Christian Publishing House Blog
Apologetic Defense of the faith, the Bible, and Christianity
Sooner or later, every young Christian comes across passages in the Bible which are hard to understand and difficult to believe. To many a young Christian, these difficulties become a serious hindrance in the development of their Christian life. For days and weeks and months, oftentimes, faith suffers partial or total eclipse.
What does it mean to be a skeptic? Are skeptics to be skeptical about all things or are they able to be skeptical about some things, while being a true believer about other things?
Bible critics, be they atheists, agnostics, Muslims, and so on, want to tell us that there are mistakes, errors, and contradictions in the Bible, not to mention hundreds of thousands of scribal errors. In fact, they would like us to believe that the Bible is filled with such things. They make this claim because ...
Hands down, the Greek Septuagint version is the most important of the early versions of the Old Testament Hebrew Scriptures. In fact, it is the first translation. The Greek Septuagint is abbreviated as the Roman numeral LXX (meaning, “Seventy”).
In dealing with Bible problems of any kind, whether in factual or in doctrinal matters, it is well to follow appropriate guidelines in determining the solution. How can this be done?
THE BIBLE: ERRORS! CONTRADICTIONS! MISTAKES! Critics claim the Bible is filled with errors, mistakes, and contradictions. Some even speak of thousands of mistakes. The truth is there is ...
As we look over the ten classes of difficulties, we see they all arise from our imperfection in understanding, and not from the imperfection of the Bible. The Bible is perfect, but we, being imperfect, will have difficulties in understanding it. As we grow more and more in our understanding of God, our difficulties grow ever less and less, and so we are forced to conclude that when we dig deeper into God's Word, we shall have very few difficulties whatever with the Bible.
Whenever you find a difficulty in the Bible, frankly, acknowledge it. Do not try to obscure it. Recognize the limitations of your own mind and knowledge, and do not for a moment imagine that there is no solution, just because you have found none. Make up your mind that you will find the solution if you can by buying out a respectable amount of study time and complex thinking. Do not be frightened when you find a difficulty, no matter how unanswerable or how insurmountable it appears at first sight. Do not be discouraged because you do not solve every problem in a day. Remember, many times, nothing explains Scripture like Scripture. It is simply incredible how difficulties dissolve when one looks at them on his knees.
In short, there are no contradictions, errors, or mistakes in the Bible, but there are Bible difficulties. Basically, Bible Difficulties are difficulties that arise because the Bible was written in Hebrew, some Aramaic, and Greek over 1,600 years by some forty+ authors, in dozens of different historical settings that require much Bible background knowledge.
IT SEEMS THAT the charge that the Bible contradicts itself has been made more and more in the last 30 years. Generally, those making such claims are merely repeating what they have heard because most have not even read the Bible, let alone done an in-depth study of it. However, we should not set aside all concerns as though they have no merit.