Questions about the Bible: 3. Isn’t the Bible full of contradictions?

Isn’t the Bible full of contradictions?

As part of my work I am sometimes asked to go on radio phone-ins and discussion groups. I remember doing one such programme when a caller came through asking the very same question – doesn’t the Bible contradict itself? The show’s host answered the question for me when he asked the caller for an example. He couldn’t. He was soon cut off and told to ‘Get off the air and stop wasting our time!’

I became a Christian when I was 15, and since that time I have systematically read through the Bible many times. I have never once found a contradiction. It fits together like a perfectly interlocking jigsaw. ‘An eye for an eye…’ (Exodus 21 v.24) and ‘Turn the other cheek’ (Matthew 5 v.38-40) is often posed as a contradiction. In fact, both injunctions are valid. The first was given as an instruction by God to the nation of Israel who had been given the duty to uphold law and order and with that hand out a punishment that fitted the crime. They were forbidden from being either too severe, or too lax.

When Jesus added the words, ‘Turn the other cheek’, He wasn’t speaking to a nation at that time, but rather to individuals, to you and to me. He was commanding that we don’t take the law into our own hands, seeking revenge. Instead, we should be patient; turning the other cheek in order to show how good God is by being like Him. Turning the other cheek is not the easy option, but rather the right one, letting the authorities that God has given us to be responsible for the enforcement of the law.

If we take either statement/verse out of context it would appear that the Bible contradicts itself, but to do that would not be fair or accurate. The Bible is too important to play games with. I encourage you to read it for yourself – unlike the caller to the radio show!

Go to: How can we believe an old book that was written by believers years after the event?