Do Contradictions Destroy the Meaning of the Bible?

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily match my own. - Dr. Bart D. Ehrman

I vividly remember the first time I realized that there were serious contradictions in the Bible. I was a sophomore in college when one of my professors gave us a deceptively simple assignment: read the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ resurrection side by side. 

He offered no interpretation and gave us no warning about what we were supposed to find. We were simply asked to approach the texts carefully and with the same open mind we would bring to any other ancient source. 

I was genuinely surprised by what I saw. Details differed, sequences didn’t always line up, and the accounts were far more difficult to fit together than I had expected. 

My first instinct was to harmonize them: to find some way of making every detail fit into a single coherent narrative. 

Looking back, that reaction seems perfectly natural for someone who had never seriously entertained the possibility that the Bible might contain historical discrepancies. Years later, I find myself in a very different position. 

Once the biblical writings are studied alongside other ancient narrative sources, variation, tension, and even contradiction no longer seem especially astonishing.

But recognizing that contradictions exist raises a much larger question: what, exactly, follows from that recognition?

In popular discussions, the issue is often treated as though the stakes were obvious. If the Bible contradicts itself, some assume its reliability collapses and its religious significance disappears with it. 

Others devote enormous energy to showing that every apparent contradiction can somehow be reconciled. 

Both reactions assume that complete consistency is essential to what the Bible is and what it means. Yet that assumption itself deserves examination. What do we actually mean when we call two biblical passages contradictory? 

How did Christians in earlier centuries deal with differences between their sacred texts? And when did the conviction that the Bible must contain no error or contradiction become such an important feature of Christian thought? 

Before deciding whether contradictions destroy the meaning of the Bible, we first need to ask why we expect them to do so.

Want to learn more about what happens after seeing that the Bible has contradictions?

Join Dr. James Barker's course, The Gospels Contradict Themselves - Now What?  

What Exactly Is a Biblical Contradiction?

In his book Jesus Interrupted, Bart Ehrman writes:

(Affiliate Disclaimer: We may earn commissions on products you purchase through this page at no additional cost to you. Thank you for supporting our site!)

Ehrman’s final qualification is especially important for the larger question of this article. The existence of discrepancies may create serious difficulties for particular understandings of biblical inspiration or historical reliability, but it doesn’t automatically tell us what significance the Bible may still possess. 

Before drawing conclusions about the importance of contradictions in the Bible, however, we first need to be clear about what a contradiction actually is.

Not every difference between two biblical accounts constitutes a contradiction. Ancient authors, like modern ones, could emphasize different details, omit material that did not interest them, or arrange their narratives according to their own literary and theological purposes. 

If one Gospel mentions a detail that another Gospel simply leaves out, the two accounts aren’t necessarily contradictory. 

A contradiction arises when two versions of the same event make claims about it that cannot readily both describe what actually happened.

In other words, the issue isn’t merely that two authors tell a story differently, but that an important element of one account appears incompatible with the corresponding element in another. 

This distinction matters because discussions of Bible contradictions can otherwise become imprecise: differences of emphasis are sometimes treated as contradictions, while genuine tensions are sometimes dissolved by constructing scenarios that neither author actually describes.

Examining Two Bible Contradictions

One well-known example of a contradiction in the Bible concerns the death of Judas Iscariot. 

According to the author of Matthew’s Gospel, Judas regrets betraying Jesus, returns the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests and elders, throws the money into the Temple, and then goes away and hangs himself (27:3–5). 

Because the priests consider the money unlawful to place in the Temple treasury, they use it to purchase the potter’s field as a burial place for foreigners (Matt. 27:6–8). 

The Book of Acts tells the story differently.

There Judas himself is said to have acquired a field with the reward of his wickedness, after which he falls headlong, his body bursts open, and his intestines spill out (Acts 1:18–19). 

Authors have long proposed ways of harmonizing these accounts. St. Augustine, for example, suggested that Judas hanged himself and that his body later fell and burst open. 

Such a reconstruction is theoretically possible. Yet it combines details from two narratives in a way that neither Matthew nor Acts actually presents. Read independently and in their ordinary narrative sense, the accounts differ both over how Judas died and over who acquired the field associated with his death.

A second example concerns the chronology of Jesus’ final meal and crucifixion in Mark and John.

In Mark, Jesus’ disciples prepare the Passover meal, Jesus eats it with them that evening, and he is arrested and crucified the following day (14:12–17; 15:1–25).

The author of John’s Gospel appears to place the events differently. When Jesus is brought before Pilate, the Jewish authorities have not yet eaten the Passover meal (18:28), and the day of Jesus’ condemnation is identified as the “day of Preparation for the Passover” (19:14).

On a straightforward reading, therefore, Mark depicts Jesus eating the Passover meal before his death, while John depicts Jesus dying before the Passover meal has been eaten. The difference may well serve John’s distinctive theological presentation of Jesus, but recognizing a theological purpose doesn’t remove the clear historical discrepancy.

How Christians respond to such discrepancies depends greatly on what they believe the Bible is supposed to be. 

Delbert Burkett makes this point clearly in An Introduction to the New Testament and the Origins of Christianity:

Burkett thus identifies an important distinction that will remain with us throughout this discussion.

The discovery of a contradiction has very different consequences if one begins with the assumption that Scripture must be completely free from historical error than if one regards the Bible as a collection of religious writings produced by historically situated and fallible human authors.

What is particularly interesting, however, is that these contrasting instincts are hardly unique to modern debates. 

Christians were confronting differences among their sacred narratives centuries before the rise of modern historical criticism, and they didn’t all deal with them in the same way. 

Some attempted to bring divergent accounts into a single harmonious narrative; others were prepared to acknowledge difficulties at the literal level while locating the deeper significance of Scripture elsewhere. 

This two-sided response to contradictions in the Bible was already visible in the earliest centuries of the Christian movement. To those early Christian responses we now turn.

What Did Early Christians Do With Bible Contradictions?

In his book Christianity at the Crossroads, Michael J. Kruger notes:

But plurality existed within Christianity as well as outside it. Different Christian communities possessed different writings, promoted different theological ideas, and remembered Jesus in different ways. 

Even the four Gospels that eventually became canonical didn’t always tell the same stories in precisely the same manner. It’s therefore hardly surprising that Christians of the 2nd and 3rd centuries developed different ways of dealing with the tensions and discrepancies that emerged when these accounts were placed alongside one another.

One of the earliest major examples comes from Tatian, a 2nd-century Christian author and student of Justin Martyr. 

Sometime around 170–180 C.E., Tatian produced a Gospel harmony that came to be known as the Diatessaron.

In her book Comparing Christianities: An Introduction to Early Christianity, April DeConick writes:

Tatian’s work is particularly revealing for our discussion of Bible contradictions because its very form reduced the problems created by having several parallel accounts.

Instead of leaving Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John as four independent narratives, Tatian wove their material into a single continuous story. 

We cannot know that eliminating contradictions was his sole (or even primary) purpose, but the literary effect was clear: differences in chronology, wording, and narrative sequence could be reconciled within one harmonized account.

Yet harmonization wasn’t the only option available to early Christian thinkers. 

A strikingly different approach appears in the writings of Origen, the enormously influential Alexandrian theologian and biblical interpreter of the 3rd century. 

Ironically, we can see Origen wrestling with some of these issues especially clearly because of a pagan critic of Christianity named Celsus who wrote a book arguing against the central claims of the Christian religion.

Joseph W. Trigg explains: “Although we cannot be certain who Celsus was, Origen took him to be the Celsus who was a friend of the second-century satirist (and enemy of Christianity) Lucian... Evidently written in the late second century, it might be called an anti-apology, a pagan response to pleas for toleration by Christian authors. Its title [Greek: Logos Alēthēs, usually translated "The True Word"], implying that Christians proclaimed a ‘False Logos,’ is evidence that Celsus knew of a Logos theology such as that taught by Justin at Rome before his death in 156, and he seems to be responding to arguments like those of Justin or Aristides...Celsus’ criticisms are satirical and hard-edged, but demonstrate a real acquaintance with the New Testament. Celsus also had a clear-sighted perception of Christianity’s departures from and threat to Greco-Roman social and cultural values.” 

Celsus’ own work hasn’t survived independently, but substantial portions of his critique are preserved because Origen quoted and answered them in his work titled Contra Celsum.

Among the accusations Origen preserves is Celsus’ charge that Christians themselves had manipulated Gospel traditions in response to criticism:

Elsewhere, Celsus attacked discrepancies in the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ resurrection and argued that the supposed witnesses to the risen Jesus were unreliable, even suggesting that their experiences could be explained as hallucinations. 

His criticism is important because it shows that contradictions in the Bible (or at least tensions between different Gospel narratives) weren’t discoveries of modern historical criticism. 

Educated critics of Christianity were already comparing Christian texts in antiquity and using their differences as arguments against Christian claims.

How, then, did Origen respond? Did he insist that every apparent discrepancy could be removed and defend something resembling a modern doctrine of an entirely “error-free” Bible? Not exactly. 

Origen certainly held an extraordinarily high view of Scripture and regarded it as divinely inspired, but his understanding of inspiration didn’t require every difficulty to disappear at the level of straightforward historical narration.

Instead, his approach was rooted in a sophisticated theory of biblical interpretation. Scripture, for Origen, could communicate meaning at more than one level, and difficulties encountered in the literal sense could prompt the careful reader to seek a deeper spiritual meaning. 

Consequently, when an apparent inconsistency emerged, Origen didn’t necessarily regard the only legitimate response as constructing a historical scenario that would make every detail agree.

Joseph W. Trigg, in his book Origen: The Bible and Philosophy in the Third-Century Church, illustrates this dimension of Origen’s thought particularly well:

This doesn’t mean that Origen was indifferent to historical questions, nor that he simply labeled every troublesome passage allegorical. 

Rather, it shows that literal consistency wasn’t the sole measure by which he judged the truth or significance of Scripture. Where Celsus regarded tensions as evidence against Christianity, Origen could regard difficulties in the text as an invitation to interpret Scripture on a level beyond the merely literal.

Tatian and Origen therefore provide us with two illuminating, if very different, responses to the problem. 

Tatian’s Diatessaron brought divergent Gospel traditions together within a single continuous account; Origen allowed a much greater role for interpretive complexity and didn’t make the removal of every literal difficulty the foundation of Scripture’s authority. 

Neither example maps perfectly onto modern debates, and it would be anachronistic simply to label Tatian an “inerrantist” or Origen a modern historical critic. 

Nevertheless, they demonstrate that Christians were confronting contradictions in the Bible long before the rise of modern biblical scholarship, and that there was never only one way of responding to them. 

What we still do not find here, however, is biblical inerrancy in the fully developed sense familiar from many modern Christian debates. 

To understand how the absence of error and contradiction became such an explicit and contested measure of biblical authority, we have to move much further forward in Christian history.

When Did Biblical Inerrancy Become So Important?

The Protestant Reformation certainly elevated the authority of Scripture, but that didn’t yet mean that Reformers such as Martin Luther and John Calvin understood biblical authority in precisely the same way that later advocates of strict inerrancy would. 

Luther could acknowledge difficulties in the biblical text and even allow unresolved discrepancies to remain without believing that Christian faith was thereby endangered.

Calvin likewise treated Scripture as a genuinely divine message communicated through genuinely human forms. 

He could recognize inaccuracies in biblical quotations, textual problems, and even what he called a “manifest error” in Acts 7:16—where Abraham is said to have purchased a burial place at Shechem that Genesis attributes to Jacob—while continuing to regard Scripture as authoritative because its central purpose was to communicate God’s saving message.

In other words, neither man approached the Bible as though its religious authority depended upon perfect technical accuracy in every historical or verbal detail. The much more rigid equation between inspiration and complete errorlessness would emerge more clearly only later.

An especially important stage in this development came in 19th-century American Protestantism, above all at Princeton Theological Seminary with theologians such as Charles Hodge.

Here the issue wasn’t simply a stronger devotion to Scripture but a particular intellectual framework for understanding what biblical truth meant.

In their book The Authority and Interpretation of the Bible: An Historical Approach, Jack Rogers and Donald McKim note:

This approach helps explain why Bible contradictions became increasingly consequential.

If biblical statements functioned like objective facts and all those facts ultimately came from God, then they had to form a perfectly coherent system. A genuine contradiction would no longer be merely an interpretive difficulty; it threatened the intellectual model by which Scripture itself was being defended.

Hodge himself expressed the comparison explicitly in his Systematic Theology:

The theologian’s task was therefore to collect the biblical “facts,” establish their relations, and demonstrate their harmony and consistency.

This way of thinking developed at precisely the time when the intellectual environment was becoming less hospitable to it. 

Historical criticism was subjecting biblical writings to increasingly rigorous historical analysis, while geology, evolutionary theory, and other sciences were challenging traditional understandings of the natural world. 

Rogers and McKim describe these developments as part of a wider 19th-century “crisis of historical consciousness.”

Peter Berger brilliantly summarizes the challenges that historical and sociological criticism brought upon the Bible and Christianity:

So, the more biblical and scientific claims appeared to diverge, the more urgent it became for conservative theologians to articulate exactly what inspiration guaranteed.

That process became even more explicit with Charles Hodge’s son, Archibald Alexander Hodge, and later Princeton theologians such as B. B. Warfield. 

Between the 1860 and 1879 editions of A. A. Hodge’s Outlines of Theology, Rogers and McKim identify a significant tightening of the doctrine.

By 1879 Hodge located absolute infallibility specifically in the Bible’s original autographs (the original manuscripts produced by the biblical authors) and argued that these conveyed God’s intended meaning with infallible accuracy in both thought and verbal expression.

This qualification became particularly important when dealing with alleged contradictions in the Bible.

A genuine discrepancy now had to be demonstrated not merely in surviving manuscripts but in the unavailable originals, and it had to be shown that no possible interpretation or reconciliation could resolve it. 

By the late 19th century, then, we can see something considerably closer to the modern doctrine of biblical inerrancy: inspiration was increasingly defined in terms of complete factual and verbal errorlessness, and the absence of contradictions became an important part of defending the Bible’s divine authority.

None of this means that concern for the truthfulness of Scripture began in the nineteenth century. Christians had spoken of Scripture as inspired, trustworthy, and authoritative for many centuries. 

What changed was the form and function of the claim. From Origen to Luther and Calvin, biblical difficulties could coexist with understandings of Scripture whose authority did not depend primarily on technical historical precision.

In the modern period, particularly within strands of conservative Protestantism, complete factual consistency increasingly became a theological boundary marker.

That historical development brings us back to the question with which we began: if contradictions in the Bible create a serious problem for one particular understanding of what the Bible must be, do they necessarily destroy what the Bible means?

Acknowledging Contradictions in the Bible While Finding Significance

In his book Writing Ancient History, Neville Morley explains:

Morley’s description is particularly helpful for thinking about the meaning and significance of contradictions in the Bible.

Historical inquiry isn’t simply a collection of statements about things that happened long ago. It’s a particular way of asking questions about the past, governed by particular methods and limitations. 

Once that point is taken seriously, the discovery that two biblical authors give incompatible accounts of an event tells us something important historically, but it doesn’t, by itself, settle every other question that might be asked of those texts.

This becomes clearer if we distinguish, without completely separating, history from theology. The boundary between the two is hardly impenetrable: biblical theology makes claims about figures and events situated in history, while historians of ancient Judaism and Christianity constantly encounter texts saturated with theological convictions.

Nevertheless, they represent different modes of inquiry. 

As Paula Fredriksen emphasized, historical interpretation is both textual and contextual. Historians examine surviving evidence within the political, social, cultural, and religious worlds that produced it, while trying to resist anachronistically projecting later concepts back onto ancient people.

Theology can ask a different kind of question. It may take events, persons, and claims preserved in ancient texts and interpret them trans-temporally—as statements about God, salvation, human existence, or moral truth whose significance is not confined to the circumstances in which the texts originated.

Neither approach is automatically illegitimate. The difficulty begins when the questions and standards appropriate to one are required to provide the answers demanded by the other.

This distinction has become increasingly important to how I understand the Bible. I see no methodological necessity for someone to choose between accepting historical-critical scholarship and finding theological meaning in biblical texts, provided that the two enterprises aren’t confused.

A Christian may, for example, believe that God’s purposes were somehow embodied in the life, ministry, and death of Jesus while also accepting the mainstream historical conclusions reached by scholars studying Jesus as a 1st-century Jewish figure.

Historical research can ask what Jesus probably said, what he did, how he understood his mission, and how his earliest followers remembered him.

The theological claim that God was acting through those events is a different kind of claim, one that historical method as such is neither designed to prove nor obligated to disprove.

The same applies to a doctrine such as atonement. Someone may regard Jesus’ death as possessing salvific meaning without first having to demonstrate that Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John agree on every detail surrounding that death.

Their theological conviction doesn’t require the historian to stop noticing the differences between the sources.

This is why, in my view, contradictions in the Bible need not destroy its meaning. They certainly matter. 

If Mark and John locate Jesus’ final meal and death differently, a historian cannot simply combine the two accounts and pretend that the discrepancy has disappeared.

If Matthew and Acts preserve different versions of Judas’ death, historical analysis should acknowledge that fact rather than begin with the conclusion that both narratives must somehow fit together. 

But recognizing those tensions doesn’t prevent readers from finding theological, literary, ethical, or existential significance in either text.

Whether a person ultimately accepts the Bible’s theological claims is, of course, another question: one that historical criticism cannot decide on that person’s behalf. 

Historical method can investigate what ancient authors wrote, why they may have written it, how their accounts relate to one another, and what can plausibly be reconstructed about the past. 

Whether those writings disclose truths about God is a judgment that moves beyond the historical method itself.

There is, however, one theological position that does create a much more direct collision with historical-critical scholarship: the insistence that divine inspiration requires the Bible to be completely free from every historical discrepancy or contradiction.

Once that premise is made non-negotiable, the interpreter must arrive at harmonization before the historical investigation has even begun. 

At that point, the disagreement isn’t really with historical criticism as such but with what its methods are allowed to discover. 

I do not think such a rigid doctrine of inerrancy is necessary in order for the Bible to remain meaningful. After all, as we have seen, Christians themselves haven’t always thought that it was. 

For me, acknowledging Bible contradictions doesn’t make these ancient writings less interesting or less significant.

In some respects, it makes them more so: their differences allow us to hear several ancient voices rather than forcing them into one, and to ask not only what happened in the past, but how different authors struggled to understand what that past meant.