The Bible underneath it
The Contradictions
The places the text disagrees with itself. Both verses linked. Check them in two clicks.
How to read this page honestly
Most alleged Bible contradictions dissolve under five minutes of context, and the weak ones are why the whole genre gets waved off. The list below is what remains after throwing those out: cases where both passages are canon, both are linked so you can read them yourself, and the standard harmonization is stated before it is questioned.
The strongest cases
Who incited David’s census? 2 Samuel 24:1: the LORD "moved David against them" to number Israel. 1 Chronicles 21:1: "Satan stood up against Israel, and provoked David to number Israel." Same event, same census, opposite agent. The harmonization is that God permitted Satan as his instrument, which may be true, but it is not what either text says, and 70,000 people die in the aftermath either way.
How did Judas die? Matthew 27: he hanged himself, and the priests bought the field. Acts 1: Judas "purchased a field with the reward of iniquity; and falling headlong, he burst asunder in the midst, and all his bowels gushed out." The standard resolution, that the rope broke after death and the priests bought the field in his name, appears in neither account. It is supplied from outside to make them agree.
Can God be seen? Exodus 33 answers both ways nine verses apart: "the LORD spake unto Moses face to face, as a man speaketh unto his friend" (verse 11) and "there shall no man see me, and live" (verse 20). The harmonization makes verse 11 an idiom and verse 20 literal, an assignment made exactly where the problem requires it.
How old was Ahaziah? 2 Kings 8:26 says twenty-two. 2 Chronicles 22:2 in the KJV says forty-two, which would make him older than his father. Modern translations quietly print twenty-two in both places and footnote the difference. Scholars on all sides agree this is a copying error in the Hebrew manuscripts, and that concession matters more than the number: it is everyone agreeing the text as transmitted contains errors.
More pairs, briefly
Each row is two passages describing the same thing. Links in the sections above and below follow the same rule: read both yourself.
| The question | One text | The other |
|---|---|---|
| Creation order | Genesis 1: plants, animals, then man and woman | Genesis 2: man first, then plants, animals, then woman |
| What Saul’s companions heard | Acts 9:7: hearing a voice | Acts 22:9: they heard not the voice |
| Joseph’s father | Matthew 1:16: Jacob | Luke 3:23: Heli |
| Women at the tomb | John 20:1: Mary Magdalene alone | Luke 24:10: Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and other women |
| Jesus’s final words | Mark 15:34: My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me | John 19:30: It is finished |
Every reference is checkable at BibleGateway in the translation named
The Exodus 33 problem has a Latter-day Saint answer, and it is a good one. JST Exodus 33:20 reads: "No sinful man hath at any time, neither shall there be any sinful man at any time, that shall see my face and live." That resolves it cleanly, and it has to, since the First Vision requires that a man can see God. The other pairs on this page are untouched by the revision. What the JST reaches and what it does not.
Bats listed with birds, hares chewing cud, pi equals three in 1 Kings 7, the mustard seed as smallest of all seeds, and the four corners of the earth are genre and translation complaints, not contradictions. Ancient functional categories and round numbers are not errors. Anyone leading with them has handed the argument away, and rightly.
The common rebuttals
"Each of these has an answer." True, and worth granting one at a time. The question is the pattern: every answer works by moving away from the plain reading, and only where a problem appears. A method allowed to do that can harmonize any two texts ever written, which means it proves nothing when it succeeds here.
"Only the original manuscripts were inerrant." This is the standard scholarly-believer position, and it is worth thinking about what it concedes: nobody has ever seen an original manuscript. The inerrant Bible, on this view, is a document no one possesses.
Why this should make you question
A perfect author with a preservation plan could have produced a text that did not need a harmonization industry. What exists instead looks exactly like what honest, careful, uninspired humans produce: mostly consistent, visibly patched, and disagreeing at the seams where independent tellings meet.