Internal consistency of the Bible
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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The question of the internal consistency of the Bible concerns the coherence and textual integrity of the Biblical scriptures. This has long been an issue for Christians and Jews, who consider the Bible and Tanakh, respectively, to be divinely inspired.
Concerns regarding biblical consistency have a long history. In Contra Celsus, the church father Origen replied to the writer Celsus, a critic of Christianity, who had complained that "certain of the Christian believers, like persons who in a fit of drunkenness lay violent hands upon themselves, have corrupted the Gospel from its original integrity, to a threefold, and fourfold, and many-fold degree, and have remodelled it, so that they might be able to answer objections". Origen responded that "I know of no others who have altered the Gospel, save the followers of Marcion, and those of Valentinus, and, I think, also those of Lucian. But such an allegation is no charge against the Christian system, but against those who dared so to trifle with the Gospels. And as it is no ground of accusation against philosophy, that there exist Sophists, or Epicureans, or Peripatetics, or any others, whoever they may be, who hold false opinions; so neither is it against genuine Christianity that there are some who corrupt the Gospel histories, and who introduce heresies opposed to the meaning of the doctrine of Jesus."
Among the classic texts which discuss textual inconsistencies are The Age of Reason by Thomas Paine, the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus by Baruch Spinoza, the Encyclopédie of Denis Diderot and the Dictionnaire philosophique of Voltaire.
See also
- Biblical canon
- Biblical criticism
- Biblical literalism
- Biblical manuscript
- Criticism of Christianity
- Criticism of the Bible
- Development of the Christian Biblical canon
- Development of the Jewish Bible canon
- Gospel harmony
- Science and the Bible
- Tahrif
