>>They are scanned/OCR'd from Archer, Gleason L, Encyclopaedia of
>>Bible Difficulties, Zondervan, 1982 (476 pages)
>
>Q: Why are such books written?
>A: Because there are discrepancies and errors in the Bible, and they
>need to be explained away.

Close, but no cookie I'm afraid. You're missing one vital word, which is that there are apparent (or alleged as the title of another book puts it) discrepancies. Apart from that, I agree. Explanations need to be given if the Bible is to maintain any credibility. After all, if there are mistakes and inconsistencies in one section, how can I be sure that any other section doesn't have problems too? But let's take a step back for a second. We need to note that we're not treating the Bible any differently to any other situation where apparent discrepancies occur. In a court of law they do the same thing - weigh the evidence, examine the sources, try to fit the pieces together to obtain a consistent, logical picture of what happened, how and why.

>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.

Secondly, yes, it is an exercise in justifying the point of view that the Bible is inerrant (notice I say inerrant, not infallible at this stage - I'll get to the distinction in a second), but if that is your only reason for discounting attempts at reconciling accounts, I would suggest that you need to rethink your logic a bit.

>If I used the same logic and methodology as the book you have quoted,
>I could prove that the Encyclopedia Britannica, the daily newspaper,
>and the "Simpsons" are all infallible and have no contradictions >between them.

No. I agree that you could (possibly) prove that there were no contradictions between them, but that doesn't necessarily imply the truth of their claims (Take the case where two witnesses give consistent but false testimony. Their consistency doesn't necessitate the truth of their story, although we might say it made it more likely that they were telling the truth) or their infallibility. The Little Oxford Dictionary defines infallible as "incapable of erring; unfailing, sure". Thus, to prove infallibility, you would have to prove not only that they didn't have contradictions and errors but that they were incapable of making such. Note too that our discussion to date is not really about the infallibility of the Scriptures but rather their inerrancy.

>
>>"Why do Matthew and Luke differ in the order of Christ's temptations?
>>
>>Matthew 4:5-10 puts the proposal to jump from the pinnacle of the temple as
>>the second of Christ's three temptations and the offer of the world empire
>>as the third. Luke 4:5-12 makes the offer of the empire temptation number
>>two and the jump from the pinnacle number three. Here we have a clear-cut
>>discrepancy. How are we to account for it without sacrificing the doctrine
>>of scriptural inerrancy?
>
>Since the doctrine of scriptural inerrancy is unscriptural, you would
>be better off sacrificing it before you start.

A difficult statement to refute, since if I use scripture to argue against it (eg show that Jesus viewed the OT as authoritative), you could argue that my proof-texts are distorted from the original. Of course I could check out variant readings, but it all seems to come back to the fact that you don't want to take the possibility of inerrancy seriously. I'm perfectly willing to seek out answers for apparent contradictions, but if you're writing off the possibility from the first, am I wasting my time? (Actually, I wouldn't be because this is benefiting me, but I'm putting that aside for a minute).

><my server will not post this if I do not cut some out, so I will
>preserve the analogy which seems to explain the 'discrepancy'>
>
>> It is much like the report of the
>>little girl who said, "Do you know what we had for Thanksgiving yesterday?
>>We had apple pie and turkey and everything!" The chances are that a more
>>careful interrogation would reveal that she had been served the turkey
>>before she had her apple pie. But she mentioned the pie first because she
>>thought of it first, no doubt preferring the dessert to the main course.
>>Could her report be faulted as erroneous under these circumstances? Hardly!
>
>Quite right. The author has shown a perfectly adequate way in which a
>careful and imaginative reader of Biblical greek could reconcile the
>accounts of Matthew and Luke whilst preserving their belief that the
>Bible is inerrant.
>
>For most of us, however, who do not approach the scriptures with such
>preconceived ideas, and who tend to read the text at face value, the
>contradiction remains. It is a small contradiction, and one which, as
>we have seen, can be explained away, but a contradiction nevertheless.

So the little girl is lying then?

>>>2. How did Judas Iscariot die?
>>
>>"How did Judlas Iscariot die?
>>
>According to Matthew 27:3-10 , Judas "hanged himself"
>
>In Acts 1:18 the apostle Peter says that Judas " falling headlong,
>burst asunder, and all of his inwards gushed out."
>
>Once again, an imaginative reader who wanted to preserve the notion of
>Biblical inerrancy might say
>
>>This indicates that the tree from which
>>Judas suspended himself overhung a precipice. If the branch from which he
>>had hung himself was dead and dry - and there are many trees that match this
>>description even to this day on the brink of the canyon that tradition
>>identifies as the place where Judas died - it would take only one strong
>>gust of wind to yank the heavy corpse and the branch to which it was
>>attached and plunge both with great force into the bottom of the chasm
>>below.
>
>Someone without a barrow of Biblical infallibility to push, reading
>the text at face value, would see that there were two different
>stories about how Judas died.

Or two aspects of the same story.

>A contradiction. Not an important one. Not one which requires us to
>re-examine our faith. But one which reminds us that the authors of the
>scriptures were , like us, fallible human beings. We need to trust in
>God, not in the things he has inspired our forbears to write to point
>us to him.

I certainly agree that the authors were fallible, but I would argue that God ensured that everything they wrote was factually accurate. Our difficulties come from mistakes made in duplicating those original documents and from mistakes and the inherent difficulties in translating them into other languages. I certainly agree that if you can find one apparent contradiction for which I cannot find a consistent, logical, plausible answer, then I would have to at least admit my lack of knowledge, and at worse admit that you had disproven the inerrancy of the scriptures. I would also argue, however, that if I can find a consistent, logical, plausible answer for an apparent contradiction, that issue is no longer an issue. I'm sure we would agree if it was any other topic, why not here too?

>>>3. Where did Joseph and Mary live before the birth of Jesus?
>>
>>Luke 1:26 indicates that Mary lived in Nazareth, Luke 2:4 indicates that
>>Joseph was there too. But because of the census decree (Luke 2:4-6) they
>>visited Bethlehem, and He was born then.
>
>But Matthew does not mention the census or any travel before the
>birth. He has the holy family travelling to Egypt, and then to
>Nazareth, in order to fulfil a prophecy after the birth of Jesus.
>Matthew 2:16 (Herod killed all the boys in Bethlehem 2 years and
>under) seems to indicate that the move to Nazareth via Egypt may not
>have taken place until a couple of years after the birth.

Ok. So because of their difference emphases, Matthew and Luke have both left some of the detail out. Is there an apparent contradiction here I'm missing?

>Leaving aside the fact that the Romans, who were almost obsessive
>record keepers, did not conduct a census in Judea before 6 CE, which
>is long after Herod had died and by which time Galilee was not under
>direct Roman rule, and the fact that there has never been a census in
>the history of humanity when people were required to return to the
>village in which they were born, the fact remains that anyone reading
>the Gospel of Matthew (without the pre-conceived notion of Biblical
>infallibility) would assume that Mary and Joseph lived in Bethlehem
>before Jesus was born, and for up to 2 years afterwards.

I agree that someone reading only the gospel of Matthew (with or without the assumption of inerrancy) would tend to assume that Joseph and Mary lived there always. Note, however, that the text does not explicitly say anything about their situation apart from the fact that they were in Bethlehem when Jesus was born. We assume the rest. As regards your other assertions, I would be interested in checking things out further if you would be willing to quote your source. For my part, I found the following in Gleason:

"Was Luke mistaken about Quirinius and the census?

Luke 2:1 tells of a decree from Caesar Augustus to have the whole "world" (oikoumene actually means all the world under the authority of Rome enrolled in a census report for taxation purposes Verse 2 specifies which census taking was involved at the time Joseph and Mary went down to Bethlehem, to fill out the census forms as descendants of the Bethlehemite family of King David. This was the first census undertaken by Quirinius (or "Cyrenius") as governor (or at least as acting governor) of Syria. Josephus mentions no census in the reign of Herod the Great (who died in 4 B.C) but he does mention one taken by "Cyrenius" (Antiquities 17.13.5) soon after Herod Archelaus was deposed in A.D. 6: "Cyrenius, one that had been consul, was sent by Caesar to take account of people's effects in Syria, and to sell the house of Archelaus." (Apparently the palace of the deposed king was to be sold and the proceeds turned over to the Roman government.)

If Luke dates the census in 8 or 7 B.C. and if Josephus dates it in A.D. 6 or 7, there appears to be a discrepancy of about fourteen years. Also, since Saturninus (according to Tertullian in Contra Marcion 4.19) was legate of Syria from 9 B.C. to 6 B.C., and Quintilius Varus was legate from 7 B.C. to A.D. 4 (note the one-year overlap in these two terms!), there is doubt as to whether Quirinius was ever governor of Syria at all.

By way of solution, let it be noted first of all that Luke says this was a "first" enrollment that took place under Quirinius (haute apographe prote egeneto). A "first" surely implies a second one sometime later. Luke was therefore well aware of that second census, taken by Quirinius again in A.D. 7, which Josephus alludes to in the passage cited above. We know this because Luke (who lived much closer to the time than Josephus did) also quotes Gamaliel as alluding to the insurrection of Judas of Galilee "in the days of the census taking" (Acts 5:37). Th Romans tended to conduct a census every fourteen years, and so this comes out right for a first census in 7 B.C. and a second in A.D. 7.

But was Quirinius (who was called Kyrenius by the Greeks because of the absence of a Q in the Attic alphabet, else because this proconsul was actually a successful governor of Crete and Cyrene in Egypt around 15 B.C.) actually governor of Syria? The Lucan text here says hegemoneuontos tes Syrias Kyreniou ("while Cyrenius was leading in charge of Syria"). He is not actually called legatus (the official Roman title for the governor of an entire region), but the participle hegemoneuontos is used here, which would be appropriate to a hegemon like Pontius Pilate (who reated as a procurator but not as a legatus).

Too much should not be made of the precise official status. But we do know that between 12BC and 2 BC, Quirinius was engaged in a systematic reduction of rebellious mountaineers in the highlands of Pisidia (Tenney, Zondervan Pictorial Encyclopaedia, 5:6), and that he was therefore a highly placed military figure in the Near East in the closing years of the reign of Herod the Great. In order to secure efficiency and dispatch, it may well have been that Augustus put Quirinius in charge of the census-enrolment in the region of Syria just at the transition period between the close of Saturninus's administration and the beginning of Varus's term of service in 7BC. It was doubtless because of his competent handling of the 7BC census that Augustus later put him in charge of the AD 7 census.

As for the lack of a secular reference to a general census for the entire Roman Empire at this time, this presents no serious difficulty. Kingsley Davis (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 14th ed, 5:168) states: "Every five years the Romans enumerated citizens and their property to determine their liabilities. This practice was extended to include the entire Roman Empire in 5 BC."

Sorry for the length of my posting, but there was a lot to address.

Hope it all helps.

Nigel & Michelle Cunningham email: web page: http://www.ne.com.au/~cunninghams