Smoodock's Blog

Dan McClellan has become one of my favorite critical Bible scholars. The dubious honor of being my favorite critical scholar has always been Bart Ehrman, but in recent years I’ve also come to appreciate Dan’s contributions. I really enjoy listening to Dan’s interesting opinions, since I discovered his YouTube channel. That said, I found a lot of information from Dan’s videos, concerning contradictions between Jesus’ birth narratives in Matthew and Luke, so I decided I’d use them in my current study on Matthew’s Gospel narrative, as objections to what I’ve claimed, and add information that may be helpful to reply to such objections as Dan has claimed on his channel.

Are there “contradictions” in the Bible? If I use Collins Definitions, an online source, then, yes, there are many “contradictions” in the Bible, because all that needs to occur for a “contradiction” to exist between texts is an inconsistency, or something that is simply different from one account to the other, when they speak of the same event. In other words, contradictions are not necessarily opposing events, where one must be true and the other false. Some are that, but many others simply mean, according to this dictionary, that there is some confusion between accounts and more data is needed to clear up what’s claimed by the two or more authors in question.

If we can receive the above as accurate, then the easiest one is able to do to show agreement between the texts is to offer a possible explanation, where a possibility is mere conjecture. There simply isn’t enough information to offer flawless agreement, because all one has is one witness, and the Bible demands two or more to establish the thing as indisputable fact (Deuteronomy 19:15; cp. 17:6). For example, of the two birth accounts, only Matthew mentions Herod wanting to kill Jesus. We can believe this is so, but it can’t be proved by Luke. It can be raised to plausible and even probable through historical accounts found in Josephus’ Antiquities of the Jews, but it will never be established as an absolute historical fact without it being verified by Luke. Therefore, faith, not the best logical or reasonable explanation about the text, is needed, if we are to receive the single mentions as truth. One can say something similar about the other single mentions in Jesus’ birth narratives, with varying degrees of help from ancient history and “possible” verification in Luke, and vice versa in Matthew verifying Luke.

Nothing, however, is one sided. Dan also has his problems with the text. For lack of a better word, I believe Dan shows himself to be a bit more over confident about his position than is warranted. Perhaps, I’m totally wrong about this. After all, I am not a scholar of the Bible and religion, not by any stretch of the imagination. Perhaps I merely think I see unwarranted overconfidence from time to time in his analysis of the problems in the texts. In which case, the reader may have the fun of pointing out my error in a comment. I’ve come to enjoy feedback, helpful or not, true or false, supporting or otherwise. I didn’t use to, but I’ve grown to value it all.

Finally, let me point out that I don’t believe the average believer and reader of the Bible uses the text dishonestly (Dan accuses us of this), nor do I believe this is so for either skeptics or critical scholarship. Of course, any one of us could act deliberately with dishonest information in an effort to undermine the foundation of another’s worldview, but I believe this would be the exception, not the rule for most scholars and Bible believers. All of us accept and reject data according to our respective worldviews, and this is often done without thinking. In other words, it isn’t always deliberate. It’s like traveling from point ‘a’ to point ‘b’ by foot. The objective is to get from point ‘a’ to point ‘b’ and putting one foot in front of the other is almost always automatic, without giving the “next step” a second thought. That’s the way worldviews are with respect to thinking; it’s almost always automatic, which is why I value the opinions of critical scholarship. They make me think about that “next step” so that I’m not always taking my worldview for granted.