Contradictions have one other benefit—the proof of its eyewitness accounts. This is especially true of the New Testament. All the stories claim to be from eyewitnesses, giving their stories. Some of these stories are opposing to one another, offering different details, even disagreeing about details. But this proves that the texts weren’t manipulated by someone trying to establish consistency. Rather, we truly do have eyewitness accounts—along with their contradictions, their inconsistencies and the different details. This is a greater evidence of historicity than a completely consistent account, for if you have ten human beings witnessing an event, you have ten different and sometimes contradictory accounts of a single event.
So what is the benefit of accounts that are sometimes contradictory? The benefit is in what they agree in. If you have ten people who see a car accident, and they disagree as to the color and make of the cars, but they all agree that the larger car was hit by the smaller one. Then one can disregard the eyewitness account of the color or make of the cars, but one can rely on the fact of the accident and who hit the other. The same with the Bible. We may not know how many angels were at the tomb, but we have a number of witnesses who claim to have seen an empty tomb and a resurrected Jesus—on that they are consistant. Not only do we know what to focus on, but we also know that what agreement we have we can better rely on because we have unimportant details that disagree with each other.
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