Raf

Look everyone! Chockfull and I in basic agreement about something controversial! We'll be celebrating the anniversary of this next year. In any event, it just occurred to me that Wierwille's explanation of Luke 2:2 can ONLY make sense if the Bible is not inerrant. It leaves too many other questions unanswered, though.

Let me clarify something Chockfull said, because I cited two different writers in the course of this thread. He is referring to an author I cited in post #38 (it's actually one of several authors, and I don't know which, nor am I particularly concerned about it). In later posts, discussing a completely different issue, I cited Daniel Wallace. Chockfull is NOT referring to Daniel Wallace. As for Luke 2, I have a healthy respect for Chockfull's approach, as well as Wallace's. If there's further historical research that will one day clarify the issue and rescue the position of inerrancy, so be it. I have no reason to think any further information will be forthcoming, but who am I? I have no problem with Chockfull being right and inerrancy being wrong (at least in this particular point).

When you think of the logistics of everyone having to travel to their ancestral home to take part in a census (why, for Pete's sake, WHY would any census taker require such a thing????), it becomes very difficult to fathom. We, of course, only think of Joseph and Mary doing this. But if Luke's description is right, everyone had to do it! And for what? So the Romans can have a record of where your great-great-grandparents once lived? I don't care if the census is for population purposes, tax purposes or what have you: the whole idea of a census that requires you to leave your home is pointless. I don't know what Luke's point is, but this is a big problem, because it looks like he's contriving a way to get Joseph and Mary from Nazareth to Bethlehem. Matthew avoids this problem altogether by placing them in Bethlehem to begin with. No explanation. They're just there. Matthew's story explains, in the end, how they came to settle in Nazareth. Nazareth is the end of the story in Matthew. It's the beginning of the story in Luke. If Luke is mistaken about them living in Nazareth in the first place, the accounts become a bit easier to harmonize. Luke leaves out the visit of the Magi and the Egyptian sojourn because they're not important to his story. Matthew leaves out the shepherds because they're not important to HIS story. Otherwise, there's very, very little conflict -- IF you allow Luke to be mistaken about this whole census thing and the timing of the holy family's residence in Nazareth. Luke knows the Nativity story ends there. He is mistaken in believing it begins there. But we're not allowed to even think such a thing if the gospels are inerrant. Wallace's proposed solution is, I think even he would agree, a dodge. I'll wait.

For those who may be lost: Luke 2:2 says that the census that brought Joseph and Mary to Bethlehem was taken while Quirinius was governor of Syria. The problem is that Quirinius didn't become governor of Syria until 6 CE, long after the birth of Jesus. This has been recognized as a problem for the accuracy of the Luke account for centuries. We know Herod was alive when Jesus was born (Matthew makes no sense at all if he was not). According to Wierwille, Herod dies in 1 B.C. (historical scholars are more inclined to offer 4 BC as the date of his death, but whichever is correct, it's long before 6 CE). So how do we reconcile the problem? Wierwille joins inerrantists who jump through hoops to get Luke 2:2 to say something it is not saying. Maybe the census was "before" Quirinius was governor of Syria. That would work if the word used was "before." But it's not. Maybe Quirinius was governor of Syria more than once (he wasn't). Wierwille proposes this translation: "This first registration took place when Quirinius was on special assignment in Syria." Special assignment? Where's the evidence? There is none. And let me add, coming from the teacher who lambasted Eve for omitting a word, adding a word and changing a word so that we no longer have the Word, this proposed translation stinks of spectacular hypocrisy. The verse says what it says. Sorry. Couple this with the fact that there is no historical evidence for a census that would require people to travel from where they live (which is the whole POINT of a census) to where their ancestors lived centuries earlier (huh?). What possible need would the Roman Empire have for requiring such a thing? As history, the Nativity of Luke is problematic on these levels. Where do Matthew and Luke agree? Jesus was conceived of a virgin named Mary and born in Bethlehem, then found his way to Nazareth, which is where he grew up. Was the census a part of that history? Not if Matthew is right. Did the Magi find him in Bethlehem (as Matthew VERY strongly implies) while he was a toddler? Maybe, but it makes no sense if Luke is right. Luke gives us no clue whatsoever of a return visit from Nazareth back to Bethlehem to rendezvous with the Magi while Jesus is a toddler. And Matthew gives no clue whatsoever that after Herod sends the Magi to Bethlehem, they follow the star... to Nazareth. It's not what Matthew says, and it's dishonest to force Matthew to say it. These conflicts are not "apparent contradictions." They are flat-out errors, and it is nothing short of entertaining to see the mental gymnastics that we have to go through to harmonize the clearly contradictory accounts. We would not accept the proposed harmonization if it were to be presented to explain an "apparent" discrepancy in the Book of Mormon. We would call it out as an actual error, and in my opinion, it is nothing short of dishonest to apply a double standard, accepting a harmonization for the holy book we hold dear knowing we would reject it for another so-called holy book. Again, my opinion.

I believe Wallace because given his bias, one would expect him to reach the opposite conclusion. He rather obviously knows a thing or two about Greek grammar (I mean, he literally wrote the book!). He could very easily take the position that "first" should mean "before," and everyone would assume he's right. Why embrace the position that undermines your own theology unless integrity demands it? I concede, however, that I have no personal basis for agreeing with him. When you're not an expert in something, you rely on the expertise of others. Comparing Wierwille's expertise to Wallace's on this matter: it's not even close. Wierwille bends over backwards and literally invents history to make this verse fit. Wallace admits that it doesn't fit and, as we used to say, holds the question in abeyance. It seems that, given the facts, it's the only honest position he can take. I admire him for that.

I recommend The Problem of Luke 2:2 by Daniel Wallace, a bona fide Greek scholar and inerrantist who handles that verse with some pretty humble integrity. Easy to find online.

While we're here, can anyone dig up for me how Wierwille deals with the problem of Luke 2:2 in Jesus Christ Our Promised Seed? I don't want to say what the problem is at this point. I just want to see how Wierwille handled that verse.

Actually, I think the whole thing belongs in doctrinal. While my original point may have been "how did TWI handle this one contradiction? (apparent or real)," I just don't see any way of discussing this issue without falling into a doctrinal discussion. Anyone disagree?

Chockfull, I found an interesting approach to the "answer a fool according to his folly" problem that, in my opinion, answers the issue adequately and removes it as a contradiction. The context of the above quote can be found here.

Piggybacking off what Chockfull is saying: There are a number of issues at work here. First, did the writer of I Timothy intend to include as "God-breathed" the scriptures of the New Testament? Did he intend to include the very letter he was writing? Assuming the answer to both questions to be "yes," as johniam and all inerrantists no doubt hold, the next question is "what does God-breathed mean?" We can ignore the first question and focus on the second. PFAL gives us a very specific answer to what it means for scripture to be God-breathed. Explicitly and implicitly, PFAL and its related works hold that God-breathed scripture will be perfect, will have no errors or contradictions. That's why, in addressing whether PFAL is God-breathed, we are entitled to hold PFAL up to its own standard. Hence, "Actual Errors in PFAL." Having ruled out PFAL as God-breathed according to its own definition, we come to a different question: Does THE BIBLE pass PFAL's standard of what it means to be God-breathed? I think the honest answer to that is "no." It is not inerrant. It has flat-out errors [for example, in Exodus 1:11, the Hebrews are credited with building the city of Rameses for the Egyptians. That city was not built until hundreds of years after the Exodus took place. This is not an "apparent contradiction." It's a colossal blunder. In Genesis, Abraham comes from Ur of the Chaldeans. This is a problem on two levels -- The Chaldeans did not have control of Ur in the time that Abraham lived... and they did not have control of Ur in the time that MOSES lived. Let that sink in: it means whoever called Abraham's land Ur of the Chaldeans, it wasn't Moses. That would be like Christopher Columbus writing about Washington D.C.) So the Bible, Old Testament and New, simply does not live up to PFAL's standard of what it means to be God-breathed. However, does it live up to its own standard of what it means to be God-breathed? Does it even set such a standard? The concept of inerrancy forces the Bible to conform to a standard it does not set for itself. It is unfair to judge the Bible based on this standard. If PFAL is right about what it means to be God-breathed, then the Bible is not God-breathed. The Bible is only God-breathed if PFAL is wrong about what that term even means. My opinion.

Krys, referring specifically to the selection of scripture we have quoted, Paul marks out two things he wrote which are not commandments of the Lord and one thing that is. If God wanted to say "I advise, but do not command" he could have done so very easily. That is not what Paul writes. Paul specifically marks out when he is writing a commandment of the Lord. Had he thought of his own writing as Scripture ™, there would be no need for him to do that, and it would be unfathomable that he would inject his own advice in the middle of God's commandment. Makes perfect sense in a letter. Makes no sense in a Scripture ™.

Please research the words "perfect understanding" in Luke 1:3. It does not say in Greek what it says in English, methinks.

In my suppositions, God doesn't make mistakes. Man does. The Bible has mistakes. The mistakes cannot be attributed to God. They can only be attributed to man. But they are actual errors in the Bible.

What are we to make of these verses? Is this God's advice? Where does it say it's God's advice? It's explicitly not God's advice. It's explicitly Paul's advice. Now, it's good advice. God wouldn't disagree. God wouldn't disagree with a mom telling her kid to look both ways before crossing the street, but that doesn't make her advice the God-breathed Word! Paul gives us some good advice here. Take it, and cool. Don't take it, and that's cool too. You haven't sinned. The point is that the advice Paul gives is declared in the Bible to NOT be God's Word. This is a real logical conundrum. Everything in the Bible is God's Word. Something in the Bible declares itself to not be God's Word. It is God's Word that something in the Bible that is explicitly addressed to believers is not God's Word. Only by forcing the equation The Bible = God's Word do we have a problem. Eliminate that equation, and there IS no conundrum. Some of Paul's advice is a direct commandment of the Lord. Some of it is not. Sometimes he makes it obvious. Most times he does not -- what he writes is presumed to be of God, although nowhere does he state that what he is writing is God-breathed. "God showed me these truths" is very different from "God is making sure I use this particular preposition because if I use any other word your whole Bible will fall to pieces." Some other "that's Paul's words, not God's Word" items should be obvious. I am as certain as I could possibly be that God does not want me to wait for Tychicus to show up at my door or my church to tell me everything or to encourage me with the latest news about Paul's well-being (Ephesians 6:21-22). I am absolutely certain that I did not send gifts to Paul via our mutual friend Epaphroditus (Philippians 4:18). Colossians 4:7-17 make perfect, perfect sense as Paul writing to people he knows, and no sense at all as divinely inspired scripture with a purpose and meaning for my life. It is not "God's Word." It's a dude writing a letter to a specific group of people and adding personal touches. A lot of what he writes is applicable to any Christian, anywhere, anytime. But some of it is clearly not. When I say the Bible lacks the self-awareness to consider itself God's Word, this is what I'm talking about. Paul doesn't know he's writing Scripture. He thinks he's writing a letter. If he knew he was writing Scripture, it's hard to imagine he would include the personal touches. It would be like me writing, knowing I am writing The Holy and Eternal Word of the Living God, and using the last few lines to say "Yo! Shout out to my homeboys in the Boogie Down Bronx! Yeah boyeeeeeee!" Who would do that? Just some (doctrinal) thoughts.

That's a whole different can of worms. I did not intend to address the believability of certain Bible stories (talking snakes, talking donkeys, a man who loses strength because of a haircut). Whole different can of worms. I intended only to talk about two stories that disagree irreconcilably on a given point. I'm talking about Paul swearing up and down that he did not do exactly what Acts records him doing. Somebody's wrong there. I'm talking about Matthew saying Joseph and Mary didn't take up residence in Nazareth until after the sojourn in Egypt, while Luke tells us they lived in Nazareth first, then traveled to Bethlehem, then Jerusalem, then back to Nazareth while Christ was still days old. Not apparent contradictions; actual errors. And one of the things TWI excelled at was taking these bizarre efforts at reconciling conflicting accounts and making OTHER people look dishonest for failing to engage in this kind of intellectual dishonesty. The stories about Peter denying Jesus make a whole lot more sense when you just recognize that the gospel writers got the main point right but differed on the minor details, for a host of reasons. By making God the selector of each word in the Bible, TWI robs the Bible of the ability to contradict itself. Then TWI comes swooping in to the rescue. We can resolve all these contradictions! (No, you can't. You can only claim to). TWI is, of course, not alone in this. When the letter to Timothy says all scripture is given by inspiration of God, it is not referring to itself. There is no reason to think it is referring to itself. There is no reason to think it was discussing the gospel of John or the Revelation or I and II Peter or most other books of the New Testament, many of which had not yet been written. That is what I mean when I say the Bible lacks the sense of self-awareness to refer to itself as God's Word. Paul, in I Corinthians, draws very clear distinctions separating when he is referring to a commandment of the Lord and when he is speaking as Paul. If it's ALL God's Word, the distinction makes no sense at all. At all.

Holy cow. Resistance is NOT futile! I'm going to change the name of this thread to "TWI and Forcing Harmony in the Bible." I would ask that we keep the discussion here about TWI. Any specific discussion that tackles a particular issue and ends up being doctrinal, we can flag and move to doctrinal. Everyone okay with that as a ground rule?

Nope. Can't be antagonistic if we agree

Somehow I expected a more, I don't know, vigorously antagonistic response.

I'm going to have to move this to doctrinal at some point, but maybe not just yet. The problem I have with the harmonization efforts is that they take a reasonable proposition and stretch it to unreasonable limits. Remember the old story about the blind men and the elephant, and how every one of them is right about the elephant even though they appear to be contradicting each other? That's a real healthy way of trying to approach apparent Bible contradictions, and as long as the conflicts lend themselves to such a solution, I am comfortable accepting the harmonization. But sometimes, now and then, the conflicts just don't lend themselves to such a solution. Every single gospel puts three crosses on that hill. Every one. Maybe, MAYBE John doesn't, but I think the more natural reading of the verse puts three crosses up there, not five. Not one gospel explicitly states there are five crosses up there. Three in Matthew, three in Mark, three in Luke, and I'm no Greek scholar, but I think three in John makes more sense than five. Every gospel that mentions Peter's denials say he denied Jesus three times. There's a discrepancy in the number of cockadoodle-doos, but not in the number of denials. We can harmonize and find six, but can you find me a gospel that lays out six denials? You can't. They all count to three and then stop. Where was Jesus when the Magi come to visit? Read Matthew, and only Matthew. He's in Bethlehem. There's not a scrap of an indication to the contrary. Then Jesus goes to Egypt. Then he comes back. Then AND ONLY THEN does his family settle in Nazareth. But read Luke, and only Luke. There are no Magi in Luke, of course. There's also very little Bethlehem. Jesus is there to be born, then skips town right away. A pit stop at Jerusalem, and whamo! They're in Nazareth. Not a hint of an Egyptian detour before or after. Jesus is still an infant when the family settles in Nazareth according to Luke. He's probably in preschool by the time they get to Nazareth according to Matthew. These are not "apparent" contradictions. It's a big fat glaring gaping discrepancy. Now, one can argue that Matthew never says the Magi find Jesus in Bethlehem. It's true. It doesn't say that. But it utterly fails to give even the slightest indication to the contrary. You cannot read Matthew on its own and conclude that the Magi found Jesus somewhere else. These guys were writing quasi-biographies (as opposed to full biographies). They were not manufacturing jigsaw puzzles and deliberately leaving out pieces that deliberately created an incomplete picture that could only be assembled by buying someone else's puzzle! Matthew didn't leave out Nazareth and just say "Ah, whatever; Luke will fill them in." Matthew doesn't take the writing of Luke for granted like that. And Luke just ignores Matthew entirely on the Nativity. The only things they have in common are Joseph, Mary, virginity, Bethlehem and the baby. I could go on. Maybe after I move this to doctrinal...

Some folks may have noticed, back during the Mike wars a decade ago (it's been longer), that I refused to allow the debate to be distracted by appeals to actual errors in the Bible. My reasoning back then was simple: I was holding PFAL to its own standard of what it meant for a written work to be God-breathed. The Bible never actually declares itself to be without error or contradiction. That's an assertion made by PFAL about the Bible, not an assertion made by the Bible itself. If PFAL is God-breathed, then PFAL must be right about what it means to be God-breathed. PFAL must therefore be without error or contradiction. We saw rather clearly that it is not. PFAL has both errors and contradictions. If PFAL is right about the Bible,, then the Bible will be without errors or contradictions. But what if PFAL is wrong? Not about itself, but about the Bible? What if the premise that the Bible is without error or contradiction is simply a false premise? We find a shocking reality we cannot ignore: The Bible quite simply never, ever, anywhere, makes such a claim about itself. Nowhere. You may find a reference to God's word as perfect, but here's a shocker: the Bible lacks the self awareness to call itself God's word! VPW popularly said: "The Bible does not contain God's Word. It is God's word." Really? Is that the testimony the Bible gives of itself? Where? Why can't two writers looking at the same event disagree on minor details, as is common? Why shoehorn six denials for Peter when every single gospel says there were only three? What if God's Word is simply that he was crucified, and the small stuff is just that-- small stuff? Scriptural inerrancy as promoted in TWI really appears to be an unattainable fantasy. A thread on actual errors in the Bible would make the Actual Errors in PFAL thread look like child's play.

I was only interested in how TWI addressed the discrepancy. Addressing the discrepancy itself is doctrinal. Not sure I'm interested in THAT conversation.

As you wish, WordWolf. However, I do believe Steve answered my question.

It's not Wierwille who skips from noon to 9 a.m., it's John. And John skipping from noon to 9 a.m. without so much as a "the next day" reference strains credibility beyond the breaking point, in my opinion.

Perhaps plausible, but it now strikes me as rather arbitrary to shoehorn an entire day of activity between vv. 16 and 17 and suggest, for no comprehensible reason, that the author did not find the events of those 21 hours worth mentioning.

Oh, that's right. Wierwille stretched out the timeline. Totally forgot about that.