Biblical Inerrancy?
Nope; Contradictions, False Claims, and Failed Prophecies
This article is one of a series of articles introduced by Flawed Reasons to Believe in God. If you’re new to the series, you should read the Introduction before (or after) reading the material below.
If we could get Christians to read the whole Bible, there would be a lot fewer Christians, and those remaining wouldn’t include so many biblically illiterate believers. Leave out The Book of Revelation, and the Jesus/God of the New Testament compares to Yahweh of the Old Testament like an affectionate pet pooch compares to a grisly bear. Yet we are told they are the same deity. Also, those familiar with the Old Testament quotes claimed to be prophecies of Jesus by the writers of the Synoptic Gospels will know that all were taken out of context and had nothing to do with Jesus when they were written.
Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 disagree with each other in important details including how Adam and Eve were created. This is because the scribes and ancient scholars who compiled the Tanakh had to reconcile two competing versions, the Yahwist and the Priestly texts.
Christian apologists are correct in claiming that Genesis 1 focuses on the day-by-day progress of the six-day creation while Genesis 2 zooms in on the creation of human beings. But they lie when they claim there are no contradictions in the two accounts. The whole story about life being created but not existing until god finally made rain to water the Earth reads like the post-hoc rationalizations Christians concoct to explain away absurdities in the New Testament.
Genesis 1 and 2 are also wildly out of sync with what modern science tells us about creation. Genesis also covers creation as if it only involved the Earth with a solar system somehow attached to the dome of the firmament, a flat Earth floating on the waters of the deep, and space filled with water above the firmament (sky). The biblical writers were clueless about the bulk of our Milky Way galaxy and all the billions of other galaxies and features that form our Universe.
Genesis clearly wasn't the inspired word of a creator God. It is a syncretic makeover of earlier Babylonian and Hindu creation myths. Even as a parable, a creator God would have written it so it tracked accurately with reality.
The Bible begins with the absurdities of Genesis and ends with the insane nonsense of The Revelation of John of Patmos. The chapters between those extremes do contain some good advice, historical fact, and moral thought. But cover-to-cover, the book is plagued by contradictions, fictions, false claims, and failed prophecies. If you are unsure what is required for a prophecy to be specific enough to count as a prophecy, that’s covered here.
This article is one of a series of articles introduced by Flawed Reasons to Believe in God. If you’re new to the series, you should read the Introduction before (or after) reading the material above.
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