Internal contradictions in the Bible

- There are two accounts of creation in Genesis that are completely at odds with each other
- The Gospel of Mark says Jesus cleansed the temple as the final act of his public ministry before being arrested, whereas in the Gospel of John, he did it at the very beginning of his ministry three years earlier
- Jesus tells Peter that he's going to deny him three times before the cock crows according to the Gospel of Matthew. - - According to the Gospel of Mark, he says, "You'll deny me three times before the cock crows twice." Well, which is it, before the cock crows or before the cock crows twice?
- According to Mark chapter two, disciples of Jesus are walking through the fields eating grain because they're hungry, and opponents of Jesus are angry about this because it's the Sabbath, and eating on this day is prohibited by Jewish law. In response, Jesus asks if they remember what David did when Abiathar was the high priest, how he went into the temple and ate the shewbread that only the priests are supposed to eat. It's a fairly straightforward passage. The problem is when you look up the reference to King David doing this in the book of Second Samuel, it wasn't Abiathar who was the high priest, but rather Achimelech.
- Jesus dies the day before the Passover meal was eaten in the Gospel of John, but the day after the Passover meal was eaten in the Gospel of Mark.
- The Gospel of Matthew insists that the followers of Jesus had to keep the Jewish Law, but Paul says they were not to keep the Jewish Law.
- Throughout the Gospel of John, Jesus called himself divine. He was God. He didn't say that in Matthew, Mark, or in Luke. Now, if the historical Jesus really went around saying that he was God, don't you think the Gospel writers might mention it, that this would be considered something worth knowing?

"Many of the stories about Jesus in the New Testament were fabricated by well meaning but misguided Christians who wanted others to believe in him."

"A large number of the twenty-seven books of the New Testament, as many as eleven or twelve of them, were not written by their alleged authors, the Apostles, but are in fact forgeries written by other people lying about their identity in order to deceive others."

Source: Bart Ehrman, the James E. Gray Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. (via The Humanist magazine, November/December 2011)

To read: Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (And Why We Don't Know About Them) by Bart Ehrman (2010)