The measure of intelligence is the ability to change. – Albert Einstein

For the word of God is alive and powerful. It is sharper than the sharpest two-edged sword, cutting between soul and spirit, between joint and marrow. It exposes our innermost thoughts and desires. Hebrews 4:12

In this second of two articles ( part 1 Salvation With and Without Christ )  I will talk about the belief that the Bible is infallible and inerrant; and I will show, through scriptural exegesis, why the common belief that the Bible is infallible and inerrant is not accurate and I will explain what the correct belief is and how this benefits us spiritually.

What are Seminarians Taught?

In the second semester of seminary at Duke my New Testament professor opened the class with this warning: “The information I’m about to teach you is for your knowledge, but you should never mention it from the pulpit, or you will be tarred and feathered and ridden out of town on a rail!” He said, “If you feel you must teach it only do so in small group settings, but I don’t recommend it!” In effect the professor was asking us newly forming pastors to be keepers of the secret knowledge too dangerous to share with the congregations we served.

The secret knowledge is that the Bible contains dozens of factual errors, contradictions and false prophesies. The professor’s warning was not an anomaly, twenty years later at Asbury Theological Seminary, earning my Doctoral degree, I discovered that even in conservative evangelical seminaries like Asbury the professors know the truth, but they don’t teach it. It may be because they are afraid of falling attendance or loosing seminarians who have been inculcated with false information about the Bible from childhood. The unfortunate result of this fear of the truth is that pastors who attend conservative theological seminaries graduate without learning the truth and go on to propagate the same false information they learned that the Bible is both infallible and inerrant, while those who attended liberal seminaries learn the truth but steer away from teaching it, or worse, propagate the false information to pander to the ignorant.

How Some Christians React to the “Secret Knowledge”

In my first church appointment out of seminary, I quickly learned that the professor was right to warn us. When I tried to teach the truth in a small study group I was caught off guard by the fervency and intractability of the illogical commitment to the false teaching of inerrancy that surfaced among some of the most faithful servant minded congregation members. I lost one of my most faithful attendees and servants; his parting comment was, “If any part of the Bible is wrong then we can’t believe any of it!” He was not interested to hear why that was not correct.   

One of the biggest surprises for me as a pastor was the realization that about 80% of the congregations I served were basically ignorant about the Bible. About 15% had a basic, relatively limited knowledge of the Bible, a few had much knowledge of the Bible’s content, but what they learned was filtered through the lens of Biblical inerrancy – also known as Fundamentalism – and a very small number had a high degree of knowledge and were not fundamentalist. That proportion was the same with minor variations in all nine of the churches I served in my 36 years as a pastor: my congregations largely thought all the Old Testament stories are historical reality.

I am ashamed to say that after being burned once I decided to let sleeping dogs lie: I just never again mentioned the Old Testament stories. Once, I forgot my avoidance principal and I did say I believed Jonah getting swallowed by a big fish was likely a metaphor, a morality lesson rather than a historical reality, and again one of my most faithful attendees and servants said in front of dozens of church members at a meeting that if I didn’t believe Jonah was swallowed by a fish I was not a Christian!

Don’t Get Me Wrong!

Let me be clear: I am a committed Christian and a firm believer in the Trinity, and I love and revere the Bible. I read the Bible every day; I have read it cover to cover and the entire New Testament twice every year for the last 30 years. The Bible is the most important book in the world to me; it is holy to me, and it is sacred, but I also know from many years of studying it that the Bible is not infallible, only God is! Our creator God, our Father in heaven, is described in the Bible as a “God of truth” (Isaiah 65:16). Jesus famously said: ‘You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free’ (John 8:32). I am confident that me revealing the truth is actually pleasing to God. Jesus also said this about religious leaders who hide the truth from their people:

 “What sorrow awaits you experts in religious law! For you remove the key to knowledge from the people. You don’t enter the Kingdom yourselves, and you prevent others from entering.” (Luke 11:52)  

I am not saying that if you do not know the truth you are denied of entry into heaven, but I am saying that you are missing out on a fuller understanding of God and God’s will for us. Because my faith has been deepened by the knowledge I attained about the Bible, and my understanding of God had grown from the searching I had to do to make sense of what I learned; I want to pass on what I’ve learned in the hopes that you the reader will benefit as I have. Past experience has shown that the truths I reveal may at first shake some people’s faith, but ultimately if you stay with me through this article I will explain how the imperfections are a part of God’s plan for our benefit; and I believe that for you like me, knowing the truth will lift your faith to a much fuller and more accurate understanding of God, and a better and deeper faith.

Unveiling the “Secret Knowledge”

First, to understand God and the Bible better you may need to be willing to let go of the popular but incorrect notion you may have been taught that the Bible was dictated by God and is without error, and that if there are any errors in the Bible then you cannot believe any of it. For the reader, who may not know the origin of this incorrect notion, it comes from something The Apostle Paul said about the Bible:

“All Scripture is inspired by God and is useful to teach us what is true and to make us realize what is wrong in our lives. It corrects us when we are wrong and teaches us to do what is right” (2 Timothy 3:16).

Unfortunately, some people, including many pastors, are trained in memorization of the text but not in scholarly analysis of the text using what the scholars call Higher Criticism; as a result, they wrongly teach what inspiration is. They misinterpret the word inspired to mean that the Bible itself is God Breathed, or in other words dictated by God; and therefore, they believe if it was dictated by God then it must also be perfect and without error.

The misinterpretation of Scripture is nothing new. The Apostle Peter wrote this about the writings of Paul:

“Some of his comments are hard to understand, and those who are ignorant and unstable have twisted his letters to mean something quite different, just as they do with other parts of Scripture. And this will result in their destruction” (2 Peter 3:15-16).

So, Our Christian faith must stand on a foundation of truth if it is to stand the test of time. A foundation which is not based entirely on truth will eventually crack and crumble, as we are seeing is now happening with the drastic decline in membership and attendance in churches around the world. The Bible’s errors, contradictions and scientific inaccuracies are constantly being lifted up by atheists to attack the validity of the Christian faith, and the result is the crumbling of the Christian religion around the Western world that was once known as Christendom. For example, the number of Americans identifying as Christian has fallen from 90% in 1975 to 62% in 2025!

There are 34 passages where God is quoted directly in the 929 chapters of the Old Testament. The rest of the time the writers were inspired by God to write, but the pure light of inspiration was filtered through the prism of  their humanity – their life experiences and knowledge; even so their own knowledge and experience were supernaturally aided by God: they knew things that should have been impossible to know such as the Big Bang (“By faith we understand that the entire universe was formed at God’s command, that what we now see did not come from anything that can be seen.” Hebrews 11:3). Speaking about the supernatural help the writers received, Peter said this about Paul: “This is what our beloved brother Paul also wrote to you with the wisdom God gave him— speaking of these things in all of his letters.” But there is a colossal chasm between God inspiring authors and God dictating the Bible word for word, and that gap is where the errors derive from.

Before proceeding to lifting up examples of the contradictions, errors and false prophesies there is one more essential thing I learned which we must keep in mind: you can only benefit from these truths if you can,

a) start from the place of trusting in the reality of God, and

b) trusting that everything that’s in the Bible is there because God wants it to be there.

That is so important I will say it again:

You must start from a place of faith and trust in God: that God is real and was in control of what went into the Bible – that God wanted or allowed everything that is in the Bible to be there.

Are you with me so far? Do you trust in God? Do you believe that God wants everything that is in the Bible to be there? Then logically since there are inaccuracies in the Bible, God must have wanted them to be there for us to discover, Amen?

Having said all that, please bear with me because before I can explain why God allowed the imperfections in the Bible to be included in the Bible as a part of God’s plan for our benefit, I first need to provide evidence of their existence: the how and the what.

How is it possible that errors, contradictions and false prophesies could find their way into the Bible?

We are All Imperfect Humans

The Bible indicates that God gives all human beings freedom of thought, and of action (Deuteronomy 30:19) however, the Bible also tells us (Psalm 14:3 & 53:3) that none of us use our freedom perfectly. It says: “all have sinned and fall short of the Glory of God” (Romans 3:23). The Bible doesn’t say, “All have sinned except the 40 men who wrote the Bible”! The sinfulness of all people is a theme in both Old and New Testaments: “Surely there is not a righteous man on earth who does good and never sins” (Ecclesiastes 7:20).  “For we all stumble in many ways” (James 3:2). “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us” (1 John 1:8).

The Bible was written by holy and inspired men, but they themselves were weak sinners like the Apostle Paul, who describes his own sinfulness in Romans chapter seven.

Romans 7:15-18 (NLT) I don’t really understand myself, for I want to do what is right, but I don’t do it. Instead, I do what I hate. 16 But if I know that what I am doing is wrong, this shows that I agree that the law is good. 17 So I am not the one doing wrong; it is sin living in me that does it. 18 And I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. I want to do what is right, but I can’t.

Think about that – the apostle Paul, who is credited with writing 14 of the 23 books of the New Testament, said of himself that he is a sinner.

Since the Bible was written by sinful normal men it could be expected that, even though the authors were inspired by the Holy Spirit, that didn’t stop both their life experiences and their human sinfulness from showing up occasionally in their writings! My favorite example of hatred from the author showing us is in Psalm 137.

Psalm 137:8-9 (NLT) “O Babylon, you will be destroyed. Happy is the one who pays you back for what you have done to us. 9 Happy is the one who takes your babies and smashes them against the rocks!”

Three times the apostle Paul said in his writings (1Corinthians 7:12, 25, & 40) that he was not positive that what he wrote was speaking for God. 1 Corinthians 7:25-26 (ESV) is a perfect example:

“I have no command from the Lord, but I give my judgment as one who by the Lord’s mercy is trustworthy.”

Trustworthy does not mean, “perfect in knowledge.” My wife can testify I am trustworthy but I and not perfect in knowledge.

Notice the Details in Biblical Text

When you put the Bible under a microscope, I mean when you read the Bible super carefully, with a mind to compare each verse with the rest of the Bible, you quickly realize the idea that God dictated the Bible word for word is ridiculous! If you believe God dictated it, you have to believe that God must also have been senile when He wrote it because He couldn’t remember what he wrote from chapter to chapter and book to book.

For example, 2 Samuel 24 says, God inspired King David to take a census; but 1 Chronicles 21 says, Satan inspired David to take a census! That is a huge difference!

Another example 2 Samuel (24:24) also says that David paid 50 pieces of silver for the land that the temple in Jerusalem would be built on while 1 Chronicles (21:25) says David paid 600 pieces of gold! Again, that is a huge difference.

You probably know that the Bible says the sun revolves around the earth? In 1610 Galileo discovered that was wrong, the earth revolves around the sun. He wrote, “The bible tells you how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go.” For saying the Bible was wrong, he was excommunicated from the Roman Catholic church until 1992 when Pope John Paul admitted the Bible was wrong, and lifted Galileo’s excommunication. It didn’t do Galileo much good at that point but the fact that it took 382 years to reinstate Galileo illustrates how tightly people cling to the Bible in the face of science.

Errors, Contradictions And False Prophesies In the Text

Numerical Contradictions:

1. There are differences in the creation story: in Genesis 1:26-27 human beings were created last of all things on earth, but in Genesis 2:4-7 was Adam created first of everything.
2. How many tribes of Israel were there?? Numbers 1:5-15 omits Levi, but splits Joseph into 2 tribes Manasseh and Ephraim. Joshua 21:4-7 includes Manasseh and Ephraim, and Levi, 13 total, in Judges 5 only 10 are mentioned.
3. How many brothers did David have? 1 Samuel 16:10 says he had seven, but 1 Chronicles 2:13-15 says he had six.
4. How high was the temple of the Lord that Solomon built? 1 Kings 6:2 says it was 45 feet high but 2 Chron. 3:4 says it was 30 feet high.
5. 1 Sam. 16:10-11 says David is one of 8 sons, 1Chron 2:13-15 he was one of 7 sons.
6. How much did King David pay for the threshing floor of the Jebusite? 2 Samuel 24:24 says 50 pieces of silver, 1 Chro. 21:25 says 600 pieces of silver.

Contradictions Within The Text:

1. Who or what was the first of God’s creations? Genesis 1:1 says it was the heavens and the earth. Proverbs 8:22 says God created wisdom “before anything else” but Colossians 1:15 says it was Christ.
2. Does God tempt men? Genesis 22:1 says yes, James 1:13 says no.
3. Did anyone ever see God face to face? Gen. 32:30 yes, John 1:18 no.
4. Who moved David to take a census? 2 Samuel 24:1 says it was God, 1 Chronicles 21:1 says it was Satan.
5. Who was Jesus’ grandfather on his father’s side? Matthew 1:16 says Jacob, and Luke 3:23 says it was Heli, and in general the lists of descendants in Matthew and Luke are different in a number of other ways.
6. When did Jesus drive the money changers out of the temple? It was during Holy Week at the end of his ministry in Matthew 21:12, and at the beginning of his ministry in John 2:15.
7. Who purchased the potters field? In Matthew 27:6-7 it was the priests, in Acts1:18 it was Judas.
8. Will God destroy all humanity?

A) “In a burst of anger, I turned my face away for a little while. But with everlasting love I will have compassion on you,” says the Lord, your Redeemer. “Just as I swore in the time of Noah that I would never again let a flood cover the earth, so now I swear that I will never again be angry and punish you” (Isaiah 54:8-9). 

B) Versus Zephaniah 1:2-3 “I will sweep away everything from the face of the earth,” says the Lord. “I will sweep away people and animals alike. I will sweep away the birds of the sky and the fish in the sea. I will reduce the wicked to heaps of rubble, and I will wipe humanity from the face of the earth,” says the Lord.”

9. The book of Proverbs (26: 4 & 5) contradicts itself in the same chapter: “⁴ Don’t answer the foolish arguments of fools, or you will become as foolish as they are. 5 Be sure to answer the foolish arguments of fools, or they will become wise in their own estimation.”
10. What was the drink they offered Jesus mixed with? Matthew 27:34 says wine mixed with gaul; Mark 15:23 says wine mixed with myrrh (they both agree that he refused it).
11. Who went to Jesus tomb the first Easter Sunday morning? Matthew 28:1 Mary Magdalene and the other Mary; Mark 16:1 Mary, Mary & Salome; John 20:1 Mary Magdalene alone.
12. What did they see there? Matthew 28:2-5 a single angel; Mark 16:5 a young man in a white robe; Luke 24:4 two men in dazzling robes; John 20:12 two white robed angels.
13. What is the exact inscription on the cross of Christ? John 19:19 says: “Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews.” Matthew 27:37 says, “This is Jesus, the King of the Jews.”
14. Where was Jesus after his baptism? Mark 1:12 says Jesus went immediately into the wilderness, but John 1:35 says the next day he was still with John the Baptist at the Jordan river.
15. What did the two thieves on the cross say to Jesus? In Mark 15:32 both make fun of Jesus; in Luke 23:39-40 one thief reprimands the other for mocking Jesus.
16. Did the men with Paul hear God speak to Paul? Acts 9:7 says they did; Acts 22:9 (KJV) says they did not.
17. After his conversion did Paul go to Jerusalem (Acts 9:26), or Arabia (Galatians 1:17)?
18. When Paul went to Jerusalem did he meet with all the apostles (Acts 9:27-28), or only Peter and James (Galatians 1:18-19)?
19. How are we justified? By faith (Romans 3:28), or by works (James 2:14)?
20. Did God alone create the universe? In Isaiah 44:24 we read, “This is what the Lord says— your Redeemer and Creator: “I am the Lord, who made all things. I alone stretched out the heavens;” but John 1:2-3 says it was the Word: “He existed in the beginning with God. ³ God created everything through him, and nothing was created except through him.”

This is just a partial list of contradictions I have uncovered in my readings over the years.

Scientific Inaccuracies:

1. In Genesis 1:9-14 God creates plants and trees before the sun.
2. In Genesis 1:14-17 God stuck the sun, moon, and stars in the firmament (the writer believed the firmament was a solid structure separating heaven from earth)
3. In Genesis Chapter 1 God made the earth and universe in six days, in science 13 Billion years.
4. The Bible contains comprehensive genealogies – lists of every descendant in an unbroken chain from Adam to Jesus, including telling how old they were when they became the father of the next person in the chain. By adding up the numbers of years between each generation, the Jews say 2025 is the 5786^th year since the creation of the world. 
5. The Bible says (2 Kings 19:9, Isaiah 37:9) King Tirhakah of Ethiopia came up to help Hezekiah when Sennacherib King of Assyria was besieging Jerusalem in 701 BC, but Sennacherib didn’t become King until 10 years later in 690 BC.

Prophesy Unfulfilled:

Here is what the Bible has to say about unfulfilled prophesies: “If what a prophet proclaims in the name of the LORD does not take place or come true, that is a message the LORD has not spoken. That prophet has spoken presumptuously, so do not be alarmed” (Deuteronomy 18:22).

There are 34 places within the Bible where God is quoted as having dictated that portion through the prophetic writer (Thus saith the Lord…). But there are a number of those sayings that involve prophesies which never came true. For example, both Jeremiah and Ezekiel say they are quoting God saying that Nebuchadnezzar would conquer and destroy Egypt (Jeremiah 46 & Ezekiel 29 & 30).

Jeremiah 46:25-26 “The LORD of Heaven’s Armies, the God of Israel, says: “I will punish Amon, the god of Thebes, and all the other gods of Egypt. I will punish its rulers and Pharaoh, too, and all who trust in him. 26 I will hand them over to those who want them killed—to King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon and his army. But afterward the land will recover from the ravages of war. I, the LORD, have spoken!”

Ezekiel 29:19-20 “Therefore, this is what the Sovereign LORD says: I will give the land of Egypt to Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon. He will carry off its wealth, plundering everything it has so he can pay his army. 20 Yes, I have given him the land of Egypt as a reward for his work, says the Sovereign LORD, because he was working for me when he destroyed Tyre.”

According to historians, Nebuchadnezzar never attacked Egypt, and neither did he destroy Tyre.

Zephaniah (2:6-7) predicted: “The Philistine coast will become a wilderness pasture, a place of shepherd camps and enclosures for sheep and goats. The remnant of the tribe of Judah will pasture there. They will rest at night in the abandoned houses in Ashkelon.” That never happened.

Jesus predicted: “The time for judging this world has come, when Satan, the ruler of this world, will be cast out. And when I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw everyone to myself” (John 12:31-32); but he also said: “However, no one knows the day or hour when these things will happen, not even the angels in heaven or the Son himself. Only the Father knows” (Matthew 24:36).

What Are The Most Important Things To Keep In Mind?

The Gospels were each written by a different author, each with his own agenda and things they thought were important to mention.

Matthew wanted to emphasize the Jewish connections to Jesus and lifted up 16 Old Testament prophesies fulfilled in Jesus.

Mark wanted to emphasize the Good News about Jesus, that there is forgiveness of sins and eternal life through faith in Jesus.

Luke wanted to emphasize the importance of the role of women.

John wanted to emphasize the divinity of Jesus and His unity with the Father.

They each include things the others do not and they recall some things differently, but all agree on the major points: Jesus was the fulfillment of God’s promise to the Jews of a Messiah; He the Son of God; He came to earth to be our teacher and example of how to live a life in relationship with God. He also came to be our savior: to offer His life as a worthy and acceptable offering to atone for our sins. They all agree He was crucified to death by the Romans at the request of the Jewish leaders, on the third day He was raised from the dead by God, He was seen alive by His disciples and many others after His resurrection, He lives eternally with God in heaven and belief in Him and obeying His commandments gains us acceptance into heaven. We should never doubt these things that the gospels all agree on.

Conclusion:

First, we need to be clear that God did inspire the writers: the Bible is a holy book. You cannot read the Bible with your heart and mind open to the Holy Spirit without being inspired to greater faith. Because we know the reality of God, and of God’s power, knowledge, and abilities, we may therefore count on the reality that the Bible is as God intended it to be, with flaws which reflect the influence of the less than perfect human authors, to be included.  So, why in the world did God allow the humanity of the authors show through dozens of times in His holy book? The answer is a very important and wonderful lesson for our spirituality.

The answer to the question ‘why?’ comes from a study of theology: beyond knowing God’s qualities and abilities, one of the things we also know is that God wants us to have faith!

It’s impossible to please God apart from faith. And why? Because anyone who wants to approach God must believe both that he exists and that he cares enough to respond to those who seek him. (Hebrews 11:6 MSG)

God always wants us to have faith in Himself. Faith requires the ability to believe or not believe, to move past doubt to trust. Faith requires free will, the choice to move towards God or to doubt and disbelieve God. God does not want to terrorize us into believing. If I put a gun to your head and tell you to love me you will probably declare your love for me if the gun is at your head, but you will not love me with your own free will. In the same way, God does not want to put a gun to our head, He wants us to love Him with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength, of our own free will. So, God creates a space between us and Himself and that distance creates room for doubt and for choice and that is where faith lives.

The Bible that was written over about an 1100-year span from about 1000 BC to about 90 AD, by about 40 authors, and an unknown number of editors or redactors also had a hand in it as well. If the Bible was perfect, with no errors, contradictions or scientific inaccuracies at all, that would be gigantic, undeniable proof of the existence of God; it would take away our need for faith, and God wants us to have faith always.

Secondly, the super important message from God for our spirituality is this: God wants us to see clearly and realize entirely that just as God used sinful men to accomplish his purposes to create the Bible, in the same way He will accept us as the flawed human beings we are! God obviously loved those sinful men, his authors, and God is willing to, and does, love us in the same way; and more, God is willing to work through us and with us in the same way even though we are flawed human beings if we will put our lives in His hands.

Do you see how God, using imperfect men to accomplish His purposes, raises the bar of what is possible for each of us?  So, we need to see the Bible as a bed of gold nuggets in an ancient parchment. Let us not be so foolish as to throw away the gold because the book is old and crumbly at the edges. Let us realize that we need to bring our faith to the document realizing we may have to do some work to get all the gold, but the work will be greatly enriching.

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Rev. Dr. Tim Ehrlich has two books available on Amazon. His book, “The Long Road To Eternity“, is about the 40+ miracles he has experienced and what they tell us about God, ourselves and about the relationship between us and God. His book, “Building Your Spiritual Palace” is a handbook for building a super relationship with God.