What is the biggest bible contradiction?

This is inaccurate.The author of John is at least second-hand information.For example:John 21:15-25 is clearly in third person.Theres a great many more internal clues that this Gospel was written by an non-eyewitness, you just need to study it a little more critically.Also, you should be aware that all four Gospels are anonymous works.Brian.

Brian, are you sure that your sources are the final word on this subject?I will readily admit that we dont know for sure...but Im less likely to admit that we know the source of authorship. Isnt the Holy Spirit one of the candidates? Oh thats right....we dont know if we know the Holy Spirit or not, right?

The title of the Gospels themselves are the sources.Take John as an example. All my Bibles have the title:The Gospel According to Saint John.The others have the 'according to' as well.So, it is according to what someone thought the Gospel of John was. It may possibly be a scribe who has copied down words from a few oral sources, or any number of possibilities. But John is quite different from the synoptics and is far too late to be the disciple John.You could also look into the naming of the Gospels if you get time, you'll be surprised just how late some of the namings took place.Matthew's Gospel, for example, was given its title by Papias around 130 CE, why did he have to name it if it was written by Matthew?Brian.

First let me tell you that when I say 'John is an eye-witness' it does not mean I walk around believing everything I hear. In the tradition of the church he is thought of that way, and in the case of his elaboration on the Last Supper, it seems credible enough to note. Sometimes when I attempt to make a point to a previous poster, I am not writing from every possible skeptical point of view, but only from that which seems best suited to the poster's question. Sure, this entire thing could be made up, but then we would not have much of a debate going on! so, back to business.....In the Bible John is an eye-witness. We may not know for sure that he is the same man who wrote the Gospel of John, but generally speaking, this is not questioned nearly as often as it is with the other evangelists and even Paul.I am very aware of the usage of third person narration in John. It adds to its appeal tremendously for me; it is his way of making himself unimportant in the text, of putting the message before the messenger and downplaying his significance. He usually reverts to third person mode, you will notice, in moments of confidence or tenderness bestowed upon him by Jesus, such as when Jesus turned to John at the Last Supper and laid John's head against His breast.
I am not sure it would credit John to go around bragging about these things.

Apologetics is fascinating, if you ask me, but in this case I see nothing squishy and maleable, and nothing in the realm of apologetics. Here, it is a lack of background facts that led you into the assertion that you had found a "clear, unambiguous contradiction". I am pleased at least that you have changed your adjectives to 'squishy and maleable'.

Strike two! the words 'according to' mean what they say, or they would be called 'the gospels, according to what someone thought was John'. I will help...If I say "according to my sister, the party is at 4 o'clock" it does not mean 'according to what someone thought my sister said'. Again, I do not mean to tell you that just because those words are there, means you have to believe them, but only that the person who put the words there believed them.The namings of the Gospels may have happened late. So what? They were being researched, they still are. It makes no difference to me with Matthew, Mark, and Luke, what their names really were. They are in fact little more than names anyway biographically speaking.

days of the week are actually irrelevent. i don't mean this to be insulting, but they really don't matter. passover changes from year to year. this year, it started on a wednesday. next year will be a monday. even so, you're thinking about them all wrong. since the hebrew days begins at sunset, the "eve of" or preparation for the passover would occur on what would be the same day (to us) as the seder itself.thus, matthew, mark and luke as making the last supper not be a pre-passover meal, but the passover seder itself. this is not a minor technical objection; this is a major theological point. the idea of christ's sacrifice and the original passover are intimately tied -- the synoptic gospels intend to portray jesus leading the disciples from bondage (of sin) as moses led the israelites from bondage (of egypt), after a symbolic meal.john has a different point. to john, jesus is the passover lamb, sacrificed and eaten, whose blood saves those from wrath of god. which is why in john, you will see, jesus is sacrificed on the first day of pesach, not the second. it's contradictory because the authors have different points to make about jesus's role in the early church. perhaps it's that m-m-l intend to invoke the passover symbolically, and john intends more abstract symbolism, literally making jesus the lamb. by "last supper" people generally mean the communion, or eucharist which is not found in john. indeed, the reference you give starts:

quote:

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Jhn 13:1 Now before the feast of the passover...

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Jhn 13:2 And supper being ended...

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the description of that supper is not given in chapter 12, either. it happens somewhere between 12 and 13. there are many other elements of the last supper story found between 13 and 18, but no euchasist.and still, the other gospels have this supper occurring not before passover, but as the feast of unleavened bread itself. see luke's reference, which you were already given:

quote:

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22:7 Then came the day of unleavened bread, when the passover must be killed.
22:8 And he sent Peter and John, saying, Go and prepare us the passover, that we may eat.

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compared to john's, above:

quote:

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13:1 Now before the feast of the passover...
13:2 And supper being ended...

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matthew, mark, and luke's last suppers are pesach seders. john's crucifixion of christ is the slaughtering of the pesach lamb, and the last supper is before passover. i don't know how this can be any more clear.

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yes, they do.but who's john, exactly? which john? how do we know?sure, there was a guy name john present (according to john), and the book is coincidentally called john by a group of people who came a lot later, but what does that mean? even if it was a legitimate claim to authorship, what's to say this john was not named after that john? or perhaps another john, as yonatan is a rather common jewish name. but you make the claim that john -- the john who wrote "john" -- was there. that's a little hard to substantiate. especially since it's not the earliest gospel we have (in the bible, mark is. elsewhere, i think thomas is), and it so often contradicts the other gospels that pre-date it.and yes, the gospels are still being researched, all the time in fact. but many people who subscribe to the ideas that the authors of the bible were eyewitnesses tend not to like that kind of research.

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i'm with you here. i see nothing squishy and maleable. the texts clearly and literally contradict.even supposing that john and matt/mark/luke count the start of the day differently, one group is clearly portraying the last supper as a passover seder, and the other is clearly portraying the last supper as prior to passover. that's just what the text says, literally.

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Shall you further insult by telling me that there is no 'Thursday' in the Jewish week? Seriously though, I am not worried about actual days. I am looking for a measure of elapsed time. Since we know already that the Sabbath is Saturday, and also know that the Sabbath was the day after Jesus' death, we can backtrack to conclude that the last Supper/Passover Seder fell on a what-we-now-call-Thursday. So, this measure of elapsed time is very relevent, when the statement is "not enough time had gone by". I said Friday is the Preperation Day for the Sabbath. It is. Even if the Sabbath starts at sundown, Friday is still the day before it. Christianity , or more specifically, Catholicism, still uses this system when it comes to masses celebrated after sundown. After 5 Pm they use the masses and canonical hours for the following day. In John 13, he says 'before the feast of the passover'. You can take this as days before if you like, personally I do not. I take it as a matter of a few minutes before the feast itself, since right after this John begins to speak about the supper. The first thing which is done is the washing of the disciples feet, which is the first thing which occurs in the ritual of Seder. There are other parallels which make it evident that John is talking about the same meal as the others. It may be worth noting that in some instances the word Passover is being used in relation to a feast day or days, in other instances it refers to the meal itself.

"When Jesus had finished saying all these things, he said to his disciples, "As you know, the Passover is two days away”and the Son of Man will be handed over to be crucified."

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Then the chief priests and the elders of the people assembled in the palace of the high priest, whose name was Caiaphas, and they plotted to arrest Jesus in some sly way and kill him. "But not during the Feast," they said, "or there may be a riot among the people." -Matthew 26:1-5Does this clarify the alleged time discrepancy?

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Faith is not a pathetic sentiment, but robust, vigorous confidence built on the fact that God is holy love. You cannot see Him just now, you cannot fully understand what He's doing, but you know that you know Him." -Oswald Chambers

Well, it does for Matthew, but the issue is whether or not John is using a different time-frame than the rest. I hate to say it, but there are a few problems no matter what. Sometimes the word 'passover' is used in reference to the feast week, or the Seder meal itself, or maybe even the Sabbath during the passover week. In one of my bibles, the word 'passover' has not even been included in the verse which schraf quoted a ways back.

In Church tradition Jesus rose from the dead, so much for tradition. I am sure we could debate over why it was made up and the consequences, it is easy to find things to debate. I think it isn’t questioned as much because it is pretty obvious that it wasn’t written by the evangelist, the debate over the authorship is really over so there’s no big debate, John didn’t write the Gospel we have. It adds to the likelihood of propaganda for me. So you can psychoanalyse someone who died 2000 years ago?Third person narratives are usually indicative of a novella, which, of course, the Gospels are. Well, since we don’t have anything John wrote, we do not know if John bragged or not.Brian.

Don’t follow your reasoning here, as having the words ”according to’ is adequate enough to inform us that someone was writing what they thought John’s Gospel was.If we have John’s Gospel it would not have the ”according to’ in the title. It would simply be called The Gospel of John; since it is ”according to’ we know that it was not written by John, but by some other person(s). Um, yes it does! It means according to you your sister said that party is at 4 o-clock. It doesn’t actually mean that your sister said this does it?So, how do I know your sister said the party is at 4 o-clock? I only have your word for that and you might have any number of reasons for passing on misinformation. You might tell me it is at 4 o- clock when it is actually at 2 o-clock so your sister dumps me and you can have me all to yourself This is also inaccurate.All writing is simply a creation of the human mind and as such does not have to be what the author believed, it is simply what the author wants the reader to believe. This isn’t to say that the author didn’t believe these things but surely you are aware that there are a huge amount of extant ancient texts that are full of propaganda and clearly inaccurate.So, it is an error to assume that the author of a text believed that its contents are true. It adds to the possibility of error, it adds to the possibility of additions to the text, it adds to the probability that the text is pseudepigraphical. Why would the author of the original text not identify themselves?If the Gospels were written by the evangelists then why wasn’t it common knowledge at the time who they belonged to? Texts from Jesus disciples and they weren’t deemed important enough to be identified with their authors? Seems highly improbable to me. Same here. Yes, who cares that the Gospels weren’t written by an eyewitness, who cares that the Church are lying over their authorship, who cares that millions of people are silly enough to swallow the propaganda of novel writers who were not even born when Jesus lived.Brian.

So what you are essentially asserting is that all human communication has its origin in the human mind----am I right?

We do not know that the Bible was inspired. We can believe that it was, and a case can be made for some theological utterences as having an origin apart from human sources...but we do not know for sure.

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On the other hand, are we to conclude that all early Bible and church writers had an agenda that was human and fallible? If so, can any Holy Book be trusted? If not, how in the world can a person make heads or tails of religion anyway?