but by my name ‘The LORD’ [= Yahweh] I did not make myself known to them” (Exodus 6:3). How does this squ
are with what is found earlier, in Genesis, where God does make himself known to Abraham as The LORD: “Then he [God] said to him [Abraham], ‘I am The LORD [= Yahweh] who brought you from Ur of the Chaldeans’” (Genesis 15:7)?
Or consider one of my all-time favorite passages, the description of the ten plagues that Moses brought down on the heads of the Egyptians in order to compel Pharaoh to “let my people go.” The fifth plague was a pestilence that killed “all of the livestock of the Egyptians” (Exodus 9:5). How is it, then, that a few days later the seventh plague, of hail, was to destroy all of the Egyptian livestock in the fields (Exodus 9:21–22)? What livestock?
A close reading of the Bible reveals other problems besides the many discrepancies and contradictions. There are places where the text seems to embrace a view that seems unworthy of God or of his people. Are we really to think of God as someone who orders the wholesale massacre of an entire city? In Joshua 6, God orders the soldiers of Israel to attack the city of Jericho and to slaughter every man, woman, and child in the city. I suppose it makes sense that God would not want bad influences on his people—but does he really think that murdering all the toddlers and infants is necessary to that end? What do they have to do with wickedness?
Or what is one to make of Psalm 137, one of the most beautiful Psalms, which starts with the memorable lines “By the rivers of Babylon—there we sat down and there we wept, when we remembered Zion.” Here is a powerful reflection by a faithful Israelite who longs to return to Jerusalem, which had been destroyed by the Babylonians. But his praise of God, and of his holy city, takes a vicious turn at the end, when he plots his revenge on God’s enemies: “Happy shall they be who take your [Babylonian] little ones, and dash them against the rock.” Knocking the brains out of the Babylonian babies in retaliation for what their father-soldiers did? Is this in the Bible?
The God of vengeance is found not only in the Old Testament, as some Christians have tried to claim. Even the New Testament God is a God of judgment and wrath, as any reader of the book of Revelation knows. The Lake of Fire is stoked up and ready for everyone who is opposed to God. This will involve eternal burning—an everlasting punishment, even for those who have sinned against God, intermittently, say, for twenty years. Twenty trillion years of torment in exchange for twenty years of wrong living; and that’s only the beginning. Is this really worthy of God?
I should stress that scholars and students who question such passages are not questioning God himself. They are questioning what the Bible has to say about God. Some such scholars continue to think that the Bible is in some sense inspired—other scholars, of course, do not. But even if the authors of the Bible were in some sense inspired, they were not completely infallible; in fact, they made mistakes. These mistakes involved discrepancies and contradictions, but they also involved mistaken notions about God, who he really was and what he really wanted. Does he really want his followers to splash the brains of their enemies’ infants against the rocks? Does he really plan to torment unbelievers for trillions of years?
These are the questions many seminarians are forced to grapple with as they move away from the devotional commitment to the Bible that they bring with them to seminary and begin to study the Bible in light of scholarship. They are questions raised, in large extent, as a result of being trained in the historical-critical approach to the Bible, the approach that is taught in most mainline Protestant seminaries and that is the more or less “orthodox” view among biblical scholars in America and Europe.
This view insists that each author of the Bible lived in his own time and place—and not in ours. Each author had a set of cultural and religious assumptions that we ourselves may not share. The historical-critical method tries to understand what each of these authors may have meant in his original context. According to this view, each author must be allowed to have his own say. Within the New Testament, the author of Matthew isn’t saying the same thing as Luke. Mark is different from John. Paul may not see eye to eye with James. The author of Revelation seems to be different from all the others. And once you throw the Old Testament into the mix, things get completely jumbled. The authors of Job and Ecclesiastes explicitly state that there is no afterlife. The book of Amos insists that the people of God suffer because God is punishing them for their sins; the book of Job insists that the innocent can suffer; and the book of Daniel indicates that the innocent in fact will suffer. All of these books are different, all of them have a message, and all of the messages deserve to be heard.
FROM SEMINARY TO PULPIT
One of the most amazing and perplexing features of mainstream Christianity is that seminarians who learn the historical-critical method in their Bible classes appear to forget all about it when it comes time for them to be pastors. They are taught critical approaches to Scripture, they learn about the discrepancies and contradictions, they discover all sorts of historical errors and mistakes, they come to realize that it is difficult to know whether Moses existed or what Jesus actually said and did, they find that there are other books that were at one time considered canonical but that ultimately did not become part of Scripture (for example, other Gospels and Apocalypses), they come to recognize that a good number of the books of the Bible are pseudonymous (for example, written in the name of an apostle by someone else), that in fact we don’t have the original copies of any of the biblical books but only copies made centuries later, all of which have been altered. They learn all this, and yet when they enter church ministry they appear to put it back on the shelf. For reasons I will explore in the conclusion, pastors are, as a rule, reluctant to teach what they learned about the Bible in seminary.2
I vividly recall the first time I came to realize this concretely. I had just started teaching at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and was still a Christian. The pastor of a Presbyterian church in North Carolina asked me to do a four-week series on “the historical Jesus.” So I did. In my lectures I talked about why historians have problems using the Gospels as historical sources, in view of their discrepancies and the fact that they were written decades after the life of Jesus by unknown authors who had inherited their accounts about him from the highly malleable oral tradition. I also talked about how scholars have devised methods for reconstructing what probably happened in the life of Jesus, and ended the series by laying out what we can actually know about him. There was nothing at all novel in what I discussed—it was standard scholarly material, the kind of thing that has been taught in seminaries for over fifty years. I learned all this material while I was at Princeton Seminary myself.
Afterward a dear elderly lady came up to me and asked me in frustration, “Why have I never heard this before?” She was not distressed at what I had said; she was distressed that her pastor had never said it. I remember looking across the fellowship hall to the pastor, who was talking to a couple of other parishioners, and wondering the same thing myself: Why had he never told her? He, too, had gone to Princeton Theological Seminary, he too had learned all these things; he taught adult education classes at this church and had been doing so for more than five years. Why had he not told his parishioners what he knew about the Bible and the historical Jesus? Surely they deserved to hear. Was it because he didn’t think they were “ready” for it—a patronizing attitude that is disturbingly common? Was he afraid to “make waves”? Was he afraid that historical information might destroy the faith of his congregation? Was he afraid that church leaders might not take kindly to the dissemination of such knowledge? Did church leaders actually put pressure on him to stick to the devotional meaning of the Bible in his preaching and teaching? Was he concerned about job security? I never found out.
I am not saying that churches should be mini-universities where pastors function as professors from the pulpit. But surely the ministry involves more than preaching the “good news” (however that is understood) every week. It also involves teaching. Most churches have adult education classes. Why aren’t adults being educated? My experienc
e in this particular church is not an isolated case.
Every year I teach hundreds of students in my “Introduction to the New Testament” course at Chapel Hill. Normally there are three hundred to three hundred fifty students in the class. I teach the class, of course, not from a confessional or devotional point of view—the view that most of these students, having been raised in the church, are accustomed to hearing—but from a historical-critical point of view. The information and perspectives I present in the class are nothing radical. They are the views found among critical scholars who approach the Bible historically—whether the scholars themselves are believers or unbelievers, Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, agnostic, or whatever else. They are the views I learned in seminary and the views that are taught at divinity schools and universities throughout the country. But they are views that my students have never heard before, even though most of these students have spent a good deal of their lives in Sunday School and church.
My students have a range of reactions to these views. Many of my more conservative students are like me at that age—certain of the Bible’s absolute truthfulness and wary of anyone who might call it into question. Some of these students refuse to listen—it is almost as if they cover their ears and hum loudly so they don’t have to hear anything that might cause them to doubt their cherished beliefs about the Bible. Others are eager to break away from the confines of the church and religion entirely, devouring the information I give as if it provides a license to disbelieve.
I personally don’t think either reaction—the radical rejection or the all-too-eager embrace of the new perspective on the Bible—is ideal. What I prefer are students who carefully study the material, consider it thoughtfully, question some of its (and their own) assumptions and conclusions, reflect on how it might affect the way they look at the Bible and the Christian religion on which they were raised, and cautiously consider how it might affect them personally. One of my main goals, of course, is to get them to learn the material for the course. It is, after all, historical information about a historical religion and a historically based set of documents. The class is not meant to be a theological exercise to strengthen or weaken one’s faith. But since the documents we consider are, for many students, documents of faith, inevitably the historical-critical method we use in class has some implications for faith. And another ultimate objective that I have—as should every university professor—is to get students to think.