Some months ago someone posted here a thread about bible self-contradictions, and Dan Silverman did his best to explain them away. However, maybe they are not meant to be explained away. What if they were intentionally placed in the bible, for a purpose?

Just like a good novel the bible begins right with a mystery. Genesis 1 describes how the Gods created the world step by step in the following order:

Light -> Heaven -> Earth & Seas -> Plants -> Water Animals -> Land Animals -> Men & Women.

Right on the next page, there's a different creation story. It's only one God this time, who created the world in this order:

Earth & Heavens -> Man -> Plants -> Animals -> Woman

Obviously, Man was now created earlier. Plants, animals, and a woman were created to serve the already existing Man. However in the first story they were originally created to please the Gods, who agreed after every creation step that they did "good".

Is it possible that the editor of the bible didn't notice this apparent contradiction? Hardly. So we have to assume that it was intentionally planted to transmit a hidden message to the reader. But what message? When we look closely at the first creation story, we notice the following:

1. It's not one god but a pantheon that created the world. (This part was censored from your King James Bible, but the original text uses the word 'elohim' which is plural). This is not a Christian belief, as the Lord forbids to believe in other Gods.

2. The description of the heaven - a vault with water above it - was exactly the Babylonian world view, which in turn had roots in cuneiform writings of the Sumerians from 1500 years earlier. So we have an essential heathen creation story here.

3. The order of creation - from the simple to the complex, starting with light - mimics the Big Bang and Evolution Theory. In fact Darwin could have got his ideas from the bible. However, evolution is also seen as non-Christian by some, otherwise the US fundamentalists weren't so scared of it.

So we have to conclude: more than 2500 years ago someone smuggled a heathen, evolutionist text to the very beginning of the bible! He even led our attention to it by putting standing out contradictions next to it. The question is now: what did he want to tell us? Is Evil everywhere?

Or might there be another explanation?

Very Interesting

I was not aware of such evident self-contradictions
I must confess that I have never picked up the bible again, after my school days , but I have been taught the second version only

One question.
Are the two versions included in the official text of the Genesis approved by the chatolic church ?
I mean , the existence of an other God is included also in some gnostic gospels which have been rejected

Abou your question
Well , talking about evolutionism theory it seem to me excessive , there are only a few words, after all

What it is evident and more realistic it is the different role of women

Even though religious people would , for sure disagree, it is a matter of fact that the christian religion has alwayes discriminated women both in thoery and in practice
Man has been created before the woman, woman comes from a rib...etc

Yes, the two creation versions were approved, first for the Torah and later after the council of Nicaea for the catholic church.

However the question of approval indeed also plays a role in our mystery. It's the reason why the unknown editor put the heathen version, which treats man and woman as equal, at the very beginning of the bible. This made it very hard to reject that part later - it was just too widely known.

Many people wrote on the bible retelling and making up stories, how they thought earth and man was
created.
Of course there are contradictions arising then, as this was not one collective taskforce
at a single time writing the stories in the bible.
Shows more the historic development of the current version of the bible.

Damocles

Ok, but the key question is :
Why such evident contracditions ?
Just an oversight ? it is unlikely

I guess that not every person that wotes parts of the bible had full access
to all the previous writings, or if they did, did not totally confirm (had a different idea) previous writings.

This way it is more impressive to have little contradictions, than to wonder about
(naturally acurring) contradictions

Now it is easy to just say, that contradictions are due to the "mortals not fully understanding the
thougts/ways of god".

Even Tolkien did have contradictions in his work, even though this was just one man writing on
this story.

so what?
what does the story of creation mean to you? what do you think does it mean to a christian? do you really think it's such a key story? did you ever ask yourself why it's located in the old testament?

There are a lot of places in the bible that many don't understand, but note that even Jesus spoke in parabels.

Also take into account that hebrew (the orginal language of torah, the old testament) contains many words that are not easy to translate to english, thus some of the text might mean something different in the orginal text than the english version or other translations. This applies to the new testament also since it was written in Greek. And translators are human also, they make mistakes too.

I'm sure the order of things is easy to figure out when translating, that's the number one thing you start with.

I think the contradictions are the evidence of a pre-christianity history of the bible that doesn't quite make it more creditable, infact in my opinion this makes it even harder for Christians to claim the bible wasn't changed much over time, which is a totally unrealistic view, considered the evidence.

Quote:

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contains many words that are not easy to translate to english

---

Which is irrelevant, because wasn't the first text translated to Latin??

Cheers

I have just seen a documentation about the "3-Kings"

not beeing Kings, but so called "Magie" (Priests) from Persia, probably Babylon, that
brought the 3 Gifts to Jesus.
They where following an Astrological coincedence/calculation the proposed that
a "new King was born", not actually following a star.

There are so many translation and rewritings of the books of the bible, that
it is hard to say what was its original content.