There is no doubt that if you try hard enough, you can reconcile any

two statements, no matter how disparate they may seem. But my question

is - why bother? Surely this is a huge exercise in justifying the POV

that "the Bible is infallible".

I'm afraid I disagree here. Firstly, your statement in the first sentence

is clearly wrong - reconcile the statements that 1 + 1 = 2 and 1 + 1 = 3,

for example. One is clearly wrong and no amount of mathematics will

change that. It's the same here. This is a situation with simple assertions - a

paradox if you like - which is being reconciled by the use of

straightforward, logical thinking.

I certainly don't always agree with Nigel on everything, and I certainly

wouldn't call myself "liberal", but I agree with him this time.

To try to push the "inerrant" line through thick and thin falls into

two fundamental errors, IMHO:

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1. It doesn't give sufficient importance to the PURPOSE of the

scriptures, by treating everything as if it's all uniform.

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The bible was never written to give us minute details about everything

we might be curious about. OK, I know the "inerrant" people aren't

quite saying this, but I'm slightly exaggerating to make the point

clear.

I wrote a week or so ago, that my view of scripture is analogous to

a street directory.

It'll get you where you want to go, tell you where all the traffic

lights etc. are, and you'd certainly rely on it for street names.

But if someone tries to argue from a street directory that every

bit of water is the same shade of blue, or that roads have

big letters down the middle, they've missed the point.

For example, to read Genesis 1 as a scientific account, is simply to

miss the point.

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2. To defend "inerrancy", is simply to defend the indefensible.

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Nigel (Mitchell) has brought up some good examples, and there are plenty

of others. I'm not sure I agree about the census stuff in Luke, but the

one about Judas is to the point (Matthew has him hanging himself, Acts

has his body bursting open in the field he bought with his 30 pieces of

silver).

The attempted harmonisation between these is ingenious, but assumes that

_prHnHs_ means "fell headlong" (which can be taken as something that

happened to his body after being hanged) instead of "swollen up" which

is much more likely. So Acts 1:18 should read "and he swelled up and

burst in the middle" (yuk!)

So we clearly have common knowledge that Judas came to a sticky end, and

that the "field of blood" got its name from what Judas did, but

different stories of what actually happened were circulating in

different Christian communities. Does this matter?

Likewise the post-resurrection accounts. Good grief, if these were all

identical they'd be LESS believable! (If you're going to concoct a

story at least you make sure everybody gets it right.)

And just to throw in another one: did Jesus heal the blind man going

into (Luke) or out of (Mark) Jericho? Or where there TWO blind men as

in Matthew? Does this matter?

I suggest that it DOESN'T matter - this simply isn't what the Bible is

about.

Lest anyone think that I've approached this whole question with a

preconception that "the Bible has mistakes", this simply isn't true. I

once believed in inerrancy. I found that eventually I just couldn't any

more. The weight of evidence was too great. The wriggling to achieve a

harmonisation became too blatant.

Mike Hore