"The Bible has no contradictions"

The claim that the Bible contains no contradictions is central to the doctrine of biblical inerrancy, which holds that Scripture is entirely free from error in all that it affirms. This position was formally articulated in the 1978 Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, signed by nearly 300 evangelical scholars, which declared that "Scripture is without error or fault in all its teaching."¹ Yet mainstream biblical scholarship, including work by both believing and non-believing academics, has identified numerous internal inconsistencies throughout the biblical text. These range from minor numerical discrepancies to irreconcilable narrative and theological conflicts, and their existence is acknowledged in standard academic introductions to the Bible used at universities and seminaries worldwide.^{2, 3}

The claim and its context

The assertion that the Bible contains no contradictions exists along a spectrum of theological positions. At one end stands strict inerrancy, the view that the Bible makes no false or misleading statements on any topic whatsoever, including history, science, and chronology. At the other end lies infallibility, a more moderate position holding that Scripture is unfailing only in matters of faith and practice but may contain incidental errors in areas such as geography or arithmetic.⁴ The philosopher and theologian Stephen T. Davis drew this distinction clearly: "The Bible is inerrant if and only if it makes no false or misleading statements on any topic whatsoever. The Bible is infallible if and only if it makes no false or misleading statements on any matter of faith and practice."⁵

The Chicago Statement attempted to hold both ideas together, affirming total inerrancy while simultaneously acknowledging that Scripture employs "free citations," "approximations," and "non-chronological narration" that do not constitute errors.¹ Critics have noted that this accumulation of qualifications significantly weakens the original claim. As historian Richard Coleman observed, "there have been long periods in the history of the church when biblical inerrancy has not been a critical question. It has in fact been noted that only in the last two centuries can we legitimately speak of a formal doctrine of inerrancy."⁶

Public opinion data reveals that strict literalism is a minority position even among Americans, who are among the most religious populations in the developed world. A 2022 Gallup poll found that only 20% of Americans believe the Bible is the literal word of God, a record low and half of the figure recorded in 1980 and 1984. The largest group, 49%, described the Bible as "inspired by God but not to be taken literally," while a record-high 29% called it "a collection of fables, legends, history, and moral precepts recorded by man."⁷

American views on the Bible (Gallup, 2022)⁷

Numerical contradictions

Among the most straightforward contradictions in the Bible are cases where parallel passages report different numbers for the same event. These are difficult to attribute to differing perspectives or literary license because numbers are, by their nature, either correct or incorrect. The Hebrew Bible contains dozens of such discrepancies, particularly between the books of Samuel-Kings and their parallel accounts in Chronicles.²

One well-known example involves King David's census. In 2 Samuel 24:9, Joab reports 800,000 fighting men in Israel and 500,000 in Judah. In the parallel account in 1 Chronicles 21:5, the figures are 1,100,000 in Israel and 470,000 in Judah, a difference of 300,000 for Israel and 30,000 for Judah.^{2, 8} The same event also raises a theological question: 2 Samuel 24:1 says "the Lord" incited David to take the census, while 1 Chronicles 21:1 attributes the incitement to "Satan," reflecting a shift in Israelite theology between the earlier and later texts.²

The age of King Ahaziah when he began to reign provides another clear example. According to 2 Kings 8:26, Ahaziah was twenty-two years old. But 2 Chronicles 22:2 gives his age as forty-two, which is mathematically impossible since his father Jehoram died at age forty and could not have fathered a son who was two years his senior.⁸ Most scholars, including conservative ones, attribute this particular discrepancy to a scribal copying error. Ancient translations such as the Syriac and several Septuagint manuscripts read "twenty-two" in the Chronicles passage, and modern translations including the NIV, ESV, and NASB have quietly corrected the figure.^{8, 9}

Selected numerical contradictions in parallel passages^{2, 8}

Defenders of inerrancy have proposed various explanations for these discrepancies, including the possibility that different categories of soldiers were being counted or that standing armies were included in one tally but not the other.⁸ While some of these explanations are plausible for individual cases, the sheer number of numerical disagreements between Samuel-Kings and Chronicles suggests a systematic issue rather than a series of coincidental misunderstandings.²

The two creation accounts

The Book of Genesis opens with two distinct accounts of creation that differ in vocabulary, literary style, sequence of events, and theological emphasis. The first account, Genesis 1:1 through 2:3, presents a highly structured, liturgical narrative in which God (called "Elohim" in Hebrew) creates the cosmos over six days in a specific order: light, sky, land and vegetation, celestial bodies, sea creatures and birds, land animals, and finally human beings, male and female together.^{10, 11}

The second account, beginning at Genesis 2:4, uses a markedly different style and vocabulary. God is now called "Yahweh Elohim" (the LORD God), and the order of creation differs significantly. Here, the man is formed first from the dust of the ground, then trees and a garden are planted, then animals are created as potential companions for the man, and finally the woman is made from the man's rib.^{10, 11} The sequence of creation in the two accounts cannot be straightforwardly reconciled: in Genesis 1, animals precede humans; in Genesis 2, the man precedes animals.²

Scholars at institutions such as BioLogos, an organization founded by evangelical geneticist Francis Collins, have acknowledged these differences openly. As their published analysis states, the two creation accounts "have different literary styles, scope, and organizational principles. Genesis 1 describes the creation of the entire cosmos over six days, with repetition and patterning, climaxing with God's rest on the seventh day," while "Genesis 2 zooms in telescopically on humanity on the earth."¹¹ This "zoom-in" interpretation is the most common conservative harmonization, treating Genesis 2 as an expansion of day six rather than a contradictory sequence. However, the text of Genesis 2 does not present itself as a flashback or elaboration; it uses sequential narrative language ("then the LORD God formed," "then the LORD God planted") that reads naturally as a distinct chronological account.¹⁰

The differences between these two accounts are central to the documentary hypothesis, the scholarly model proposing that the Pentateuch was composed from multiple written sources. Genesis 1 is attributed to the Priestly source (P), characterized by its formal style and use of "Elohim," while Genesis 2 is attributed to the Yahwist source (J), which uses "Yahweh" and employs a more anthropomorphic portrayal of God.^{10, 12}

Gospel contradictions

The four canonical Gospels tell the story of Jesus's life, death, and resurrection, but they do so with significant differences in detail, sequence, and emphasis. New Testament scholars have catalogued these differences extensively, and while many can be explained as variations in perspective or emphasis, others present direct conflicts that resist easy harmonization.^{2, 3}

The genealogies of Jesus in Matthew and Luke illustrate the problem vividly. Both Gospels trace Jesus's lineage through Joseph, but they diverge dramatically after King David. Matthew 1:6 traces the line through Solomon, while Luke 3:31 traces it through Nathan, a different son of David. Between David and Jesus, the two lists share only two names in common: Shealtiel and Zerubbabel.^{2, 3} Even Joseph's father is identified differently: Jacob in Matthew 1:16 and Heli in Luke 3:23.² The most common apologetic response, that one genealogy follows Joseph's line while the other follows Mary's, faces the difficulty that Luke explicitly identifies his genealogy as Joseph's ("being, as was supposed, the son of Joseph, the son of Heli").³

The accounts of Judas's death present another well-documented conflict. In Matthew 27:3-10, Judas returns the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests, then goes and hangs himself; the priests use the money to buy the potter's field. In Acts 1:18-19, Judas himself buys a field with the reward of his wickedness, and "falling headlong, he burst open in the middle and all his bowels gushed out."² These accounts differ on who bought the field, how Judas died, and why the field received its name. Harmonization attempts typically propose that Judas hanged himself and then the rope broke, causing him to fall and burst open, but this explanation requires adding details found in neither text.^{2, 8}

The resurrection narratives across the four Gospels contain some of the most extensively documented discrepancies in the New Testament. The accounts disagree on who went to the tomb, what they found there, whom they met, and what happened next.^{2, 3}

Resurrection narrative details compared across the Gospels^{2, 3}

The Gospel of Mark, which most scholars consider the earliest written Gospel, originally ended at 16:8 with the women fleeing the empty tomb in fear and telling no one.^{3, 9} The longer ending of Mark (16:9-20), which includes resurrection appearances, is absent from the earliest and best Greek manuscripts and is widely regarded by textual critics as a later addition.⁹ The crucifixion timing presents yet another conflict: Mark 15:25 states that Jesus was crucified at "the third hour" (approximately 9 a.m. by Jewish reckoning), while John 19:14 says that at "about the sixth hour" (approximately noon), Jesus was still before Pilate and had not yet been crucified.²

Theological tensions

Beyond factual and narrative discrepancies, the Bible contains theological statements that stand in tension with one another. These are often subtler than numerical contradictions but are considered more significant by scholars because they reflect genuinely different religious perspectives held by different biblical authors writing in different periods.^{2, 10}

The nature of God is portrayed differently across various biblical books. In some passages, God is described as changing his mind: Genesis 6:6 says "the LORD regretted that he had made human beings on the earth," and in Exodus 32:14, "the LORD relented from the disaster that he had spoken of bringing on his people." Yet 1 Samuel 15:29 states explicitly that God "is not a human being, that he should change his mind," and Numbers 23:19 affirms that "God is not human, that he should lie, not a human being, that he should change his mind."² Malachi 3:6 declares, "I the LORD do not change." These passages present conflicting claims about a fundamental divine attribute.^{2, 10}

The question of whether God punishes children for their parents' sins receives contradictory answers. Exodus 20:5 states that God visits "the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation," while Ezekiel 18:20 directly contradicts this: "The child shall not suffer for the iniquity of the parent."² Deuteronomy 24:16 similarly declares that "parents shall not be put to death for their children, nor shall children be put to death for their parents." These passages cannot both be true as absolute principles.²

In the New Testament, the relationship between faith and works in salvation is a prominent theological tension. Paul writes in Romans 3:28 that "a person is justified by faith apart from the works of the law," and Ephesians 2:8-9 states that salvation comes "by grace through faith" and "not by works." Yet James 2:24 states bluntly: "You see that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone."^{2, 3} Martin Luther was so troubled by this tension that he famously called the Epistle of James "an epistle of straw" and questioned its canonical status.¹⁴ While theologians have proposed various ways to harmonize Paul and James, the surface-level contradiction is plain in the texts themselves, and New Testament scholars generally acknowledge that these authors held genuinely different emphases on the role of human action in salvation.³

Jesus himself is recorded as making seemingly contradictory statements. In Matthew 12:30, he says, "Whoever is not with me is against me," while in Mark 9:40, he says, "Whoever is not against us is for us."² These sayings express opposite logical propositions. Harmonization typically argues that they address different audiences or situations, but this requires contextual inference beyond what the texts themselves provide.²

How textual criticism explains some contradictions

Textual criticism, the scholarly discipline of analyzing ancient manuscripts to reconstruct the most likely original text, provides an important framework for understanding how some biblical contradictions arose. The New Testament alone survives in more than 5,800 Greek manuscripts, 10,000 Latin manuscripts, and 9,300 manuscripts in other ancient languages. No two of these manuscripts are identical.^{9, 15}

Scholarly estimates of the total number of textual variants among New Testament manuscripts range widely. Bruce Metzger, widely considered the foremost textual critic of the twentieth century, documented these variants extensively in his standard reference work, The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration.⁹ Bart Ehrman, Metzger's student and coauthor of the fourth edition of that work, reported estimates ranging from 200,000 to 400,000 variants.¹⁵ A 2016 study by Peter Gurry in New Testament Studies proposed a higher estimate of approximately 500,000 non-spelling variants, making them more numerous than the words of the New Testament itself.¹⁶

Most of these variants are minor: spelling differences, word-order changes, and other scribal slips that do not affect meaning. But a significant subset involves intentional changes made by scribes for theological or harmonistic reasons.^{9, 15} Ehrman's research in Misquoting Jesus documents how scribes altered texts to de-emphasize the role of women in the early church, to harmonize conflicting portrayals of Jesus across the four Gospels, and to oppose theological positions they considered heretical.¹⁵

Harmonization by scribes is particularly relevant to the question of contradictions. When a scribe copying the Gospel of Luke encountered a passage that differed from the more familiar version in Matthew or Mark, the temptation to "correct" one text to match the other was strong. Metzger documented that such harmonization is "ubiquitous" in the manuscript tradition, "found on virtually every page of an apparatus of the Greek New Testament."⁹ This means that some apparent agreements between the Gospels in modern Bibles may actually be the result of later scribal smoothing rather than original authorial consistency. Conversely, the contradictions that survive in our best manuscripts are likely original, because they resisted the scribal impulse to harmonize.^{9, 15}

The case of Ahaziah's age illustrates how textual criticism works in practice. The Masoretic text (the standard Hebrew text preserved by medieval Jewish scribes) reads "forty-two" in 2 Chronicles 22:2, creating an impossible chronology. But the Septuagint (the ancient Greek translation) and the Syriac Peshitta both read "twenty-two," matching 2 Kings 8:26. Textual critics can therefore identify the "forty-two" as a scribal error that entered one branch of the manuscript tradition, while the original reading was likely "twenty-two."^{8, 9} This kind of analysis explains some contradictions as transmission errors rather than authorial mistakes, but it also demonstrates that the biblical text has not been preserved without error, undermining the premise of strict inerrancy.¹⁵

Multiple authorship and the documentary hypothesis

Many of the contradictions in the Hebrew Bible can be traced to the composite nature of its texts. The documentary hypothesis, the foundational model of Pentateuchal criticism, proposes that the first five books of the Bible were not written by a single author (traditionally Moses) but were compiled from at least four major written sources composed over several centuries.^{10, 12}

First articulated in its modern form by Julius Wellhausen in his 1883 Prolegomena to the History of Israel, the hypothesis identifies four primary strands: the Yahwist (J), which uses the name "Yahweh" for God and dates to approximately the tenth or ninth century BCE; the Elohist (E), which uses "Elohim" and dates to the ninth or eighth century; the Deuteronomist (D), largely confined to the book of Deuteronomy and dated to the late seventh century; and the Priestly source (P), focused on ritual law and genealogy, dated to the sixth or fifth century.¹² Although details of the hypothesis have been refined and debated over the past century, its fundamental insight, that the Pentateuch is a composite work from multiple authors, remains the mainstream scholarly position.^{10, 12}

Richard Elliott Friedman, in his widely read Who Wrote the Bible? and the scholarly The Bible with Sources Revealed, demonstrated how the Pentateuch can be separated into continuous, internally consistent narratives when the sources are disentangled. He identified seven types of evidence for the documentary hypothesis: linguistic differences reflecting the Hebrew of different historical periods; distinctive vocabulary tied to specific sources; consistent content themes within each source; the coherence of each source as a self-contained narrative when read independently; connections between each source and specific historical contexts; relationships between the sources that show a clear editorial process; and convergence of all these lines of evidence pointing to the same source divisions.¹³

The documentary hypothesis explains contradictions by showing that they arise at the seams where an editor (known as the redactor) combined originally independent sources. The two creation accounts in Genesis are perhaps the clearest example: Genesis 1:1-2:3 comes from P, while Genesis 2:4-25 comes from J. They were placed side by side by a later editor, creating the contradictions in sequence and divine naming that scholars now observe.^{10, 12, 13} The flood narrative contains similar doublets: in one strand God instructs Noah to take two of every animal (Genesis 6:19-20, attributed to P), while in another he is told to take seven pairs of clean animals and one pair of unclean (Genesis 7:2-3, attributed to J).^{10, 13}

A similar composite authorship is recognized in the New Testament. The consensus of modern scholarship holds that Mark was the first Gospel written (around 65-70 CE), and that Matthew and Luke independently used Mark as a source, along with a hypothetical sayings collection known as Q and their own unique material.^{3, 17} This "two-source hypothesis" explains the extensive verbal agreement among the Synoptic Gospels as well as their divergences: Matthew and Luke each modified Mark's account to suit their own theological purposes, sometimes in contradictory ways.³

Harmonization and its limits

Apologetic harmonization, the attempt to demonstrate that apparently contradictory passages can be reconciled, has a long history in Christian theology. Gleason Archer's Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties, first published in 1982, is one of the most comprehensive examples of this approach, addressing hundreds of alleged contradictions from Genesis to Revelation.⁸ Archer's method treats all biblical testimonies as trustworthy reports viewed from different perspectives that, when combined, provide a fuller understanding of events.⁸

Several common harmonization strategies recur throughout apologetic literature. Additive harmonization combines the details of multiple accounts into a single, larger narrative, assuming that apparent conflicts simply reflect different aspects of the same event. For example, the different numbers of women at the tomb are explained by arguing that each Gospel mentions only some of the women who were present, without intending to provide an exhaustive list.⁸ Translation-based arguments appeal to ambiguities in the original Hebrew or Greek, such as the suggestion that the Hebrew verb in Genesis 2:19 should be read as a pluperfect ("had formed") rather than a simple past tense ("formed"), which would remove the apparent conflict in the creation sequence.¹¹ Contextual explanations argue that contradictory-seeming statements address different audiences or situations, as with the opposing sayings of Jesus about "whoever is not with me" and "whoever is not against us."⁸

Mainstream biblical scholars acknowledge that some of these strategies resolve genuine difficulties, but they also identify significant limitations. New Testament scholar Raymond Brown, himself a Roman Catholic priest, argued in his authoritative An Introduction to the New Testament that the differences between the Gospels should be understood as reflecting the theological perspectives of their individual authors rather than harmonized away. Brown maintained that each Gospel must be read on its own terms before being compared with others, and that forced harmonization often obscures the distinctive message of each evangelist.³

Bart Ehrman, who began his career as an evangelical committed to inerrancy before becoming a leading critical scholar, has argued that many harmonization attempts amount to "imaginative interpretive gymnastics" that effectively create a fifth narrative not found in any of the original texts.² When defenders of inerrancy propose that Judas both hanged himself and later fell and burst open, or that two separate cleansings of the Temple occurred (one recorded by John at the beginning of Jesus's ministry and another by the Synoptics at the end), they are constructing scenarios that no biblical author describes.²

Kenton Sparks, an evangelical scholar at Eastern University, has acknowledged this tension from within the tradition. In God's Word in Human Words, he argues that evangelicals should take the insights of critical biblical scholarship seriously, including the recognition that the Bible contains genuine discrepancies reflecting its human authorship. Sparks maintains that acknowledging these discrepancies need not undermine the Bible's theological authority, but he insists that pretending they do not exist is intellectually dishonest and ultimately harmful to faith.¹⁸

An important dimension of this discussion involves the distinction between ancient literary conventions and modern expectations of historical accuracy. Ancient Near Eastern authors did not share the modern historian's concern for precise chronology, exact quotation, or exhaustive reporting.¹⁹ Ancient biographies, including Greco-Roman bioi (the genre to which the Gospels are most commonly compared), routinely rearranged events thematically, compressed timelines, and placed speeches in the mouths of historical figures to convey their ideas rather than their exact words.^{3, 19} Recognizing these conventions helps explain some of the variation in the biblical texts, but it also means that reading the Bible as though it were a modern newspaper or textbook, as strict inerrancy tends to do, applies an anachronistic standard that the original authors never intended to meet.^{19, 20}

The existence of contradictions in the Bible does not, in the view of most scholars, diminish its literary, historical, or theological significance. Critical scholarship treats these inconsistencies not as embarrassments to be explained away but as evidence of the Bible's rich compositional history, a collection of texts written by different authors in different times and places, each with their own perspective on the divine. What the contradictions do challenge is the specific claim that the Bible is a seamless, error-free document, a claim that, as the evidence shows, cannot be sustained under careful examination.^{2, 3, 10}