{"id":9723,"date":"2024-02-14T00:35:08","date_gmt":"2024-02-13T19:05:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/2024\/02\/14\/if-youve-ever-wondered-why-the-bible-contradicts-itself\/"},"modified":"2024-02-14T00:35:08","modified_gmt":"2024-02-13T19:05:08","slug":"if-youve-ever-wondered-why-the-bible-contradicts-itself","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/2024\/02\/14\/if-youve-ever-wondered-why-the-bible-contradicts-itself\/","title":{"rendered":"If You\u2019ve Ever Wondered Why the Bible Contradicts Itself"},"content":{"rendered":"


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Readers of this blog will know that I think Christians (namely evangelicals) can learn a lot from how Judaism (in its varied forms) looks at the nature of the Bible and its interpretation. Bottom line: Judaism tends to be more flexible in accepting the Bible\u2019s diversity and contradictions.<\/p>\n

The question this raises, though, is how a book that is considered to be revealed from\u00a0God can contain such non-Godlike properties as contradictions and internal debates among its authors. As I never grow tired of arguing, this conundrum is the bane of Evangelicalism\u2019s commitment to biblical inerrancy.<\/p>\n

Enter\u00a0Benjamin D. Sommer<\/a>, an observant\u00a0Jew and professor of Bible and Ancient Near Eastern Languages at the Jewish Theological Seminary in NYC. In his latest book\u00a0Revelation and Authority: Sinai in Jewish Scripture and Tradition<\/a><\/em>\"\", Sommer explains how Torah can be both a divinely authoritative book while also exhibiting these human traits.<\/p>\n

Sommer\u2019s answer is summed up in the phrase \u201cparticipatory theory of revelation\u201d or \u201cparticipatory theology,\u201d\u00a0by which he means:\u00a0the Pentateuch not only conveys God\u2019s will but also reflects Israel\u2019s interpretation of and response to that will<\/strong><\/em>\u00a0(p. 2).<\/p>\n

Or, to put a fine point on it, according to Torah,\u00a0revelation\u00a0involved\u00a0active\u00a0contributions\u00a0by both God and Israel; revelation was collaborative and\u00a0participatory<\/strong>.\u00a0<\/em>(p. 1)<\/p>\n

And that is why you have, for example, \u00a0contradictions in the laws of the Pentateuch between Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy:<\/p>\n

they are all interpretations of the divine revelation.<\/em><\/h2>\n

OK, Ben. You have my attention. The Bible is a paradoxical (and messy and complex and un-untanglable) convergence of divine and human involvement. In Christian terms, I call this an \u201cincarnational\u201d understanding of the nature of the Bible<\/a>. The Bible isn\u2019t dropped out of heaven. Its \u201cfull humanity\u201d is a non-negotiable and necessary property of Scripture, and should be accepted as such with all its implications.<\/p>\n

I read Sommer as a true kindred spirit, a notion underscored by the fact that, as\u00a0he recently pointed out to me, we both went to the same high school<\/a> (though we didn\u2019t overlap). Small world. But while he was studying Hebrew in high school I was watching Gilligan\u2019s Island <\/em>and\u00a0trying to make the baseball team.<\/p>\n

Anyway, here are some brief quotes from the\u00a0introduction\u00a0to get a feel for Sommer\u2019s point.<\/p>\n

My thesis is a simple one. Many biblical texts that describe the giving of Torah move simultaneously and without contradiction in two directions: they anchor the authority of Jewish law and lore in the revelation at Sinai, but they also destabilize that authority by teaching that we cannot be sure how, exactly, the specific rules found in the Pentateuch relate to God\u2019s self-disclosure<\/em>\u00a0(p. 1).<\/p>\n

Read that slowly: the diversity in the authoritative Torah destabilizes that authority.<\/p>\n

This paradox of revelation in the Pentateuch, Sommer argues, lies in fact that\u00a0the Pentateuch\u00a0itself\u00a0gives voice to both stenographic<\/em>\u00a0[i.e., \u201cdictation\u201d] and participatory theologies of revelation<\/em> (p. 2).\u00a0In fact,\u00a0biblical authors and editors expend considerable ingenuity weaving those threads into biblical accounts of the events in Sinai<\/em> (p. 6).<\/p>\n

The\u00a0writers\/editors of the Bible\u00a0intend<\/em> for readers to struggle with the notion of revelation.<\/h2>\n

What I also deeply appreciate about Sommer\u2019s approach is debt to historical critical scholarship for helping recover the biblical voices\u00a0that were lost or obscured as a consequence of the way biblical books were edited in antiquity<\/em>\u00a0(p. 5). Sommers is not an advocate of giving priority to the final, canonical form of scripture but of\u00a0seeing scripture\u00a0itself\u00a0as a complex, multi-layered\u00a0tradition.<\/em><\/p>\n

The payoff for such a view of the Bible, in addition to accounting for how the Bible actually behaves, is a wise caution concerning the nature of any theological quest:<\/p>\n

It [the approach to scripture he has been advocating] involves a degree of doubt that renders religious practice tentative and searching rather than apodictic and self-evident. It ought to lead to that most important religious virtue, humility, rather than promoting a characteristic less rare among religious people than one would hope, self-righteousness<\/em> (p. 6).<\/p>\n

Ah, another paradox: a commitment to biblical authority should lead to humility about one\u2019s grasp of the Bible. Christians take note.<\/p>\n

Bottom line, this is a wonderful book that will provoke any Christian concerned with the questions, \u201cWhat is the Bible, anyway, and what do I do with it?\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n


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Readers of this blog will know that I think Christians (namely evangelicals) can learn a lot from how Judaism (in its varied forms) looks at the nature of the Bible and its interpretation. Bottom line: Judaism tends to be more flexible in accepting the Bible\u2019s diversity and contradictions. The question this raises, though, is how […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9724,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[]},"categories":[44],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9723"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9723"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9723\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9724"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9723"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9723"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9723"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}