How Should Christians Respond to People Who Claim the Bible Has Errors and Contradictions?

Published Jul 29, 2022
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Michael Lawrence

The following is a transcribed Video Q&A, so the text may not read like an edited article would. Scroll to the bottom to view this video in its entirety.

I think when Christians encounter folks that claim the Bible has errors and contradictions we need to respond with sympathy, understanding, and charity. There are passages in Scripture which are hard to explain. There are things in Scripture that upon first reading might appear to contradict themselves. So we should not pretend that there are no problems. Instead, what we want to do is point people to Jesus and help them grapple with first who Jesus is and then secondly Jesus’ attitude toward the Bible and the Scriptures.

We also need to understand that what we claim as Christians is that the Scriptures as they were originally given are without error. What we have is a copy. We do not have the original documents. WE have thousands and thousands of copies. We can compare those copies to each other and essentially recreate the original document, but we do not have the original document. We want to be honest about that. WE want to be charitable about that.

But at the end of the day the Scriptures defend themselves. They authenticate themselves in the life of the person who is reading them. So, we should not spend a lot of time trying to prove inductively that there is no error in Scripture. Instead, we want to bring them to the person that Scripture is all about—and that is Jesus.