Hello, friend, and welcome back to The Moral Vision of Jesus Christ. If you are new here, be sure to check out the Introduction to this study first, which can be found here.
Last time, as you'll recall, we highlighted ten stark differences between the synoptic gospels and the Gospel According to John. Today, we will highlight some of the other contradictions found across the New Testament. We're trying to highlight the fact that the books of the New Testament do not always agree with one another, and thus cannot all be said to be equally valid, God-inspired, or "correct." We began this line of inquiry some weeks back, in response to a friend of mine having remarked that Jesus' words are no more important than the rest of the New Testament.
We here at The Moral Vision disagree with the idea that, within the context of a religion based on the teachings of Jesus, anything might be more important than the actual teachings of Jesus.
In the interest of time, let's get started.
Ten Major Differences Between Varying Books of the New Testament
1 - They are a long way off for us, but someday we will read together the accounts of how Judas Iscariot, one of the Twelve Apostles, betrayed Jesus to the Roman authorities during the Passover festival weekend in Jerusalem in 30 or 33 AD. You probably already know the story, so we won't recount all the details of the betrayal here. Substantive for us, at the moment, are the conflicting stories as to what happened to Judas after he betrayed Jesus to the authorities.
In Matt 27, we read the following:
3 Then Judas, his betrayer, seeing that Jesus had been condemned, deeply regretted what he had done. He returned the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests and elders,
4 saying, “I have sinned in betraying innocent blood.” They said, “What is that to us? Look to it yourself.”
5 Flinging the money into the temple, he departed and went off and hanged himself.
So in Matthew, Judas sees what he has done and is overwhelmed with guilt. He tries to return his money to the authorities - the ransom he'd received for Christ - but they did not want it. He goes off to hang himself.
Now, let's check out the account we find in Acts of the Apostles. In Acts of the Apostles, Chapter 1, we read the following words, attributed to the Apostle Peter:
16 “My brothers, the scripture had to be fulfilled which the holy Spirit spoke beforehand through the mouth of David, concerning Judas, who was the guide for those who arrested Jesus.
17 He was numbered among us and was allotted a share in this ministry.
18 He bought a parcel of land with the wages of his iniquity, and falling headlong, he burst open in the middle, and all his insides spilled out.
Woah! So which gruesome end are we to believe actually befell this man? Did Judas hang himself? Or did he fall down under the apparent weight of some supernatural power and subsequently explode from the abdomen, causing gore to spill out in a large circumference?
How is it that the author of Luke-Acts and the author of Matthew came to disagreement on this?
And furthermore...
2 - ...Why do the Gospel According to Matt and the Acts of the Apostles differ in regards to who purchases this "Field of Blood" associated with Judas' death?
Look closely again at the text we just read from Luke-Acts. Peter tells us that Judas took the money that he'd earned in his betrayal and used it to buy a bit of land - a "Field of Blood." But recall what the Gospel According to Matthew told us: Judas didn't buy anything with the money he'd earned. He felt terrible about the deal and tried to return the money to the chief priests and elders who had given it to him. When they wouldn't accept it, he simply flung the money into the temple. Later, the chief priests and elders gather the money Judas had flung into the temple and, in Matthew, they themselves buy the "potter's field," turning it into a burial place for foreigners called the "Field of Blood."
Again: how is it that the author of Matthew and the author of the Acts of the Apostles differ here in their recounting of history, if every word of both texts are equally valid and true?
3 - In Luke chapter 24 we find an account of Jesus Christ's "ascension," or supernatural passage into heaven in body and spirit from the earthly plane. The author of Luke remembers it thusly:
50 Then he led them [out] as far as Bethany, raised his hands, and blessed them.
51 As he blessed them he parted from them and was taken up to heaven.
52 They did him homage and then returned to Jerusalem with great joy,
53 and they were continually in the temple praising God.
Let us compare that with the account we find in Acts of the Apostles, chapter 1:
9 When he had said this, as they were looking on, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him from their sight.
10 While they were looking intently at the sky as he was going, suddenly two men dressed in white garments stood beside them.
11 They said, “Men of Galilee, why are you standing there looking at the sky? This Jesus who has been taken up from you into heaven will return in the same way as you have seen him going into heaven.”
12 Then they returned to Jerusalem from the mount called Olivet, which is near Jerusalem, a sabbath day’s journey away.
So, did they go right outside Jerusalem and see the resurrected Christ ascended from Mount Olive? Or, did they travel more than twice as far outside of the holy city, all the way to Bethany, before they saw the resurrected Christ ascended?
Did there appear men dressed in white garments, or did Christ simply get "taken up to heaven?"
Is it not strange that the author of Luke-Acts contradicts himself in this regard?
4 - Now we come to the little question of the "law" meaning, of course, the Hebrew Law as it is spelled out in the Pentateuch. In the New Testament, we see disagreements about whether or not the law is to remain valid in the light of Jesus' teachings.
One opinion is found in the Gospel According to Matthew, chapter 5, wherein Jesus speaks:
17 “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets. I have come not to abolish but to fulfill.
18 Amen, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest letter or the smallest part of a letter will pass from the law, until all things have taken place.
Clearly, the author of Matthew believed the old Hebrew Law to be completely intact and valid, even after Christ's ministry.
So what does Matthew's evangelist brother Mark have to say? The author of Mark records the following, in his chapter 7:
18 He said to them, “Are even you likewise without understanding? Do you not realize that everything that goes into a person from outside cannot defile,
19 since it enters not the heart but the stomach and passes out into the latrine?” (Thus he declared all foods clean.)
20 “But what comes out of a person, that is what defiles."
The author of Mark is very explicit here. Further research into the manuscript history of this bit of text is warranted, but it is clear that Mark's Jesus is indeed abolishing the law, or at least some portion of the law.
How can this be? Jesus, in Matthew, says that not one jot or stroke of the pen of the law will ever be abolished. In Mark, Jesus abolishes one of the more significant sections of Jewish Law in a matter of sentences.
Is the Hebrew Law valid or invalid? As you may know, and as we will learn, this question was one the earliest Christians struggled with almost immediately.
5 - Seasoned readers will remember some weeks back when we learned about the Book of Enoch while we were looking for the nearly non-existent scriptural story of Satan. To refresh you, the Book of Enoch is a work of Old Testament Apocrypha, that is, a work of Jewish religious literature that was not accepted into the "canon" of the Jewish Scripture. The Book of Enoch was widely known and read in the first and second centuries AD.
I recall the Book of Enoch here because of a particular passage we find in the New Testament canon. From the Letter of Jude:
14 Enoch, of the seventh generation from Adam, prophesied also about them when he said, “Behold, the Lord has come with his countless holy ones
15 to execute judgment on all and to convict everyone for all the godless deeds that they committed and for all the harsh words godless sinners have uttered against him.”
Here, Jude is quoting Enoch.
Does this strike you as odd?
Let's follow the logic through.
If the Letter of Jude is canonical, then to many modern Christians, the Letter of Jude is the inerrant word of God, trustworthy in every way, in every word.
If the Letter of Jude quotes The Book of Enoch authoritatively, then God himself quotes Enoch authoritatively.
But... why would God quote from scripture that was not correct?
And... if it is correct, than why isn't The Book of Enoch part of the canon?
I encourage you to ruminate on these questions.
6 - The ritual immersion of one's body in water in order to purify oneself for God, or "baptism," is a fairly unique practice among the world's ancient religions. One is hard pressed to find ancient instances of this behavior outside of Judaism and Christianity. Baptism was part of the foundation of Christianity from the very beginning, and there were a diversity of methods among early Christians by which a community might baptize their faithful.
There were a plurality of methods among the early Christian communities in part because scripture presented a plurality of methods. Again, this time in regards to baptism, we see the New Testament disagreeing with itself.
In Matt 28:19, after his resurrection, Jesus tells his men how he wants things to be done after he is gone. He tells them to "make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the holy Spirit."
Compare that with Acts 2:38, wherein we find Peter giving his "Pentecost Sermon," which we've discussed before. Peter is exhorting the crowd in Jerusalem to become members of the Jesus Movement. He tells them "Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins."
Perhaps this is a thin hair to be splitting, but the baptism that Jesus prescribes in Matthew does not match the one that Peter seems to be offering only a few weeks later in Acts. One is in the name of Jesus Christ, one is in the name of The Trinity. Which of the two are valid, then?
Shall we baptize "in the name of Jesus Christ," or "in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the holy Spirit?"
7 - You can't get far conversing with many American Christians before you hear them saying emphatically that it is by "faith alone" that they are saved, and not by "works." They usually say this in order to disparage the habits of other Christians outside of their denomination.
They might cite the oft quoted John 3:16 as evidence of the correctness of their stance on "faith vs works." Then again, they might cite Paul's letter to the Romans, chapter 3, where Paul says "we consider that a person is justified by faith apart from works of the law."
The contradiction can be found in James 2:17: "... faith of itself, if it does not have works, is dead."
The Epistle of James is traditionally attributed to James, the brother of Jesus. James died in the 60's AD, which would make this epistle one of the very oldest Christian documents, if tradition were true. James says that faith without works is dead. Paul says faith saves, regardless of works.
How can the New Testament be, through and through, the inerrant word of God if it disagrees so obviously about such a seemingly critical facet of Christian life?
How does one attain salvation? Through faith? Or through faith and works?
We ask.
8 - According to the New Testament, Jesus appeared to his Apostles after he was resurrected from the dead. There are multiple accounts of this among our texts, and they do not always agree with one another. For example, in the First Letter to the Corinthians, Paul reiterates to his readers the aspects he deems to be "of first importance" to the Christian faith:
"...that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures; that he was buried; that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures; that he appeared to Cephas, then to the Twelve."
Smash-cut to Matt 28:16-17:
16 The eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had ordered them.
17 When they saw him, they worshiped, but they doubted.
Note the discrepancy in the number of Jesus' followers as mentioned. Again, maybe this is a thin hair to be splitting, but one text says "eleven" and the next says "twelve."
The two are mutually exclusive. He can't have appeared to them first in a group of eleven and then appeared to them first again in a group of twelve. It would have to be one or the other. It would appear that either A) some percentage of the New Testament was not dictated directly by God or B) God's personality is fractured and has turned against itself.
9 - I am not sure we've had the occasion to discuss the conversion of Saul of Tarsus here yet. For anyone not in the know, Saul of Tarsus is what the Apostle Paul was called before he decided to change his name and become a Christian. Long story short, Saul was on the "road to Damascus" to persecute some Christians when he was knocked to the ground by a flash of supernatural light. The light was followed by the voice of Jesus. Saul was struck temporarily blind by the event, causing him to convert to the Christian cause.
On the road to Damascus, Saul had travelling companions. In the Acts of the Apostles, there are two different accountings of Paul's conversion. Of interest to us here is the reaction of his travelling companions to the supernatural event as it unfolds for Saul.
Acts 9:7, a third person account of Paul's conversion, says:
The men who were traveling with him stood speechless, for they heard the voice but could see no one.
Acts 26:13-14, a first-person retelling by Paul, reads in part:
13 At midday, along the way, O king, I saw a light from the sky, brighter than the sun, shining around me and my traveling companions.
14 We all fell to the ground and I heard a voice saying to me in Hebrew, ‘Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?
Here we have the same book, let alone a set of books, disagreeing with itself.
Again, in the face of the claim that The Holy Bible is one-hundred percent the inerrant word of God, we must ask: did Saul's friends fall to the ground with him, or did they remain standing, dumbfounded?
10 - For our last item today, we've dug up a little gem from Romans. I know that we've spoken very little about Paul's Letter to the Romans before. Within a couple of years, we will know Romans in and out. For now, you don't need to know much about it. Just read Romans 7:1-6. Here it is:
1 Are you unaware, brothers (for I am speaking to people who know the law), that the law has jurisdiction over one as long as one lives? 2 Thus a married woman is bound by law to her living husband; but if her husband dies, she is released from the law in respect to her husband. 3 Consequently, while her husband is alive she will be called an adulteress if she consorts with another man. But if her husband dies she is free from that law, and she is not an adulteress if she consorts with another man.
4 In the same way, my brothers, you also were put to death to the law through the body of Christ, so that you might belong to another, to the one who was raised from the dead in order that we might bear fruit for God. 5 For when we were in the flesh, our sinful passions, awakened by the law, worked in our members to bear fruit for death. 6 But now we are released from the law, dead to what held us captive, so that we may serve in the newness of the spirit and not under the obsolete letter.
Everything makes some sense up until verse 4. At that point, things break down, and it becomes difficult to understand the metaphor. The writing and the thought being conveyed are premature, to say the least.
This selection smacks of what we term, in the modern era, "word-salad." The beginning of Romans 7 reads like nonsense. According to many Christians, this word-salad is the inerrant word-salad of the Almighty God.
I defy anyone to make exhaustive sense of this section of text.
This concludes our list.
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So there you have it. The divided nature of the New Testament shows us that it cannot be taken for granted as being "the word of God," because it is full of disagreement, contradiction, and cognitive-dissonance, none of which should affect a perfect being.
That's a milestone for us, so let's say it once more: the New Testament disagrees with itself so much that it is not remotely believable that it all came from one being, Almighty or not. The truth must be, then, that the texts at hand were created by multiple distinct minds who wrote freely of their own accord.
Modern Christians say that every word of the New Testament is equally important. To them, Jesus' words in the Gospels aren't necessarily any more important than anything written in Romans or in Revelations, because the whole thing is divinely dictated. In this belief, modern Christians are wrong, and their own scriptures prove it.
The truth is that the most important words in the New Testament, if we really want to follow Jesus, are the ones that we can say "probably describe the prescriptions of the historical Jesus." Since words probably describing the prescriptions of the historical Jesus appear almost exclusively in the Gospels, the Gospels are the most important texts we have when it comes to knowing what Jesus Christ taught, and thus what Christians ought to be doing with their lives.
I'm not sure that we'll pursue this line of thought any further after today. At least not for a while. I pray this hasn't offended anyone. I assure you that I do not take this work lightly.
Back to our gospel reading.
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Matthew 5:6
6 Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for righteousness,
for they will be satisfied.
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The Beatitudes continue. This is the fourth Beatitude that Jesus gives the world, here at the very outset of his ministry. Remember that a "beatitude" is a "great blessing," and that "The Beatitudes" are the very first thing Jesus teaches in The Bible.
In today's reading, Jesus blesses those who "hunger and thirst for righteousness." The original Greek word here is "dikaiosuné," which means "righteousness" but could also be translated as "justice" or "fulfillment of the law."
Today, Jesus blesses those who want for what is right and just. He conversely does not bless those who do not pine for said justice.
In this fourth Beatitude, Jesus is telling his followers that they should not be at rest as long as justice has yet to be had. Jesus is also telling those who have been treated unjustly by the world that a better day is near for them.
He is saying that he prefers people who have their hearts and minds on the conditions of the marginalized of society.
Isn't it interesting that these Beatitudes are the first things Jesus says in the Bible?
If Jesus thought that there was an eternal hell to be avoided by the following of a series of cryptic and arbitrary rules, wouldn't he open up his teaching with that? Wouldn't the first thing he said in his public ministry be something like "hell is a real place, and I really don't want you to go there, so here are the concrete steps you need to take to avoid that?"
If Jesus thought he was God, and wanted to be worshipped as God by his followers, wouldn't he start out his ministry explaining that he is God, and the steps that he wanted taken in his worship?
What do you think?
Why does Jesus start out teaching about desiring justice, and being meek, and being poor, and what does this say about his moral vision?
Sorry about all the rhetoricals. We'll see you next time. Thank you so much for reading. Please share this writing.
Love.
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