Peace Paarsurrey,
A situation in which there are contradictory verses passages in the NTBible; what should one do?
I don’t believe there are real contradictions in the Bible. Sometimes I may run into something that appears to be a contradiction, but by faith I know the difficulty is in my own ability to comprehend, and not the text itself. I also know by faith that there is a reasonable explanation.
My argument is that since the gospels were written, as I understand from Catholic Encyclopedia, by anonymous writers. These were ascribed to disciple for convenience only. These were also influenced by the deviant Paul; and adopted by the Catholic Church only in following Paul. Jesus neither wrote them nor authenticated the gospels literally. The contradictions in NTBible have therefore arisen only due to the theological differences of Paul with Jesus, in my opinion.
I’d have to question where you read that, I’d be surprised (and disappointed) if it was in fact a Catholic source, certainly doesn’t sound like anything from the Catholic Encyclopedia!
With regards to the authors of the Gospels, they are not anonymous, the same names have been attributed to the same Gospels since the beginning. We in fact have many external sources verifying who the authors were. An example includes St Papias, who personally knew St John the Apostle and was in contact with many of the disciples from other Apostles. He mentions the known history that Matthew wrote a gospel originally in Hebrew that was later translated to Greek. That Mark was a disciple of St Peter and after the two split Mark wrote down everything Peter revealed although it wasn’t necessarily in the exact order. I don’t quite recall if he mentioned anything about Luke and John, however these are mentioned in other early sources.
As for St Paul, I doubt a Catholic source would describe him as a “deviant.” There actually was a proposed theory a hundred or more years ago that in the early Church there was a rivalry between St Peter and St Paul, the former representing Jewish Christianity and the later Gentile Christianity. I presume this is where such statements come from. The theory was disproven when many early non-canonical writings were discovered showing not enmity, but teamwork between the Apostles! For example, the first epistle of St Clemenent to the Corinthians, written in 96 AD. St Clement was a first century Pope who actually lived in the time of Peter and Paul. His epistle doesn’t reveal any rivalry between the Apostles, which would be expected if St Paul was indeed a deviant, but instead mentions the Apostles together, working to bring Christianity to Rome. The fact is St Paul was accepted by all the Apostles and even preached with many of them (hard to comprehend if he was such a radical!)
This old and refuted theory is something Muslims still hold on to.
Also kindly refer to my post #14 in this thread:
It wasn’t a very clear post but the main point I gather is that the NT is unreliable.
It is true Jesus didn’t write any books of the NT Himself, but this doesn’t discredit the NT in anyway.
When considering accuracy/reliability we have to ask two questions. What is the
incentive of the writer, do they have an incentive to write accurately? And did they have the
opportunity to gather reliable information?
With regards to the first, we can say with certainty that their incentive was to write everything down accurately because the facts they were gathering pertained to their eternal salvation. It would make no sense to forge material or be lax about collecting information if their soul hangs on the line! St Paul declares plainly that if Jesus was not Crucified and if He did not Resurrect, we are without any hope and are to be the most pitied people on earth! Therefore the authors of the gospels must have written accurately because their intention would have been to preserve facts that pertain to salvation. St Ignatius (executed ~107 AD), Bishop of Antioch, was so confident in the facts pertaining to Jesus that he was more than willing to be fed to lions for his faith in Christ! I’m sorry, but liars, fakes, and those lacking faith are not willing to die for something not true!
With regards to opportunity, we see that the authors had more than enough opportunity to gather the facts about Jesus’ life. Most modern scholars date the Gospels to about 70 AD, but even if we attribute the later dating of 80-90 AD, they still had the opportunity to gather facts! The last Apostle to die was John around 98AD! Disciples of Jesus and His eye witnesses lived late into the first century! We have a report by Quadratus, an early apologist for Christianity, writing in 123 AD that in his time there were still people alive who were cured and resurrected by Jesus! We see therefore, that in the time the Gospels were composed, the authors had more than enough opportunity to gather information from Apostles and other eye witnesses.
Thus, we have no reason to doubt the historicity of the Gospels!
Hope this helps!
God bless,
Tomasz
