Isn’t the Bible Full of Contradictions?

The short answer: The Bible has hard passages and places where accounts differ in detail, and it’s honest to admit that. But when you look closely, most supposed contradictions turn out to be different angles on the same events, and none of them touch the heart of the message. Christians believe the Bible is God’s trustworthy Word.

Someone shows you a list online: “100 contradictions in the Bible.” It looks devastating. How many angels were at Jesus’ tomb, one or two? Who was the father of Joseph? What did the sign on the cross actually say? If the Bible can’t keep its own story straight, why trust it about anything?

That’s a fair question, and it deserves a careful answer rather than a panicked one.

Differences aren’t the same as contradictions

Imagine four friends describing the same football match. One says, “We won 2–1 and Sam scored the winner.” Another says, “It was a great game, Jordan’s first goal was amazing.” A third mentions the rain. They don’t contradict each other. They chose different details.

Now take the angels at the tomb. Matthew and Mark mention one angel; Luke and John mention two. A contradiction? Not really. If there were two, there was certainly one. Matthew and Mark simply mention the one who spoke. Differences like this are what you’d expect from honest, independent witnesses. In fact, if all four Gospels matched word for word, people would say the writers had copied each other or got their story straight in advance.

Many items on those online lists work like this. Others come from misreading the text, ignoring which kind of writing it is (poetry, history, proverb, prophecy), forgetting that ancient writers often rounded numbers or arranged events by theme rather than strict time order, or not knowing that a person in the Bible sometimes had two names. Others are simply copying slips in a few manuscripts, like a number written wrongly, and those are well known and noted in Bible footnotes.

Being honest about the hard ones

That said, there are a few places where it’s genuinely hard to see how two passages fit together, and serious Christian scholars have offered different explanations. It’s not faithful to pretend those don’t exist. Even Peter said about Paul’s letters, “Some parts of his letters are hard to understand” (2 Peter 3:16).

But “I can’t solve this yet” is different from “this can’t be solved.” Over the centuries, many alleged errors have been cleared up as archaeologists dug up places and names critics said were made up, and as scholars understood ancient languages and customs better. When you meet a difficulty, the wise thing is neither to panic nor to force an answer, but to be patient. As Proverbs says, “The first to state his case seems right until another comes and cross-examines him” (Proverbs 18:17). Hear the other side before you decide.

Why Christians trust the Bible

Christians don’t trust the Bible because they’ve personally solved every puzzle in it. They trust it chiefly because of Jesus. Jesus treated the Scriptures as the word of God. He quoted them to resist temptation, built His teaching on them and said, “Heaven and earth will pass away, but My words will never pass away” (Matthew 24:35). If Jesus really rose from the dead, His view of the Bible carries a lot of weight.

And when you step back from the small puzzles and look at the whole, the Bible’s unity is astonishing. Around forty writers, over more than a thousand years, in three languages and very different situations, tell one connected story: God creating, humans rebelling, God promising a rescuer, and that rescuer arriving in Jesus. That’s not what you’d expect from a random pile of contradictory documents.

So if a list of contradictions shakes you, do what Luke did. He “carefully investigated everything from the beginning” (Luke 1:3). Look the passages up. Read the verses around them. Ask a pastor or youth leader. You’ll usually find the “contradiction” is a lot less dramatic than it looked online.

Think about it: Why might four slightly different accounts of the same event actually be more believable than four identical ones?

Go deeper: The Key Teachings of R. A. Torrey — Torrey had once been a clever critic of the Bible himself, and he gives wonderfully practical advice for facing its difficulties: honestly, humbly, patiently and prayerfully, and never forcing an answer you don’t have. Start with chapter 11, “The Scripture Cannot Be Broken”.