Internal consistency of the New Testament

Disputes regarding the internal consistency and textual integrity of the Bible have a long history.

Classic texts that discuss questions of inconsistency from a critical secular perspective include the ''Tractatus Theologico-Politicus'' by Baruch Spinoza, the ''Dictionnaire philosophique'' of Voltaire, the ''Encyclopédie'' of Denis Diderot and ''The Age of Reason'' by Thomas Paine.

Consistency

For many believers, the internal consistency of the Jewish and Christian scriptures is important because they feel that any inconsistencies or contradictions could challenge belief in truth of their contents and the view that they are of divine origin. On the subject of the Jewish text, B. Barry Levy writes about the Torah that "the textual integrity of every biblical book should be extremely important to those interested in either the Hebrew Bible leaders demonstrate that they, in some measure similar to modern scholars, were concerned about its true textual state; some of them even tried to clarify known textual doubts and to eliminate many troublesome inconsistencies." However, the modern writer Joshua Golding states that even though it contains inconsistencies, this "does not imply that God did not reveal the Torah".

On the other hand, Christian evangelists John Ankerberg and Dillon Burroughs state that "the Bible's teachings, if perfect, must be consistent with one another" and that "the Bible is consistent with itself from beginning to end". Similarly, Catholic writers have argued that "If we believe the Scriptures are divinely inspired, we must also believe them to be internally coherent". Pastor Erwin Lutzer argues that the Bible is consistent in asserting that it is the word of God, and that this is a reason for accepting that it is of divine origin: "The sixty-six books speak with a consistent voice that these are the words of God".

Critics of traditional Jewish and Christian belief have also argued that inconsistencies undermine the value of scripture. The deist minister Joseph Barker, speaking in 1854 at the Hartford Bible Convention, described the Bible as "the most inconsistent, the most monstrous and blasphemous representations of God that can possibly be conceived by the human mind" and argued that "The book that contradicts science and contradicts itself is a book of no authority whatsoever". A modern Islamic critic writes that if the Bible can be shown to be inconsistent, "then those who preach the Bible and read the Bible must seriously reconsider their source of information concerning their faith."

One response to this kind of criticism is to argue that no inconsistencies exist. As theologian John Barton explains, some Christians read the Bible with the assumption that "Scripture is ''self-consistent''", and that if there appear to be contradictions between two texts, they believe that "more careful reading is required to show that they really cohere". Barton states that "this is not the Bible that we have in fact got". He also points out that Judaism understands that texts "may sometimes be in dialogue with each other" and "something positive may emerge from a kind of creative tension".

Most Christian writers, however, while agreeing that inaccuracies and inconsistencies occur, argue that these do not necessarily make the Bible false and that it is no longer desirable to try to harmonize all four Gospels into "one consistent account", because "we have learned that each of the four Gospels has its own ... unique image of Jesus".

Randel Helms argues that the books of the Bible were written for and against different points of view—that the Bible's authors were often motivated to write because they wanted to challenge or correct those who had written before them.

Religious views

Jewish

The Torah is viewed by some as the literal word of God, dictated to Moses. According to the 12th-century Jewish scholar Maimonides, "The Torah that we have today is the one dictated to Moses by God". The Prophets, such as Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Jonah, are said to have heard and reported the word of God, while the Writings (the category that includes books such as Psalms, Lamentations and Chronicles) "were excluded from the prophetic collection because their inspiration appeared to be human rather than Divine". However, "In the broadest sense, the Scriptures taken as a whole, and subsequently the totality of Jewish spiritual teaching, fall within the connotation of God's word."

Many modern Jewish scholars have an accommodating view of the nature of the Torah, not necessarily viewing it as strictly internally consistent.

Christian

Justin Martyr, a 2nd-century Christian writer, declared the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible wrote that "the author of Holy Scripture is God". The Westminster Confession of Faith (1646) asserts that the Bible's authority depends "wholly upon God (who is truth itself), the Author thereof; and therefore it is to be received, because it is the Word of God".

Some Christian groups, such as the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches follow the Jewish practice of describing certain books as apocrypha (although not all churches regard the same list of books as apocryphal, see also biblical apocrypha).

Assertions that the Bible contains inconsistencies contradict Martin Luther's statement that "God cannot lie." Luther accepted that mistakes and inconsistencies existed, but concluded that they did not necessarily undermine the truth of the Gospel.

German Lutheran theologian Andreas Osiander took a different view, proposing in ''Harmonia evangelica'' (1537) a number of attempted harmonisations, including the suggestion that Jesus must have been crowned with thorns twice, and that there were three separate episodes of cleansing of the Temple.

Modern Christian approaches to biblical consistency are reminiscent of the split between Luther and Osiander, and can be broadly divided between inerrancy and infallibility. The former, followed by the Southern Baptist Convention and by evangelical Christians in the United States in general, holds that the original biblical manuscripts have "God for its author, salvation for its end, and truth, without any mixture of error, for its matter", so that "all Scripture is totally true and trustworthy": Gleason Archer, whose reconciliation of difficult texts echoes that of Osiander, allows that textual scholarship and an understanding of the historical context of individual passages is necessary to establish true, original biblical text, but that that text, once discovered, is without error.

The infallibility approach followed by some theologians and scholars, primarily of the Catholic and Anglican churches, and some mainline Protestant denominations, avoids many of the pitfalls of inerrancy by holding that the Bible is without error only in matters essential to salvation, and that guidance is necessary for the correct interpretation of apparent inconsistencies; the latter part being common to all Orthodox and Catholic Christians, regardless of views of biblical inerrancy, being the primary role of the magisterium.

According to Roman Catholic biblical scholar Raymond E. Brown, this approach found expression in ''Dei verbum'', one of the documents adopted at the Second Vatican Council, which stated that scripture teaches "solidly, faithfully and without error that truth which God wanted put into sacred writings for the sake of salvation," meaning that Scripture is inerrant only "to the extent to which it conforms to the salvific purpose of God," without necessarily being reliable on matters such as paleontology or political history; this view is challenged by some conservative Catholic scholars.

Muslim

In the Middle Ages, Muslim scholars such as Ibn Hazm, al-Qurtubi, al-Maqrizi, Ibn Taymiyyah, and Ibn al-Qayyim, based on their interpretation of Quranic and other traditions, maintained that Jews and Christians had tampered with the scriptures, a concept known as ''tahrif''.

The theme of ''tahrif'' was first explored in the writings of Ibn Hazm (10th century), who rejected claims of Mosaic authorship and posited that Ezra was the author of the Torah. His arguments against the authenticity of the biblical text in both the Tanakh