CONTRADICTIONS BETWEEN THE WISDOM LITERATURE AND THE NEW TESTAMENT

“What is incredible about the Bible is not its divine authorship; it’s that such a concoction of contradictory nonsense could be believed by anyone to have been written by an omniscient god. To do so, one would first have to not read the book, which is the practice of most Christians; or, if one does read it, dump in the trash can one’s rational intelligence — to become a fool for god, in other words.” (American Atheists home page)

Here are two more contradictions put forward by this group in an attempt to discredit the Bible. But first, just a few general comments on the types of comparisons shown below. (1) Any direct comparison between an Old Testament passage with one in the New Testament is hampered by the fact that both are taken from entirely different dispensations in which God may have dealt with his people quite differently; (2) OT personages often spoke out of ignorance of the true facts in a situation; (3) and individual contexts in other ways must be taken into account.

Job 7:9 vs. John 5:28-29

When Job is in the midst of his troubles, he moans and groans about how short life on earth is. His words are: “As the cloud fades and vanishes, so he who goes down to Sheol does not come up..” (7:9)

And then to explain exactly what he is talking about, he clarifies his words in the following verse: “he returns no more to his house, nor does his place know him any more.” In other words, Job is not declaring unilaterally that there is no such thing as bodily resurrection (although that probably was his limited perspective on reality); instead, he is just stating that he will never return to his home on earth again and people there will eventually forget him. In that, he is perfectly correct since the resurrection is not just a return to the physical earth we know, but to a totally transformed creation.

Of course, we get the corrected story in passages such as John 5:28-29 where Jesus Himself is quoted as saying that at the Judgment Day, some will be raised to eternal life and others to eternal judgment.

We should keep in mind that for the most part the Jewish perspective did not clearly recognize the possibility of an afterlife in the presence of God (although there are a few hints of it in the OT). It is that fact which makes sense of Satan's challenge to God – whether Job will renounce Him once all his earthly blessings have been removed and he has no future reward to which he can definitely look forward. Despite this belief on Job's part, he still refuses to turn his back on God.

Ecclesiastes 9:7 vs. I Corinthians 7:30

It is even more obvious in Ecclesiastes that the “Teacher” is speaking out of a highly restricted worldview “under the sun.” In other words, he is purposely limiting his observations to what he can see with his own eyes here on earth. And with that as the context, the only thing we can do if this world is all there is to existence is to “eat your bread with enjoyment, and drink your wine with a merry heart.”

But the question is whether Paul disagrees with the Teacher in I Corinthians 7:30 when he advises the Corinthians to “rejoice as though they were not rejoicing.” The whole of chapter 7 needs to be taken into account to answer that question, and all the advice Paul gives in it is predicated on the shortness of time before “the form of this world is passing away.” (v. 31)

Literary critics are always talking about authors' use of unreliable narrators. But in the Bible, it is only the narrators, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, who can be trusted while the words spoken by the personages in the book are always subject to doubt. In the above cases, note that at the end of the book of Job, the title character repents of the errors in his words. And regarding Ecclesiastes, most commentators see two voices in the book – the Teacher who makes his personal observations and the narrator who occasionally provides a fuller, more godly perspective on the situation. Alternatively, others attribute all the somewhat contradictory comments in Ecclesiastes to a single person who in the end has to admit that his own perspectives may not reflect the entire truth of the matter.