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New International Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties
Informed Answers to Your Most Troublesome Questions about the Bible. What do you make of the difficult areas in the Bible—those puzzling passages that make you stop and scratch your head? The seeming inconsistencies or moments that make you uncomfortable? The seeming incongruities of Scripture actually have sound explanations. But unless you're a Bible scholar, you probably don't know about them. The New International Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties gives you informed answers to your most troublesome questions. Many explanations include an eye-opening look at linguistic, cultural, numerical, relational, and other considerations of which most Bible readers are unaware. Referencing both the New International Version (NIV) and the New American Standard Bible (NASB), this handbook makes scholarly insights accessible to everyone. Whether you're a student, pastor, everyday Bible-lover, or even a skeptic, the New International Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties will show you why the Bible is believable and dependable, with a message you can live by. —ZONDERVAN'S UNDERSTAND THE BIBLE REFERENCE SERIES— This four-volume series supplies users of today's most popular modern Bible translation, and New International Version, with scholarly, economical, and uncompromisingly evangelical study tools. It
480 pages, Hardcover
First published August 1, 2001
About the author
Gleason L. Archer Jr.
16 books9 followersGleason Leonard Archer, Jr. was a Biblical scholar, educator and author.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
October 25, 2021
Even though I have had this book on my shelves for years, I stumbled upon it after studying the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy’s Chicago Statement from 1978, and realizing that Gleason Archer was one of the council members, and that “the view of inerrancy set forth by Dr. Archer is the historical position of the church in all of its major branches”, I decided to read this monumental work, Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties. The book was authored to seek to answer the questions that Dr. Archer has been asked throughout his life’s work, no doubt many of them asked with the purpose of trying to stump him. But it was not really the answers to the questions that I remember most from the book, but rather the questions themselves.
Admittedly, I cannot read a book such as this without personal bias, albeit that personal bias is founded upon my high view of Scripture, in which I believe that the best commentary on the Bible is the Bible. Where discrepancies may exist, usually they can be resolved within the context of all of Scripture, and if not even though I personally draw upon a strong faith that all Scripture is indeed inspired by a God who does not err, “God never asks us to crucify our intellect in order to believe.” Some critics ostracize this ‘high road’ approach, but those are the same critics that “subordinate the authority of Scripture to the authority of human reason and modern science” as the Introduction well points out.
To bolster this argument, the Introduction provides a good survey of the history of the church, and rightly shows that throughout history those that have stepped away from Christian orthodoxy “like Socinus and Michael Servetus argued their position on the basis of the infallibility of Scripture.” It is only in our modern world that human beings have argued that human beings have now come into some higher level of intellectual enlightenment, from which the ushering in of new abilities to decipher and debate has suddenly become more superior to previous eras.
Indeed, “Christ’s references to the Old Testament makes it unmistakably evident that He fully accepted as factual events even the most controversial statements in the Hebrew Bible,” and thus if Christ accepted it, how could I not without denying what He said is true? Likewise, the “full trustworthiness and authority of the Hebrew Scriptures was constantly recognized by the New Testament authors.” Either the Bible is true or it is not, and frankly there is no ground to stand on for one who believes portions of the Bible are false. I have written on this more extensively in my goodreads review of Five Views on Biblical Inerrancy.
After some fantastic groundwork is laid in the introductory chapters, which is my favorite portion of the book, Dr. Archer organizes his answers in a manner that follows the outline of Scripture, from book to book, Genesis to Revelation. A considerable amount of discussion is given to the books of The Pentateuch (about 25% of the book), and in latter chapters this groundwork is revisited when Archer covers the New Testament citations of Old Testament Scriptures. Many of citations given in the New Testament were given to a Greek speaking audience, and for reasons that seem so obvious to me the New Testament authors cited the Septuagint translation. Often this leads to a few words being slightly different than what the Pentateuch originally records, although the meaning and intent remains unchanged. That someone would challenge the inerrancy of Scriptures on these grounds I found odd, but nonetheless maybe an example would illustrate my point: the quotation of Amos 5:26 in Acts 7:43, in which the slightly differing heathen gods are mentioned – Rompha versus Raiphan. Many of the so called biblical discrepancies fall into this type of translational category.
A second major category that is discussed in the book revolves around the four eye witness accounts of Jesus’s life as described by the gospels. It seems plausible to me that four different people would author four distinct accounts of what they saw. That one gospel writer when compared to another recorded a different order of the temptations Jesus faced while coming out of the desert matters very little to me to the credibility of the text’s meaning: that Jesus underwent temptation and still overcame victoriously as the author and perfector of our faith, having already ran the race well and now interceding on our behalf.
A third category that the questions fall into is one of complete misunderstanding of Biblical hermeneutics, such as the two sermons Jesus gave in Matthew 5 versus Luke 6, wherein the text differs because the sermons were given to two distinct audiences at two distinct locations at two distinct times. Another critic points out that the mustard seed truly isn’t the smallest of all seeds as Jesus indicates, but that does not change the intent of Matthew 13, where Jesus was talking to His listeners in a specific locale whom likely had experience dealing with mustard seeds and not orchids.
Keeping an open mind, the most thought-provoking examples given in the book stemmed from more concrete, quantifiable measurements. While I’m not concerned that 1 Kings 7:23 doesn’t give the exact mathematical equivalent to the value for pi, some questions that I had never pondered – like the differing consensus values given in the books of Kings and Chronicles – piqued my interest. Dr. Archer’s explanations for these areas tended to be a little weaker, but then again whether or not there were 470,000 people in the tribe of Judah as described in 1 Chronicles 21 or 500,000 as described in 2 Samuel 24 doesn’t particularly influence my faith.
In all, the Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties most influenced me by opening my eyes to the nature of Biblical critics. There are those that accept the Bible on faith because they have tangible evidence of God in their lives based on the relationship they have and the track record of His faithfulness, and there are those that read into every word of the text intentionally trying to discover and promote any nuance that appears on first glance to be self-contradictory. Either one holds a reverent view of Scripture or one doesn’t, and even after reading the book I do not see how the former makes one close-minded.
Admittedly, I cannot read a book such as this without personal bias, albeit that personal bias is founded upon my high view of Scripture, in which I believe that the best commentary on the Bible is the Bible. Where discrepancies may exist, usually they can be resolved within the context of all of Scripture, and if not even though I personally draw upon a strong faith that all Scripture is indeed inspired by a God who does not err, “God never asks us to crucify our intellect in order to believe.” Some critics ostracize this ‘high road’ approach, but those are the same critics that “subordinate the authority of Scripture to the authority of human reason and modern science” as the Introduction well points out.
To bolster this argument, the Introduction provides a good survey of the history of the church, and rightly shows that throughout history those that have stepped away from Christian orthodoxy “like Socinus and Michael Servetus argued their position on the basis of the infallibility of Scripture.” It is only in our modern world that human beings have argued that human beings have now come into some higher level of intellectual enlightenment, from which the ushering in of new abilities to decipher and debate has suddenly become more superior to previous eras.
Indeed, “Christ’s references to the Old Testament makes it unmistakably evident that He fully accepted as factual events even the most controversial statements in the Hebrew Bible,” and thus if Christ accepted it, how could I not without denying what He said is true? Likewise, the “full trustworthiness and authority of the Hebrew Scriptures was constantly recognized by the New Testament authors.” Either the Bible is true or it is not, and frankly there is no ground to stand on for one who believes portions of the Bible are false. I have written on this more extensively in my goodreads review of Five Views on Biblical Inerrancy.
After some fantastic groundwork is laid in the introductory chapters, which is my favorite portion of the book, Dr. Archer organizes his answers in a manner that follows the outline of Scripture, from book to book, Genesis to Revelation. A considerable amount of discussion is given to the books of The Pentateuch (about 25% of the book), and in latter chapters this groundwork is revisited when Archer covers the New Testament citations of Old Testament Scriptures. Many of citations given in the New Testament were given to a Greek speaking audience, and for reasons that seem so obvious to me the New Testament authors cited the Septuagint translation. Often this leads to a few words being slightly different than what the Pentateuch originally records, although the meaning and intent remains unchanged. That someone would challenge the inerrancy of Scriptures on these grounds I found odd, but nonetheless maybe an example would illustrate my point: the quotation of Amos 5:26 in Acts 7:43, in which the slightly differing heathen gods are mentioned – Rompha versus Raiphan. Many of the so called biblical discrepancies fall into this type of translational category.
A second major category that is discussed in the book revolves around the four eye witness accounts of Jesus’s life as described by the gospels. It seems plausible to me that four different people would author four distinct accounts of what they saw. That one gospel writer when compared to another recorded a different order of the temptations Jesus faced while coming out of the desert matters very little to me to the credibility of the text’s meaning: that Jesus underwent temptation and still overcame victoriously as the author and perfector of our faith, having already ran the race well and now interceding on our behalf.
A third category that the questions fall into is one of complete misunderstanding of Biblical hermeneutics, such as the two sermons Jesus gave in Matthew 5 versus Luke 6, wherein the text differs because the sermons were given to two distinct audiences at two distinct locations at two distinct times. Another critic points out that the mustard seed truly isn’t the smallest of all seeds as Jesus indicates, but that does not change the intent of Matthew 13, where Jesus was talking to His listeners in a specific locale whom likely had experience dealing with mustard seeds and not orchids.
Keeping an open mind, the most thought-provoking examples given in the book stemmed from more concrete, quantifiable measurements. While I’m not concerned that 1 Kings 7:23 doesn’t give the exact mathematical equivalent to the value for pi, some questions that I had never pondered – like the differing consensus values given in the books of Kings and Chronicles – piqued my interest. Dr. Archer’s explanations for these areas tended to be a little weaker, but then again whether or not there were 470,000 people in the tribe of Judah as described in 1 Chronicles 21 or 500,000 as described in 2 Samuel 24 doesn’t particularly influence my faith.
In all, the Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties most influenced me by opening my eyes to the nature of Biblical critics. There are those that accept the Bible on faith because they have tangible evidence of God in their lives based on the relationship they have and the track record of His faithfulness, and there are those that read into every word of the text intentionally trying to discover and promote any nuance that appears on first glance to be self-contradictory. Either one holds a reverent view of Scripture or one doesn’t, and even after reading the book I do not see how the former makes one close-minded.
March 13, 2021
This book tackles and resolves portions of the Bible that appear contradictory or confusing.
Want to Read
January 12, 2025But not because I want to be an apologist, rather I want to see the argument gymnastics they must have to do on some of these passages
August 11, 2016
A helpful compilation of scriptural difficulties and possible harmonizations.
Want to Read
January 10, 2013Great reference and resource.
February 10, 2015
Excellent reference material
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews