What is the biggest bible contradiction?

Sorry, I am no literalist, but in this case there is no apparent 'clear, unambiguous contradiction'. It is actually perfectly sound and sensible. Passover lasts 7-8 days. The Seder is on the first or second nights. When Matthew, Mark, and Luke say 'Passover' they are referring to the Seder meal. John is talking about Friday after the Seder when Jesus is on the cross. It was Preparation day for the upcoming Sabbath, Saturday. Preparation is so called because the Jewsih people would prepare their meals on Friday so that they could keep to the custom of not cooking on the sabbath. This particular Sabbath would be even more solemn because it fell during the week of Passover.

Also, if you go back and start at chapter 13 of John, you will see he is not confused. His apostles had already eaten their Passover just like in the other versions. He is telling the story in chronological fashion from there on, and clearly does not mean to deny what he had just written and say that the eating of the Passover had not yet happened. It is just that the entire feast was not over.

This is a good example of how the focus on Scripture has changed. Men in Augustine's time (4th century) were confounding themselves by taking the Bible too literally. Augustine attempted over and over to clarify that the Bible is not to be taken as the answer to anything except salvation. It would probably frustrate him to find out that this is still an issue 1600 years later! From reading the previous posts in this thread, it is obvious that the modern christian emphasis on the inerrancy of scripture, and the insistance that it can and MUST be taken literally, is still doing more harm than good.

Can you tell me what you mean here? I still think you ae misreading something. Last Supper is on Thursday. Jesus dies Friday, the Preparation Day. This is the day before the Sabbath, which is on Saturday in the Jewish calendar, and not Sunday. As I said before, read chapters 13-18. The entire thing is the Last Supper, or Passover Seder. It is actually longer than any of the others, as John was an eye-witness. I am curious about the other explanations you have received, but I think they could be from well-intentioned people who have tried to explain so that you would not doubt. I do not see that you should be worried about contradicting explanations. Many people simply do not know enough background information. For a long period of time, every Tom, Jack and Joe was not allowed to read the Bible, at least without the guidance of a spiritual counselor. It was meant to prevent this exact thing from happening. Think about a photo of any beautiful landmark; 1000 artists would paint it differently, and none capture it so perfectly as the original. Now think what would happen if you took people off the street with no painting experience whatsoever, and asked them to paint. The Bible is like a photo in this sense. Any preacher will tell you that the answers are all inside if we keep looking, just as our painting will get better if we refer to the photo. But no one is going to get it 100 percent no matter what. Errors in interpretation occur constantly, otherwise known as heresies, schisms, sects, cults, etc. It is not always so much the Bible's fault, as the 'artist's'.

Just wanted to mention BTW that this does not show contradiction either. The Jews have long been waiting for a Messiah. At the time of Jesus, under Roman persecution, it was natural for them to believe the Messiah would save them from this, as they were the Chosen People of God. The point is that they were looking for the wrong thing. Jesus came to save souls, and not bodies. That is why He told Pilate "My kingdom is not of this world". Many Jews were disappointed in their expectations. They are still awaiting a Messiah who will do great things for the people.

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.

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.

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.

I don't know about this. 'Gospel' is from an old word meaning good news. Is it the good news of John? No, it is the good news of Jesus, from John. In other words, the Gospel (of Jesus) according to John. Look, what I am saying is that the authors of the Gospels did not write the words 'according to' on there at all. Now again, I will not stubborn it out and insist that they were all first hand accounts; I know they are not, with the slight possibility of some parts of John. But when it comes to drawing weighty conclusions from the words on the title page, it is better to understand what the words actually mean, and that they were put there after the fact, than to think that you were the first to discover this 'proof'. This is about the meaning of a word, not the motives of the speaker. I did not say that the authors of any texts believed they were true. I said the person who put the words 'according to John' on the title page believed that it was the work of John, some John, any John, presbyter John, disciple John. Sure maybe he had ulterior motives for putting the words there, but more likely the title page exists with the secret motive of seperating the books in your Bible. I think it is a shame to detract from the debate with this clearing up of things which have been taken out of context. If you really want to get skeptical, we can never prove if we have original text, or just oldest existing texts. There could be many reasons why the authors did not identify themselves. But I may just as well ask you the same question; if the gospels are some form of propaganda, don't you think the authors would be more likely to identify themselves? A spiritual writer will not be as concerned about making a name for themselves as a political writer might be.

This may be slightly off-topic, but it kind of sums it up. You speak with scorn about Fundementalists taking things too literally. I don't blame you. Using the Bible to prove the Bible, with something like circular reasoning, is odd.Q. How do you know the Bible is from God?
A. Because it says so!
Q. How do you know what it says is true?
A. Because God wrote it.Hmmm.....But what is even more odd, is disproving the Bible with the Bible.Q. How do you know John did not write the gospel?
A. Because the Bible doesn't say so.I still think there is no excuse for all this literalism. How do we know how many times the cock crowed? We don't. It does not make much sense to say the cock crowed before Peter's denial, or Peter would have had an advanced reminder, but that is beside the point. Thing is, we don't know when the cock crowed, how many times, or if it even happened at all.The story of Peter's denial is like much of the Bible. It is a moral written into a plot. It is on the one hand a possible historical happening, on the other, all parable/metaphor/allegory type writing. Proving the historical insignifigance by looking for contradictions is only half the battle. Take away the moral and you will have won me over. The contradictions mentioned have taken nothing away fron the meaning behind the story of the money changers, for example, and these spiritual lessons are what is thought of as being inspired. Not the history, not the science.I am still not sure how GoJ changed the day of Jesus' death. He says 'the parasceve of the Pasch', the evening before the Passover. But a parasceve is only before the Shabbat, or Saturday. So either John meant that this was the Shabbat within the week of Passover, (which seems likely because he called it a high day, and not just a normal Sabbath), or that Passover would start on the night of Shabbat, which seems unlikely, since when this happens, some preparations for passover take place on on the Thursday before. Among these is a fast, and the disciples are not seen to be fasting on Thursday.

So, the early xianists spoke Old English? To be accurate, they did not have the word 'gospel' at all. No silliness, Brian. Look it up.
World Book Dictionary definition of 'according to';a. in agreement with
b. in proportion to
c. on the authority of; as said byYou are using the first definition. Definition c. is correct for the titles of the gospels. So you think all 4 of these books coincidentally say 'according to' on the first page of the original text? And you also think the authors did not identify themselves? How? Yep.

There is a verse, and I can not find it now, in which John says 'these signs and many more did He do' or something similar, which makes many feel that this was the end of the book, and that it was picked up later on by someone else.

I think the situation is more that Matthew did write in Hebrew, but quoted an OT more similar to the Greek Septuagint than to the Hebrew. It doesn't matter too much. Maybe that is the translation he had available, maybe he was using it for the Greek speakers, or maybe the Holy Spirit was quoting Greek and he was trying to translate quickly. (just kidding!)