Does the Bible Contradict Itself?
Anyone who’s spent time reading the Bible seriously has bumped into them: two passages that, side by side, don’t seem to line up. Maybe it’s a fig tree that withers “immediately” in one Gospel and “the next day” in another. Maybe it’s a voice from heaven quoted slightly differently by different writers. For some, these little discrepancies are enough to dismiss the whole Bible. For others, they’re worth persevering and wrestling with.
Darrell Bock, senior research professor at Dallas Theological Seminary, has spent decades studying exactly this topic. In a conversation with Charlie Styles, a minister in the Church of England and associate speaker with OCCA, Bock makes the case that difference doesn’t automatically mean contradiction.
Are Bible Contradictions a Problem?
Why does this even matter? As Bock explains, if the Bible genuinely contradicts itself, we’re left unsure what it’s actually teaching. If two passages say opposite things about an event, or portray God’s character inconsistently, then readers are right to ask which version, if either, they should trust. But Prof. Bock’s central claim is that many so-called contradictions dissolve once you understand why different biblical authors wrote the way they did. Each writer had their own personality, purpose and level of detail they cared about.
Bock offers an anecdote from his own marriage to illustrate this: if his wife asks whether he’s coming to dinner, she gets a straight yes or no. If he asks her, he gets a full narrative first, the context, the reasoning, and eventually the answer. Neither response is wrong. They just reflect two different communicators.
New Testament Inconsistencies – What Happened at the Cross?
One of the clearest examples of apparent contradiction in the Bible involves Jesus’s final words on the cross, where the gospels of Mark and Luke seem to describe two very different emotional moments. In Mark’s Gospel, Jesus cries out the opening line of Psalm 22, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34) expressing anguish and a sense of abandonment. Luke’s gospel focusses on words from Psalm 31, “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit” (Luke 23:46). This seems to demonstrate a very different emotional state – one of a calm, trusting surrender.
How can the same man, in the same moments, be crying out in abandonment and yet rest in trust?
This raises the importance of understanding the process of events by reading the gospels as a whole. By laying the two Gospel accounts side by side in what’s called a synopsis, reading down through them together rather than treating each in isolation, the apparent tension begins to dissipate. Mark records that after Jesus’ cry of forsakenness, “Jesus cried out again in a loud voice” (Mark 15:37) yet does not reveal his words. Line up the two Gospels side by side, and Luke’s words slot precisely into that gap. Rather than contradicting each other, Luke is filling in what Mark left unsaid, showing a progression: from the anguish of facing death, to trust in what lies beyond it. Multiple Gospels, Bock argues, give us Jesus in something like “quadraphonic sound” rather than a single flat recording. The fuller picture only emerges because the accounts differ.
Where Did the Disciples Go After the Resurrection?
A similar pattern emerges after the resurrection, where the disciples appear to receive conflicting instructions. In one account they are to stay in Jerusalem, in another to go to Galilee. Bock argues that this apparent contradiction can be explained by simple historical context. The disciples had travelled to Jerusalem as pilgrims for the Passover festival, expecting to be there only a week before returning home to Galilee. When Jesus was crucified and resurrected, and they were told their mission would now be based in Jerusalem, so they still had to make that transition. Some resurrection appearances happened in Galilee as they wrapped up affairs, others happened in Jerusalem as they prepared to stay.
It’s not a contradiction so much as a snapshot of a move in progress, with each writer highlighting a different part of that timeline.
Faith Alone, or Faith and Works?
Paul’s insistence that salvation comes through faith alone (Ephesians 2:8-9), versus James’s warning that faith without works is dead (James 2:14-26) is an example of a theological rather than historical tension. Bock suggests that this apparent contradiction is a product of timing. Paul is describing how salvation begins, through faith, from start to finish. James, on the other hand, is looking back at a life of professed faith and asking what fruit it has produced. If someone claims to trust God but their life shows no evidence of it, James asks whether that faith was ever real to begin with. The two aren’t competing definitions of salvation therefore, they’re addressing different moments in the same story.
Precise Versus Accurate
A theme running through all of the examples discussed is the difference between being precise and being accurate.
Two accounts can both be accurate while differing in precision, in the same way that one witness to a car accident might give exact times and measurements while another simply confirms that a collision happened. Neither is lying. They’re just offering different levels of detail.
Take the fig tree we mentioned earlier. In Matthew’s account the disciples see the result of Jesus’ curse straight away, ‘immediately the tree withered” (Matthew 21:19). In Mark’s account, the withering isn’t noticed until the following morning, “In the morning…Peter…said, ‘Rabbi, look! The fig tree you cursed has withered!’” (Mark 11:20-21). Whether the tree visibly died the moment Jesus spoke or simply wasn’t noticed until the next day, both accounts agree it withered with a speed at odds with purely natural processes. One writer is more precise about the exact timing, but neither is inaccurate about what happened.
Do These Differences Actually Help the Case for Christianity?
The overall conclusion of this discussion is that wrestling with these apparent contradictions does not weaken confidence in the Bible, it deepens it. Asking why Matthew phrases something one way and Luke phrases it another encourages careful, attentive reading rather than a passive, surface-level one.
It reveals a text with real depth, shaped by real human witnesses with real personalities, writing about events that were often “messy” rather than tidily uniform.
Bock makes it clear that he didn’t approach the Bible from a position of faith. Trained originally with a sceptical, agnostic mindset, he came to these questions discovering that the accumulation of small human differences didn’t undermine the Gospels’ unified portrait of a genuinely unique figure in Jesus. If anything, the differences convinced him the writers weren’t colluding on a single polished script. They were independent witnesses, describing what they’d seen from their own vantage point, the way real testimony usually works.
That doesn’t mean every question gets neatly resolved on this side of eternity. Bock jokes that he’ll happily bring his remaining questions to a “press conference in heaven.” But he suspects that once there, in the presence of the God these Gospels point to, the questions simply won’t feel as urgent anymore.
Learning More
OCCA The Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics was established in 2004 to raise up the next generation of evangelist-apologists. By 2021, around 350 emerging evangelists from around the world had studied on the OCCA one-year programme. This course equipped each of them to share and defend the gospel message and to come alongside others to help them with their intellectual objections and heartfelt concerns about the Christian faith. Subscribe to our weekly newsletters to see our latest articles from our team of speakers.
Darrell Bock