Thank you, I will. The bible has been edited to suit the powers that be IMO. Which means that "Inerrant Word of God" is anything but. There is a website that graphically illustrate over 400 contradictions. Even when they weren't editing it they were still getting it wrong!
Well there are definitely contradictions but there are also those that seem to be contradictions but really are not. This is because the Bible was written over a couple thousand years and as society developed, things that had application before, no longer did and were replaced by something else. Also, things that did not exist earlier in Hebrew society came around later and since there was no scripture to address it, they had to create some.
Also, there are things that create apparent contradictions but only if you miss the context or target audience. For example, Leviticus was a legal contract between God and the Jews. When you compare the wording of Leviticus to legal documents of a similar age, scholars note that it is written in what was legal language. So Leviticus is actually a contract. God gives his conditions of the contract to the Jews. This was the Law. In exchange for following the Law, Jews were given and allowed to live in the Holy Land. But what this means is that the contract is limited to those terms, and actually Torah spells this out. So the Law only applies if you are Jewish and living in the Holy Land. If you do not meet those two qualifications, you are not part of the contract and thus you do not have to follow the Law. This is why Jews under Roman occupation who lived outside of Judea were not bound to things like Kosher Law. They were free to practice it if they chose but they were not required to as they were not in the Holy Land.
So later scripture sometimes says something that seems to contradict Leviticus, but in reality it doesn't because the later scripture is targeted at a different group...Gentiles, for example, who are not bound by the Law. However, there are indeed a LOT of contradictions that are absolutely valid...meaning they are truly contradictions.
To make it even worse, out of the 5,400 or so ancient manuscripts of the Bible we have available to us, scholars have not found any two that are completely identical. Most of the variances are totally irrelevant: spelling mistakes, using "also" in place of "as well as", etc. Some of them though are absolutely critical and have a major impact on the theology of Christianity. What a mess, huh?
I generally am of the opinion that the very first time these books were written down they
may have been the inspired word of God. But if they were, God didn't seem terribly interested in preserving them, because it's been fucked up ever since. It makes it very difficult, as a theist, to figure out what came from Jesus and what was just bullshit that someone tossed in.
