INCONSISTENCIES IN THE NEW TESTAMENT - PART ONE (of many thousands).

 

Robert, in a comment on my previous post said that all the old stuff in the Bible has "been shredded" whatever that means and that I guess reason and commonsense now is being used. The inference is that the Old Testament stuff was the raving of old Jewish loonies and that the New Testament stuff (nonsensically) is the informed opinion and fact of non-Jewish Christians. I was intrigued so looked up the web for inconsistencies in the New Testament and found this written by Paul Carlson. 

Christians will remember that they have been taught that Jesus had a family tree going back to King David. They were also taught that Jesus was miraculously produced by a 'seed' from The Holy Spirit.

Well, they can't have it both ways.

THE GENEALOGIES OF JOSEPH - Paul Carlson.

1. Matthew and Luke disagree

Matthew and Luke give two contradictory genealogies for Joseph (Matthew 1:2-17 and Luke 3:23-38). They cannot even agree on who the father of Joseph was. Church apologists try to eliminate this discrepancy by suggesting that the genealogy in Luke is actually Mary’s, even though Luke says explicitly that it is Joseph’s genealogy (Luke 3:23). Christians have had problems reconciling the two genealogies since at least the early fourth century. It was then that Eusebius, a “Church Father,” wrote in his The History of the Church, “each believer has been only too eager to dilate at length on these passages.”

2. Why genealogies of Joseph?

Both the genealogies of Matthew and Luke show that Joseph was a direct descendant of King David. But if Joseph is not Jesus’ father, then Joseph’s genealogies are meaningless as far as Jesus is concerned, and one has to wonder why Matthew and Luke included them in their gospels. The answer, of course, is that the genealogies originally said that Jesus was the son of Joseph and thus Jesus fulfilled the messianic requirement of being a direct descendant of King David.

Long after Matthew and Luke wrote the genealogies the church invented (or more likely borrowed from the mystery religions) the doctrine of the virgin birth. Although the virgin birth could be accommodated by inserting a few words into the genealogies to break the physical link between Joseph and Jesus, those same insertions also broke the physical link between David and Jesus.

The church had now created two major problems: 1) to explain away the existence of two genealogies of Joseph, now rendered meaningless, and 2) to explain how Jesus was a descendant of David.

The apostle Paul says that Jesus “was born of the seed of David” (Romans 1:3). Here the word “seed” is literally in the Greek “sperma.” This same Greek word is translated in other verses as “descendant(s)” or “offspring.” The point is that the Messiah had to be a physical descendant of King David through the male line. That Jesus had to be a physical descendant of David means that even if Joseph had legally adopted Jesus (as some apologists have suggested), Jesus would still not qualify as Messiah if he had been born of a virgin – seed from the line of David was required.

Women did not count in reckoning descent for the simple reason that it was then believed that the complete human was present in the man’s sperm (the woman’s egg being discovered in 1827). The woman’s womb was just the soil in which the seed was planted. Just as there was barren soil that could not produce crops, so also the Bible speaks of barren wombs that could not produce children.

This is the reason that although there are many male genealogies in the Bible, there are no female genealogies. This also eliminates the possibility put forward by some apologists that Jesus could be of the “seed of David” through Mary.

I hope that this is of assistance to you. If this post is popular (as measured by at least one comment) I will 'research' more inconsistencies in the New Testament of the Bible. I doubt that I'll have to look far. 

PATERNITY TEST

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