Contradictions are not an argument against the inspiration of Scripture. God could have inspired the authors to focus on what is important. The important thing, in Genesis 1, is to offer texts that show the creation of the world by God’s hand, but not necessarily to show the order or timing of the creation. The important thing in the genealogies of Jesus is to show that he is an adopted descendent of David, not to get the exact names right. The importance of Stephen’s speech in Acts 7 is to show how Judeans had always rejected God’s prophets, not to get every precise detail correct. In this way, we can see that contradictions in Scripture help us to focus on the important details—the ethics and basic facts about God, not the details of history.
Contradictions, however, do land a blow against the idea of the inerrancy of the Bible. If the Bible can be shown to have one, solid, proven error, then it is not without error, thus not inerrant. If the Bible is not inerrant—which the Bible never claims for itself—then that offers a lot of other questions about the connection between faith and science, faith and proven historical data, and whether fundamentalist faith is accurate in any way. The Bible could be about many things, but it does not have to inform science, nor does it have to inform our study of other disciplines. The Bible is good for what is shows us—the ways of God, the salvation of Jesus, the fact of a spirit world, and the ancient history of the Jews. But we should not make the Bible say what it does not say for itself.
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