All right, we're in a series here on apologetics, defending the faith against skeptics and critics of the faith. And we've talked about some various approaches to how we do that in general, what we can call various philosophies of apologetics. And we, he said, imperially. have decided to start dealing with specific questions. The question we want to start with is how do we know that the Bible is not simply another sacred book? How do we know that it's different in kind? Is there a way objectively to demonstrate that? Well, I've made the point that faith always plays a role in Christianity. We do walk by faith and not by sight. But this is not a blind faith. It is not a leap into a fog bank. There is evidence. And while the evidence obviously is not so convincing that nobody can disagree, it is scientifically worthy evidence. And what we're trying to do here is just to discuss the various evidences that we have for the allegation that the Bible is an extraordinary book, that it is not simply another sacred writing like the Book of Mormon or the Bhagavad Gita or the Koran or something along that line. And I suggested last time that I think of these evidences in two main groups, two main lines of argument. One has to do with the literary quality of the text itself. And if you have a background in the study of literature, you know that there is a discipline called literary criticism. and that it has tools that we can use as scholars to evaluate the nature of the text. The second line of thinking that I'm going to get to, by the way, is the matter of fulfilled prophecy. And we're not going to get to that for a couple of weeks yet at least, but I just want you to know what's coming. Now, on this idea of literary quality, last time I started with this concept of unity and I used the illustration of anthologies, how when I worked in publishing, I was actually responsible for putting together some anthologies. And I told the illustration of trying to write an actual high school science textbook as an anthology with different professors writing different chapters. And what a horrifically difficult job that was. First, to create a structure that was coherent, that held together where you weren't repeating yourself or leaving things out or contradicting yourself. Very difficult to do that. And I was working with a situation where I had a fairly limited number of authors, five or six, sitting pretty much in the same room contemporaneously. And I talked about how difficult it was to have to go in later with a very skilled editor to make this thing sound like It wasn't written by a committee. This is very hard to do. Now, the scripture written over about 1400 to 1500 years by at least 40 different persons, and I didn't say men because we don't know who the authors of all the books are, and there are a couple of speculations that some women might have had a place in writing some of the material, but at least 40 different persons. the kind of thematic unity you get in this work, and you can demonstrate it with the tools of literary criticism. I gave you a brief demonstration of that last time. I talked about those three sections of the Old Testament in the Hebrew canon, the law, the prophets, and the writings, and how they introduce the offices of priest and the prophets, prophet, and writings, king, those three offices, and demonstrate in each case the need for someone who can execute those offices correctly and permanently and skillfully and morally. And then you turn the page to the New Testament and you are introduced to Jesus Christ, prophet, priest, and king. And the whole New Testament is the demonstration of His perfect fulfillment of those three offices. It begins with Him as prophet in the Gospels. It turns to His work as priest on the cross. And then it ends with His role as king in the book of Revelation. Now, there wasn't email in those days. These guys weren't talking to each other. Most of them never met each other. That piece of large-scale literary unity is a wondrous thing, and the more you study it, the more remarkable it is. This is not a merely human anthology. Now, that's all review. I said another element of literary quality is the lack of contradiction. And I want to spend some time on that today. There have been lots of books written and articles and so on alleging specific contradictions in the Bible. And often if you're dealing with critics, people who don't believe, you will hear the allegation that the Scripture is just full of contradictions. Just before we even get into the details, it can be fun to say, really, can you show me one? And the answer is always, well, no, but I've heard. Well, that's not scientific. Hearsay is neither legal evidence nor scientific evidence. And if we're going to discuss a complex issue like this, we have to approach it with scholarly academic rigor. We can't just throw allegations around and not support them. If you Google contradictions in the Bible, you can find a whole list of websites that list these things. And they break them out in different ways. But a lot of them are just recycling the same material. Now, if you're a web fiend, you know that Google is an extremely popular search engine. And the reason is the algorithm it uses to decide what order it gives you your results in. It has a fairly complex ranking system that is built on the idea that the better websites will have lots of other websites that link to them. And so essentially, this is an oversimplification, but essentially, the more sites that link to your website, the higher you're going to be in the list of results. And what that amounts to is a nod toward the concept of free market capitalism. It says the market will tend to determine where the value is. And so they look at what the people on the web think are the most valuable websites by linking to them. And then they rank them by that way. So I googled contradictions in the Bible and you get a whole list, but the number one site on Google is a site called infidels.org. And I have chosen to use their list simply because that's what the web community has indicated in a fairly objective way is the most valuable one. There are other sites you can find a list of 101 contradictions in the Bible and so on. I'm using infidels.org. They have a list of 69 contradictions. I've gone through that list fairly thoroughly and carefully. There are two duplicates. Two of those contradictions are listed twice in different places. So there are actually 67 unique alleged contradictions. It prints out to 26 pages. And there are a number of contributors. They are identified. Email address is given. And so this seemed like a fairly reasonably carefully done list with a broad base. And it seemed to be very highly recognized in the web community. So I've picked this one. Can't possibly go through all of them, all of the lists. But this seemed like a good one to use. Now before I get, what I want to do today is to give you a little sampling of these alleged contradictions. And I want to make the point that they tend to fall into groups. Now, sometimes on the web you can find, and in books, you can find these contradictions grouped by type of alleged error. For example, scientific errors, mathematical errors, historical errors, and so on. I'm not going to group them that way. I'm going to group them by the nature of the flaw in the charge. And we're going to look at several different types of charges of contradiction in the Scripture. I can't give you all 67 of them. I'm thinking I'm going to place my notes on the website, if that would help you. I hope they'll be up there sometime this week. They're very terse. I'm not really giving you full explanations of everything. You can find in lots of books and on the web and in commentaries explanations of specific alleged contradictions. But what I've done here is I've categorized all those 67 in the infidels list by category. And I've given some statistics to indicate how much weight the critics are placing on these kinds of objections. Before I get into the specifics, I want to make three points that you should already know, but I just want to make sure they're on the table for the discussion. We're talking about the fact that the Bible is different from other sacred scriptures. And the theological term we use for that difference is the term inspiration. And we talked about that, how really it's not the right word because the Bible teaches that God breathed out. And it's really outspiration. of the Scripture that we're talking about. But we call this concept that the Scripture is the Word of God. We call that concept inspiration. And this idea of inerrancy, that there are no contradictions in the Bible, is essentially a function of inspiration. The reason we say the Bible is inerrant is because it's the Word of God and God doesn't make mistakes and He doesn't lie and He doesn't change His mind. Now, there are three points I want to make about this idea of inspiration. First of all, you often hear it said, that conservative Christians, Bible believers, are people who believe that the Bible should be taken literally. That is entirely wrong. There is nobody, nobody on the planet who believes that everything in the Bible should be taken literally. Nobody believes that. Yet, that's often, the position is often oversimplified as that. Look, when Isaiah says at the end of chapter 5, 55, that when Jesus returns, he doesn't say Jesus, obviously, it's Old Testament, Messiah returns, the trees of the field shall clap their hands. Nobody takes that literally. Come on, what do you think, I'm an idiot? And that's just stupid. First of all, trees don't have hands. Secondly, I don't think it's even saying that they're going to bang their leaves together in the wind. That's not what the... What is that? That is a figure of speech common to all kinds of literature. And it's simply saying that nature will rejoice. And that reminds you of the passage in Romans where Paul says that the creation groans and travails under the bondage of sin and it's going to be released from that with the return of Christ. And we read about the millennium and eventually the New Jerusalem where there are going to be all kinds of unusual things happening in nature, lions lying down with lambs and children playing in the snake pit. And a tree that bears 12 different kinds of fruits, a different kind each month, Fruit of the Month Club. And it's going to be less expensive than the modern Fruit of the Month Club. creation is going to be delivered. Okay, figures of speech. We recognize that the nature of language and of literature is that you never are literal all the time. Language is very boring when you're literal all the time. It's not worth reading. So, point one, nobody believes that the Bible is all to be taken literally. Point two, inspiration does say that the Bible is to be taken literarily. By that I mean it's to be viewed with the same tools and techniques that you would view any other kind of literature. We are not saying that it is ordinary literature, but that it works the same way. So, you find metaphor, you find other figures of speech, anthropomorphism, personification, different genres, and the different genres work differently. Proverbs, for example, in wisdom literature, The nature of a proverb is it's an observation about the way things tend to work. Proverbs are not prophecies. Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise. Is that always true? Of course not. It's a proverb. That's the way proverbs work. Early to bed, early to rise, and your girl goes out with other guys. That's the way it really works. So you read in the book of Proverbs, train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it. Well, here's an example where that didn't happen. The Bible's wrong. No, that's a proverb. You have to read it as the kind of literature it is. So the Bible is not to be taken literally in all cases. It is to be taken literarily. We bring the ordinary tools of literary analysis to this literature. Third, inspiration and therefore inerrancy applies only to the original writings. It does not apply to copies. Nobody, well, there are people, crackpots who say this, but nobody orthodox says this. There is nobody orthodox who says that the copyists never made any mistakes. It also does not extend to translations. Nobody says translators were inspired. Nobody that we should be listening to. There are a couple guys and they're nuts. They are not mainstream at all. Now, when we approach these alleged contradictions, we have to remember all of that stuff. And I think we're going to see those three concepts coming into play occasionally here. Now, let's look at some specifics. I want to start with the really easy ones, and we'll work our way up the list. The first group of alleged contradictions I call illegitimate based on their misunderstanding of this concept of translation. The list in infidels.org is almost exclusively taken from the King James. And they find things in the King James where the translators did something. And these guys are not looking at the original Hebrew and Aramaic and Greek. And it's interesting to me that we're the idiots. We're the non-scholarly ones. But they are not looking at the original languages. And they're finding things in this case, the King James translation. And you could find examples of this sort of thing in any other translation. that make it look like there's an error when there isn't. Let me give you a couple of illustrations. Turn to Genesis chapter 1 and verse 20. Genesis 1 and verse 20. You know, this is creation week, right? Very familiar story. And God said, this is day 5, and God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven. Now, if you're not looking at the King James, you may not see the error. Let the waters bring forth the moving creature and fowl that fly. Where did the fowl come from? God brought them forth out of the water. That's what the King James says. Now, you look down at chapter 2, verse 19. And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every fowl of the air. So, did God make the fowl out of the water or out of the ground? Contradiction. Well, this is an example of a problem with a specific translation. Genesis 1.20 is not, I wouldn't call it incorrectly translated, but it's ambiguously translated in the King James. And it appears that fowl here is a direct object in 1.20 of bring forth. Let the waters bring forth fowl that may fly. It isn't in the Hebrew. I've pulled out the ESV, which is just one example of another modern translation. Let the waters swarm with swarms of living creatures and let birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the heavens. This passage does not say in the original language that God made the fowl out of the waters. Well, if all you're doing is looking at a translation, an old one at that, I really don't want to be hostile or cynical or hypercritical, but that is not scholarship. And it really irritates me, frankly, that some of these guys act like we're the idiots when they are not doing their homework. That's one example of a translation problem. And let me quickly mention a couple of others. You don't need to turn to them. In Genesis 22.1, God tempts Abraham. James 1. No man, let no man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of God. God cannot be tempted with evil, neither tempteth He any man. Well, for starters, tempt in James is in Greek. Tempt in Genesis is in Hebrew. You're dealing with different languages. In either, even if you weren't, words have multiple nuances. And the word I always use for this illustration is the word set. If I were to ask you, what does the word set mean? You would say, well, it depends on whether you're talking about the sun or tennis. or your hair. Three very different concepts. Completely different concepts. Same English word. How do you figure out in English which nuance, which meaning you're using? Well, you get it from the context. And we do that all the time. We don't even think about it. When I say, I'm going to set my hair, I don't mean that it's going down like the sun. You just figure that out. It's innate to the human communication process. All right, this word tempt has multiple meanings. It may mean to try to induce someone to commit moral evil. And that's our modern English word, tempt. It may mean simply to put somebody through a period of testing, to try him, boot camp. That is a temptation. That is a testing. Now, in modern English, we have divided those two meanings and we don't use that second nuance of the word temptation. But in the King James period, they did. And so there was no contradiction. God tempts Abraham, he puts him to the test. Now, there is an interesting problem in that concept. Didn't God know what Abram would do? Does God really have to try someone to see if he will, you know, he knows. So why did he do that with Abraham? He did it so we would know what Abraham did. So the event would occur, the record would be preserved, and thousands and millions of people have profited from Abraham's example in his faithful obedience to the promises of God. But this idea of the word temptation is not a contradiction at all. It's just a translational issue. And frankly, these are very basic translational issues. Anybody who's ever studied a foreign language knows that words have multiple meanings in every language. with the possible exception of very technical terms. Deoxyribonucleic acid, I think, has just one meaning. I don't know of any others. But as a rule, common words always have multiple meanings. And we know that. And it's obvious. It's right there on the surface. This is not complicated. And I would argue that if somebody wasn't trying to be critical, he wouldn't even make this charge because, frankly, it's silly. It's embarrassing. I'd hate to have to defend that in a debate. I'll give you one more example. Turn over to Leviticus 11. This is fun. There's a whole series of these in Leviticus 11. 11-13. This is in the clean and unclean foods passages in the book of Leviticus in the Mosaic Law. Verse 13, and these are they which ye shall have in abomination among the fowls. These are the unclean birds. And not to eat them, they're an abomination. The eagle, the ossifridge, the osprey, the vulture, the kite, the raven, the owl, the nighthawk, the cuckoo, the cock, the little owl, the cormorant, the great owl, the swan, the pelican, the eagle. Ooh, there's another eagle. The stork, the heron, the lapwing, and the bat. Well, a bat is not a bird. Scientific error in the Bible. Well, there are two issues here, first of all. The King James translators themselves said in their preface, now they wrote a lengthy preface that is never published in modern editions of the King James and that's too bad because a lot of really stupid ideas would go away if people would actually read that preface. But one of the things they said was, particularly in the Old Testament animals and plants, some of these words are extremely rare and we're frankly not sure what they mean and we just kind of guessed. Particularly, I mean, eagle, that's a fairly common word. It's actually, one of the words for eagle here is actually vulture, by the way. They shall rise up with wings as eagles. That's actually buzzards. That kind of takes some of the charm out of that, doesn't it? But some of the rarer words, the King James translators admitted they just kind of guessed. This word bat, is it really talking about that mammal with the sonar going on? We don't know. We don't know what that word means. So you can hardly charge the Bible with a scientific error when we're dealing with a translation and we don't know what the word means. Secondly, this word, foul, back in verse 13, you can make a case that it is not precisely a synonym of the modern scientific word, bird. That isn't technically a scientific word. And I didn't pull out my taxonomy to find out all the technical terms for class, phylum, and species and all that. The word foul, translated foul here, the Hebrew word, might simply mean flying creature. Now, is the bat a flying creature? Yeah. So that's just a translational issue. And it's really disingenuous to accuse, to use passages like this, the examples I've shown you, as illustrations of contradictions. They just fall apart when you look at them a little more closely. Now, out of the 67 on infidels.org, 13 of them fall into this category. That is 19%. That's almost 1 out of 5 that are just simple translation errors. And that is academic laziness, right? These, to my mind, are the most embarrassing if I had to defend them because they are extremely weak. The next group. I'm going to read you a list of the examples. And I want you to, there's a pattern that's very clear. I want you to tell me what the pattern is. What kind of errors are these? 1 Kings 4 says Solomon had 40,000 stalls of horses. 2 Chronicles 9 says he had 4,000. 2 Kings 24, Jehoiachin was 18 years old when he became king. 2 Chronicles 36, he was 8. 1 Kings 9, there were 550 overseers. 2 Chronicles 8, 250. 1 Kings 16, King Basha died in Asa's 26th year. 2 Chronicles 16, he died in Asa's 36th year. 2 Kings 8, Ahaziah was 22 when he began to reign. 2 Chronicles 22, he was 42 when he began to reign. Now, what's the common thread that goes through all of those besides the obvious fact that we're dealing with numbers? It might be easier to see it if I'd written them down. Not a decimal point, a digit. One digit difference. Regardless of where the place is, the decimal place, it's always just one digit that's off. Now, where'd that come from? You tell me. You don't have to be a scholar to figure that out. It's a copying error. It's clearly a copying error. And in fact, if you go back and examine the manuscripts and the context, in most of these cases, you can figure out which of the two numbers is the original number, the correct number. But some copy... And by the way, in Hebrew, they don't have numerals. They use letters of the alphabet to stand for numbers. And it's not quite the same as Roman numerals. It's a slightly different system. But it doesn't have place value quite. Well, it's really easy to make a math error in a situation like that. Now, in a modern Arabic numeral system, If you make an error, you can see instantly that the numbers don't add up. When you're using letters as symbols for numbers, you can't see that. It's real easy to make a mistake like that. There are five of them. How many numbers are there in the Bible? Well, for starters, there's a whole book named Numbers, right? Thousands and thousands of numbers. Five copying errors. That's pretty good. You try copying a page of numbers and see how many mistakes you make. Five, and I've already said that inspiration does not extend to copyists. They were not protected from error and nobody except a few crackpots claims that they were. So, is this an error in the Bible? No, that is a completely illegitimate charge. And by the way, if the guys who were coming up with these lists would simply read the actual beliefs of the people they're trying to mock, they wouldn't be bringing up straw men like this. The temptation to get hostile is just almost overwhelming because some of these are so ridiculous and it's irritating to have to take your time to answer charges like that, you know, because it's just stupid. It's careless. Okay, my third group, let's do some writing, shall we? We got translation questions. we have transcription or copying questions. The third group I'm going to call simple misreading, reading the text carelessly and thinking it says one thing when it doesn't. And I would distinguish this from translation errors in that this would happen in the original language as well. Let me show you some examples of what I'm talking about. Genesis chapter 1, every day God says, He sees what He has made and it's good. And on day six, He sees what He has made and it is very good. Is it good or not? It's good. When does it cease being good? This is not a trick question. This is easy, Sunday school stuff. When does it cease being good? With Genesis chapter 3, the fall of Eve and then Adam, right? That's when sin enters into creation. And if there's any doubt about that, Paul makes that clear in Romans chapter 5 when he says, by one man sin entered into the world and death by sin. God looks at Adam before he creates Eve. And he says what? It is not good that man should be alone. Now, is it good or is it not good? Well, this is not a translation error. It's in the original language. Words have multiple meanings, okay? And we all use language that way. The word good in Hebrew, tov, mazel tov, tov, can mean morally good. It can mean efficient, useful, in that sense, a wrench can be good. It has no moral value but it can be... it's a good tool. It can mean complete or grown up or calm or peaceful, almost a synonym of shalom. Now, God looks at what He has done every day and He says, this is good, there's nothing wrong with it. Notice that He doesn't say it's very good until the end of day 6. Mid-afternoon, apparently, I don't know what time of day it was. Mid-afternoon on day six, he has made Adam, but he hasn't made Eve. Well, he's not done yet. So he says, I'm not finished. I got more to do. Woman is not an afterthought. And God doesn't look at his creation and say, oh, I can't believe I left out woman. Oh, I got to fix that. That's how it's characterized in some of the critical literature. No. Okay, we're almost done, but not yet. I got one more thing to do. There's nothing moral or even inefficient about that. It is simply a statement of the status of the project. The project's not complete yet. Misreading of the text. Let me give you one other. I've got 10 of these for 15% of the total list. Let me give you one other illustration just to give you a sense for how this works. 2 Samuel chapter 6 and verse 23. Saul has a daughter named Michael. She is given to David as wife. And we're told that Michael disrespects David. He is dancing before the Ark of God as it is brought into Jerusalem. And she thinks it was inappropriate for him to be so out of control there in front of the people. And she rebukes him. And verse 23 says, Therefore, Michael, the daughter of Saul, had no child unto the day of her death. Did Michael have any children? No. Turn over to chapter 21 of 2 Samuel, verse 8. And the king took the two sons of Rizpah, the daughter of Eah, whom she bare unto Saul, Armoni and Mephibosheth, and the five sons of Michael, the daughter of Saul, whom she brought up for Adriel, the son of Barzaleh, the Meholaphite. The five sons of Michael, the daughter of Saul. Thought she had no sons until the day of her death. Well, look at the text carefully. What does it say? Which she brought up. What does the text not say? That they were her biological sons. There's more than one way to have a child, isn't there? We have illustrations of that in this church. Now, we read elsewhere in the Scripture that Adriel was the husband of Michael's older sister, Merib. Now, it doesn't say whether Michael died or Became a drug addict and was pronounced unfit mother or what? But apparently her older sister is out of the picture and she brings these boys up. What's happening here is you are reading the text carelessly and you're assuming that it says something that it never actually says. Pay attention. The details matter. I've got 10 of those for 15%. Let me give you very quickly one more section, context. Now, the guys at infidels.org mock this defense. They say, well, Christians take verses out of context all the time. Yes, they do, and they shouldn't. Let that be a warning to you. Don't take verses out of context. But the fact is that the principle of literary context is still a valid principle of literary analysis, and it still is a basis for argument. Proverbs 4.7 says that wisdom is the principal thing. Ecclesiastes 1.18 says wisdom doesn't really do any good. Now, what's the context issue? Solomon in Ecclesiastes, the whole book is about how temporal life is not all that we're made for. We're made for something better than this. And he says, I tried riches, I tried women, I tried food, I tried wisdom, and none of it really satisfies. That's true. Now, while you're here, is wisdom the principal thing? Yes, it is. Can they both be true? Of course they can. That's the way language works. We're simply talking about context or perspective. Proverbs 18.2, He that findeth a wife findeth a good thing. 1 Corinthians 7, Paul says, I think it's better if you stay single. Can they both be true? What's the context of 1 Corinthians 7? Paul says in 1 Corinthians 7 very clearly, right now times are tough. There's a lot of persecution going on. Things are up in the air. You will have an advantage if you are not tied down to a family, if you don't carry those responsibilities. You'll be able to make simpler decisions. And so for the current distress, he says, I think that it's better if you stay the way I am, which is single, Paul says. Is that a contradiction of he that findeth a wife findeth a good thing? Not at all. That's the abuse of context, the abuse of the very nature of language. I have nine of these for 13%. Now, that means that so far we've got 29, 26. We have covered 37 errors out of 67. That is slightly more than half, isn't it? Slightly over 50% of the errors in the list are just bad scholarship. They're not hard. What they are doing is reading the Bible in the way that they imagine Bible believers do, which is childishly, literally, and blindly. Well, if they think that's the way we read the Bible, they're just wrong. They're misrepresenting their opponents, and we call that a straw man. They're refuting something that doesn't exist. There are more sections here to talk about, and they get increasingly more difficult to deal with. And I'm going to end up, I'll tell you right now, I'm going to end up with one in the list that's tough. And we'll talk about some possibilities for that one. But we have next time, I want to talk a little bit about the influence of culture on our understanding of the text. And then the influence of various literary techniques like metaphor and perspective and roundness of character and that sort of thing. And if you read the Bible literarily as literature, these errors, these supposed contradictions just fly away. They just absolutely disappear. I ran a little overtime this time. I knew I wasn't going to do it in one lesson. Any questions or observations before we dismiss? Version that I think is best? There's no one answer to that. It depends on what you're looking for. For literary quality, the King James cannot be beat. For careful, formal reflection of the original Hebrew and Greek texts, New American Standard, I think, is very good. For raw readability in a modern context balanced with accuracy, I think the ESV is very good. I've read all of those versions and all the way through, and they all are good in different ways. I memorize from the King James because I want to elevate my language. I'm not saying that's a big theological thing that you got to do, but that's just a quick answer to the question. Yes, ma'am? If you go to the church website and go into the Sunday School section, sometime this week, maybe late in the week, I hope to have this file posted. You're going to be disappointed when you see it because my notes are always very terse. But at least they give you a categorization of the infidels.org allegations. Okay, let's have a word of prayer and we'll be dismissed. Thank you, Father, for the privilege we have of studying your word. We thank you that the Bible does stand despite all of the attacks of misguided and often heavily biased enemies. We pray, Father, that you will help us to Be well equipped for the battles that we fight. We pray also that you would help us as we fight the battle that the real enemy is not the people we deal with, but in fact is a much higher power. And we pray that you would help us to teach these things and make these cases in ways that are gracious and loving and kind and that demonstrate to those who do not believe that there is a better way. Help us, Lord, to demonstrate the peace and the joy and the calmness that comes from a right relationship with God. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.