There are no contradictions in the bible, just error in our interpretation.
That is merely a bald statement; it does not explain of justify itself with details as to how everything that seems anomalous is down to the interpretative license of the reader two millennia later rather than the lack of consistent commonality of expression of the various authors. If you expect to be believed in your statement here, you would have to cite ample irrefutable evidence for this interpretative error in each and every case.
A lot of the material in the bible has to be READ IN CONTEXT.
But then so it should in
Hamlet,
Paradise Lost,
Finnegan's Wake or
A Clockwork Orange! - but then who defines that context, who interprets it and how can you guarantee that its interpretation will not metamorphose over time? The first of these cannot be answered at all, the answer to the second is every individual who has ever read the work in any language at any time and the answer to the last is that the only possible guarantee is that the interpretation of both the material itself and the context in which it is read WILL metamorphose over time, because that is in the very nature of constant human change and development.
You cannot take one phrase here or there and try to learn from that.
Such selective reading is, of course, inadvisable, as it is likely to result in biased views, but then the remainder of your statements here seem almost to suggests that this is precisely what you yourself are doing in any case!...
Anything you do you do to honor god, upholding the law instead of keeping it (since humans are inseperable from sin).
This surely applies only to those who believe in God; those who read the Bible are not confined to believers.
If you think you find things in the bible that do not make sense then you explore it, not let yourself get hit into a brickwall of doubt and short sightedness. Don't get confused over small issues which do not paint the big picture! You keep the larger picture in mind and then research the finer points, what is the point in getting caught up over fine points if you have no solid foundation to start with??!
This appears initially to be sound advice, but it does not stand up to a realistic approach in practice. What IS that "big picture" and who decides what it is? One of the problems is that not every one of the Bible's authors expresses things identically, nor are they each of equal literary prowess. The Bible is an historic document incorporating documents from a whole series of chroniclers; one may as well expect every contemporary journalist today to cover a series of events in identical fashion.
It seems to me that what you are seeking to advocate is that people read the Bible WITHOUT "interpreting", so that there would then be no issues of the kind that you are attempting to address here. This is a hopelessly untenable and unworkable approach, since the Bible's various books and chapters were all written - and have all been read - by humans, none of whom were the kinds of clone suggested by "ada" in the recent
God killed the soapbox star thread on this forum; add to that the fact that, whilst the authors all emerged from a roughly similar cultural, social, political and geographical background, the readership over the last two thousand years or so has embraced those of just about every conceivable background.
Unlike you, I am not prepared to make statements like those above without at least some attempt to support them, so, since this is first and foremost a music-oriented forum, let me give you an illustrative example from music. In his remarks some years ago about the rise of the "authentic performance" movement, the English composer Robert Simpson (1921-1997) noted that one of its most significant problems is that all the research in the world, no matter how exhaustive and brilliant, can render it possible for anyone to listen, for example, to the music of J S Bach as Bach's contemporaries would have heard it, because our ears today are accustomed to Xenakis - in other words, our aural experience itself adopts an inevitable rôle as an "interpreter" to the extent that it affects the way in which we hear all music, whether or not we have heard it before.
Likewise - and again this is merely an example - the events covered in the Bible are obviously from a pre-Islamic era, yet they all occurred in certain parts of the Middle East and south east Europe; when anyone reads the Bible today, he/she will almost certainly have to do so with the foreknowledge of at least some aspects of subsequent Middle Eastern and European history and this foreknowledge will inevitably colour its effect.
No - I'm sorry to have to disappoint you, but such bald, unquestioning and inflexible statements as yours here simply won't do, for they will not - and indeed by definition cannot - stand up to scrutiny and still less to practical application.
Best,
Alistair
Topic: Contradictions in the Bible?