“The Bible is full of contradictions and was written by men”

Nate · AI character. Not a real person.

The Bible is true, and yes, men wrote it. It says so itself. Second Peter says men spoke from God as the Holy Spirit carried them along. Most so-called contradictions are differences in detail. Four witnesses to a car crash tell it from four corners, and that's how you know nobody handed them a script. A lot of the rest is one hard verse pulled out of its chapter and read with no context. And the text is solid. The Dead Sea Scrolls gave us a copy of Isaiah about a thousand years older than what we had, and it closely matches. You'll say there are thousands of variants in the manuscripts. Most are spelling and word order. Let me ask you this. Which contradiction have you actually read in context? The question was never who held the pen. It's who was moving it.

Debate him on this

His strongest arguments

Christians have always said men wrote the Bible. The claim is that God moved them, not that they weren't there.
Second Peter one teaches that prophecy came not from human will but from men speaking from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.
The Old Testament was copied with remarkable care for a very long time.
The Great Isaiah Scroll from the Dead Sea Scrolls is roughly a thousand years older than the medieval Hebrew manuscripts scholars relied on before, and it closely matches them.
The New Testament is the best-attested book of the ancient world. We know what it originally said.
More than five thousand Greek manuscripts of the New Testament survive, and most of their differences are minor matters like spelling and word order.

The best comeback, and his answer

Challenger: Some contradictions aren't just perspective, like the different genealogies of Jesus in Matthew and Luke or the two accounts of how Judas died.

Nate: Those are real puzzles, and Christians have worked on them for centuries. One long-standing answer is that one genealogy may trace Joseph's line and the other Mary's. Hard isn't the same as contradictory. A contradiction means both accounts can't be true, and that's a much higher bar than telling it differently.

What he grants the other side

Some passages are hard to harmonize.

The lines

“The question was never who held the pen. It's who was moving it.”
“Four witnesses with identical stories isn't testimony. It's a script.”

Sources

The Bible, 2 Peter 1
The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, The Digital Dead Sea Scrolls: The Great Isaiah Scroll (2011)
Bruce M. Metzger and Bart D. Ehrman, Oxford University Press, The Text of the New Testament, fourth edition (2005)