I don’t usually look at complicated nit-picking in which someone tries to establish the inerrancy of the Bible by very convoluted exegesis, but the length of this one struck me.

“Nigel & Michelle Cunningham” <> writes:

>Hi there. Excuse me for butting in, but I have answers to a couple of your

>questions. They are scanned/OCR’d from Archer, Gleason L, Encyclopaedia of

>Bible Difficulties, Zondervan, 1982 (476 pages)

>Nigel B. Mitchell wrote in message <34c3d8f6.690>…

>

>1. Why do Matthew and Luke list the three temptations of Jesus in a

>different order?

>Pages 320/321:

>”Why do Matthew and Luke differ in the order of Christ’s temptations?

[84 lines of argument deleted]

All the deleted stuff was, IMHO, a misguided attempt to establish the inerrancy of the Bible by showing that one of the passages did not present the events in chronological order, while the other one did.

A notorious attempt to support the “inerrancy” of the Bible was the book “Battle for the Bible” by Lindsell, published about 15 years ago. Amongst other things he argued that the various discrepancies in the records in the Gospels about Peter’s denial of Jesus could be accommodated if there were, in fact, six denials rather than three. The whole argument struck me then as being much worse than a simple admission that different people remembered/recorded things slightly differently.

Some years ago I was called as an expert witness in a car accident in which an elderly couple were killed (my testimony was about the distance needed to stop from different speeds on a wet road). Eyewitness accounts of the accident were so different that it was hard to believe that they were speaking about the same event.

So why should we expect even eyewitness accounts in the Bible to agree exactly? It is not the precise order of the temptations which is important, it is the replies Jesus gave to the tempter.

[rest of post deleted]

>Regards,

>Nij >——-

>Nigel & Michelle Cunningham

>email:



Ken Smith

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