Portal:Bible/Featured article/June, 2009

The internal consistency of the Bible is the question of how self-consistent the Hebrew and Christian scriptures are. This has long been an issue for Christians and Jews, who consider the Bible and Tanakh, respectively, to be divinely inspired: inconsistencies appear to throw doubt on this. Concerns regarding biblical consistency have a long history. In Contra Celsus, the church father Origen replied to the writer Celsus, a critic of Christianity, who had complained that "certain of the Christian believers, like persons who in a fit of drunkenness lay violent hands upon themselves, have corrupted the Gospel from its original integrity, to a threefold, and fourfold, and many-fold degree, and have remodelled it, so that they might be able to answer objections". Origen responded that "I know of no others who have altered the Gospel, save the followers of Marcion, and those of Valentinus, and, I think, also those of Lucian. But such an allegation is no charge against the Christian system, but against those who dared so to trifle with the Gospels. And as it is no ground of accusation against philosophy, that there exist Sophists, or Epicureans, or Peripatetics, or any others, whoever they may be, who hold false opinions; so neither is it against genuine Christianity that there are some who corrupt the Gospel histories, and who introduce heresies opposed to the meaning of the doctrine of Jesus." Among the classic texts which discuss textual inconsistencies are The Age of Reason by Thomas Paine, the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus by Baruch Spinoza, the Encyclopédie of Denis Diderot and the Dictionnaire philosophique of Voltaire. (more...)