COMMENTARY

Peter--The Bible has many heroes who play a crucial role in the formulation of Biblical concepts and ideology. Jesus, Paul, Abraham, David and Peter are among the more prominent figures. Unfortunately, each of these individuals has serious deficiencies in his character and should not be depicted as models for our children to emulate. Peter is as good an example as any of one lacking in courage and integrity. All of the following acts, statements, and events in the New Testament show poor judgement associated with naming churches, cathedrals, basilicas, and so forth after him, and the absurdity of granting him sainthood:

Despite this deplorable record, Peter is considered to be a "saint" by many, and one branch of Christendom has even gone so far as to use Matt. 16:18 19 to designate him as first Pope. Of all the Apostles, Peter was the most important; yet he often demonstrated a sorrowful lack of honour, truthfulness and integrity. One can only pity any institution having him as a founding father.

Contradictions

If there is any area in which the Bible's imperfections and errancy is most apparent, it is that of inconsistencies and contradictions. The book is a veritable miasma of contradictory assertions and obvious disagreements, which is to be expected in any writing formulated over approximately 1,500 years by 40 or 50 different writers, few of whom seemed to be precisely concerned with what the others had penned. Moreover, the highly repetitive nature of the Bible accounts for many of the conflicts. It would have been far better for those attempting to defend the Book if, for example Deuteronomy had not repeated so much of Exodus, Chronicles had not repeated so much of Samuel and Kings, and the gospels had not been so repetitious. But they do repeat and, thus, problems exist. Yet, despite all historical, mathematical, ethical, philosophical, geographical, and chronological difficulties contained therein, some diehard fundamentalists carry their hopelessly doomed resistance to the bitter end. As incredible as it may seem, there are some individuals who still say, "The Bible is perfect and inerrant. There are no inaccuracies." So, for the benefit of these holdouts, I am going to provide a list of some simple, straightforward problems that even some well known spokesmen for the fundamentalist position grudgingly concede:

Besides hundreds of singular contradictions, the Bible has several instances in which contradictory statements appear in blocks or groups of anywhere from 10 to 25. The numerous problems associated with the Resurrection show this quite well (See: BE #2). Probably the most blatant example concerns the listings in Ezra 2 and Nehemiah 7 of the family units of the returning exiles. There are about 33 units that appear in both lists, starting with the children of Parosh. Fourteen of these units disagree, as can be seen by simply reading down the lists and comparing the numbers. Moreover, Biblical writers often had difficulty in adding figures, and this instance is no exception. Ezra 2:64 says the whole congregation together was 42, 360, whereas, one need only add the figures to see that it is actually 29,818. Neh. 7:66 says the total number of returnees was 42,360, whereas, the actual number of people listed in Nehemiah 7 is 31,089.