I don't believe any of the gospel accounts were inaccurate, they just didn't include the exact same details.

This post was edited by IceMage on Jul 31 2015 08:52pm

I feel like there is literally nothing I or we could point toward in that book that would cause you to doubt the validity of the Bible. Christians will justify almost anything.

The different gospels account for different amounts of people being there. How does that make any sense at all?

Why would you expect the four gospel writers to report the same secondary details? Especially the details of which women were present? Women weren't valued as witnesses in that culture.

Again, this isn't a news report. One gospel didn't say "5 women were at the scene", and another 3, another 8. Certain writers mentioned certain people and others were more descriptive on this minute aspect of the story.

This isn't an issue of a Christian justifying anything which supports the consistency of the gospel accounts, it's an issue of people criticizing Christianity with misguided standards. No historian would expect 2,000 year old documents to be completely consistent in the secondary details of the same story.

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It'd be nice for people to respond with arguments, and not the same tired garbage of "Christians will make excuses for anything lolz".

This post was edited by IceMage on Jul 31 2015 09:34pm

When an interrogator is performing an interrogation that is multiple hours long you know how they know whether you are lying or not? They ask you to repeat your alibi or story or whatever again and again and again. If your story variates a bit or is it word for word, as recited the first time. Someone that is trained themselves to tell a lie under duress will revert to the same fallback lines word for word. His/her story will be identical when told the first or the 30th time, on the contrary the person that's telling the truth will start to give variations of the truth because he/she doesn't have the lie rehearsed in their heads and as the fatigue and duress gets to them more and more details relevant or not will come out.

Likewise it would be more suspect if all four accounts were completely identical, because it would indicate some sort of collusion on the part of the people telling a lie. Just because there is some insignificant variation between the Gospel writers does not mean they contradict each other or are lies. In fact these small variations testify to the truthfulness of the events that transpired.

This post was edited by ofthevoid on Jul 31 2015 09:45pm

I have to ask Alex, what is it that you're trying to accomplish here? You are clearly intelligent enough to find the answers yourself. I assume you already did this so why don't we skip to the point here. What explanation troubles you? What would you like to discuss?

so many topics here trying to expose holes in the christian faith. all their bases are covered, stop trying.

See, that underlined bit is a part of the issue. The Bible is a divinely inspired work; the word of God. We shouldn't treat it just like any historical document. When you find contradictions within a divine scripture, it makes you you wonder. And you can say they aren't contradictions, but they are, man. Check out that PDF in the OP of this topic.



I don't think there is an explanation for these contradictions, though. The Bible, a supposedly divinely inspired book, contains many contradictions, and not just the ones I outline here.

Maybe the Bible wasn't written by God? Maybe it was written by humans? If you want to cut to the chase, that's it. I just think that point is more than abundantly clear to people who aren't apart of the religion and will justify anything to themselves to maintain spiritual consistency with their holy scripture.

This post was edited by ThatAlex on Jul 31 2015 11:43pm

resurrection is not possible, there i said it

christianity 5-0'd, gds

this changes everything lel

It was obviously written by humans. Why would you think otherwise? These humans were divinely inspired by God though. You have to ask yourself, does the message change at all based on these discrepancies? I think Santara and several other people have given you perfectly valid explanations.