Many Jewish people, when challenged to read the New Testament, simply dismiss the book as being unreliable and full of contradictions. They may or may not be able to discuss the alleged contradictions with someone who disagrees with them, but they hold to that position nevertheless. Does it really matter whether the New Testament is full of contradictions? What difference does it make for Jews, anyway?

Who's Your Source Of Information?

Jewish scholars conversant with the New Testament may differ on many points, but most if not all agree on one: the essential Jewishness of Jesus. Writers such as Claude Montefiore (1858-1938) and Joseph Klausner (1874-1958), have helped many to understand the New Testament within its Jewish milieu.¹ More recently, Reform rabbi Michael J. Cook, Professor of Intertestamental and Early Christian Literature at Hebrew Union College, has gone so far as to call for all Jews to become acquainted with the New Testament.²

These scholars have read the Gospels (the narrative accounts of the life of Jesus), if not the whole of the New Testament, with an eye for the historical and Jewish context. While they are not prepared to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, much less divine, their treatment of him is far more sympathetic than their treatment of Paul, who brought the message about Jesus to the non-Jewish world.

Nevertheless, the average Jewish college student is not so likely to learn about the New Testament from scholarly sources like Montefiore, Klausner or Cook. They are far more apt to be exposed to the perspectives of someone like Rabbi Tovia Singer, head of Outreach Judaism, an organization devoted to refuting the message of groups like Jews for Jesus. Additionally, most synagogue-goers are likely to be more familiar with the work of a Beth Moshe, author of Judaism's Truth Answers the Missionaries.³ The approach of these writers is not designed to encourage understanding of the New Testament (whether or not you agree with it), but simply to discredit it. For example, Beth Moshe writes:

This chapter is organized to display the contradictions within the New Testament. The conflicting verses selected are representative of the many which can be found. We will offer no comments about the verses, because the confusion and disarray are self-evident. . . . Can Christianity's Scripture, so lacking in harmony and coherence, so flawed in contrary statements, be considered other than unreliable as the word of God to the non-Christian? If anything, the New Testament's contradictions make Judaism's authentic interpretation of the Hebrew Scriptures even more certain for us. Let's now read these astonishingly opposing verses.⁴

Or from Tovia Singer:

The stories told in the New Testament, and the passion narratives in particular, are so inconsistent, that the resurrection story collapses under careful scrutiny. The conflicting testimonies of the evangelists are so unreliable, they would not stand up to critical cross-examination in any court of law. In fact, there is virtually not one detail of the crucifixion and resurrection narratives upon which all four Gospel authors agree.⁵

Several times, in fact, Singer describes the differences between the “conflicting testimonies” as “stunning.” Serious Jewish scholars generally do not take such a tone. But it is typical of writers like Singer or Beth Moshe, whose comments are “louder,” easier to understand and frankly more accessible than the scholarly observations that would better serve those who seriously desire to know something about the literature in question. So it is no wonder if many Jewish people carry around the idea that the New Testament—and maybe even the “Old”—are full of irreconcilable problems and impossible contradictions.

At this point, I would like to offer two notes.

First, in this article, I refer to the "Old Testament" as well as the "New Testament." Some find the term "Old Testament" to be offensive and prefer "Hebrew Bible." I am offering no value judgment in referring to the "Old Testament." It is, indeed, chronologically older than the New Testament. As I was growing up, our Reform Jewish family always referred to the "Old Testament." And so it is in this article.

Second, I make no pretense when I refer to "apparent" contradictions or discrepancies in the Bible. The reader will easily see that my position is that difficulties in the Bible can ultimately be resolved, though not necessarily in any simplistic way.

So then, this article focuses on the issue of Bible "problems" in the Old and the New Testaments. Some may wonder, why should Jews even care about such things, especially when it comes to the New Testament?

One good reason to care is that the allegation of "contradictions" and "problems" in the Bible has been used as a weapon against Jews. Imagine if the tone taken by Singer and Beth Moshe regarding the New Testament had been taken by Gentiles regarding the Old Testament. Now that you've imagined it, let me tell you that it's real. Anti- Semites have treated the Old Testament much as anti- missionaries have treated the New (more on this below). There is a lesson here for those who fail to read a document of faith objectively, whether or not they agree with it.

There is another reason why Jews should care whether or not the New Testament is full of contradictions. Logically, if it is not filled with contradictions, then the New Testament might just be valid. And if that is true, its teachings on the Messiah and on the future of Israel are extremely relevant to Jews.

Is The Glass Half Empty Or Half Full?

Some people are natural skeptics, especially when it comes to faith documents like the Bible. Natural skeptics assume that faith is completely subjective, and that documents that concern matters of faith are unreliable. The burden of proof is on the "believer" to demonstrate otherwise. But skepticism dismisses far more than documents of faith. Many skeptics are dubious about our ability to be certain of any historical record. In the postmodern era it is common to view all such documents as the result of a power play, or the "spin" of dominant groups who repress the alternative stories of others.

Trendy as that may be, and as much as it may appeal to our sense of justice for "the underdog," the truth of such a notion is another matter. Jewish scholar Michael Fishbane⁶ in his recently published volume, Biblical Myth and Rabbinic Mythmaking, offers what reviewer James West calls an interpretive "principle of charity." That is, "a method of reading that begins with the assumption that every text makes or conveys sense and that one should therefore construe it in the best possible light, taking account of all its factors."⁷

Fishbane might or might not agree with attempts to resolve a given discrepancy in the Bible, but his principle invites us to assume the best and not the worst about a text.

Or in other words, he suggests that we begin with the glass half-full rather than half-empty.

"It Was A Horse! It Was A Mule!" Or, What Judaism Does About Contradictions

In Ecclesiastes 1:9, King Solomon observes, "There is nothing new under the sun." Among other things, this applies to the observable fact of apparent contradictions in the New Testament. Though some contemporary writers may give the impression that they are the Jewish Christopher Columbuses of New Testament studies, in fact skeptics and believers alike have been well aware of the apparent discrepancies for centuries, and have responded to them.

Moreover, before examining the New Testament it's important to recognize that Jewish scholars have known for thousands of years that "problem passages" crop up in the Old Testament. In fact, from the second century come the "Thirteen Rules of Rabbi Ishmael" to guide rabbinic discussions on the proper interpretation of the Hebrew Bible.⁸

The importance of the Thirteen Rules is evident in that their recitation is included in the siddur, the daily prayer book.⁹ Their inclusion underscores the fact that God's word can be understood and carried out, if we interpret it rightly. It also means that during every single daily service in the synagogue, every Orthodox Jew affirms that the Scripture contains apparent contradictions that can properly be resolved!

The last of the Thirteen Rules is:

If two passages contradict each other, this contradiction must be reconciled by comparison with a third passage.¹⁰

Other Jewish voices agreed: Rabad,¹¹ a 12th-century authority on the Talmud, wrote concerning the above rule, "This teaches us that we must clarify and reconcile each of two verses that seem to contradict each other, and that we should not reject either of them. We should not presume that there is an error in the Torah."

The Talmud tells a colorful story about Hananiah ben Hezekiah ben Garon, a first-century rabbi who worked on resolving Bible contradictions:

Rab Judah said in Rab's name: In truth, that man, Hananiah son of Hezekiah by name, is to be remembered for blessing: but for him, the Book of Ezekiel would have been hidden, for its words contradicted the Torah. What did he do? Three hundred barrels of oil were taken up to him and he sat in an upper chamber and reconciled them.¹²

With no electricity, we are to understand that Hananiah literally "burned the midnight oil" for who knows how many long nights until he succeeded in working through the problems he found in the book of Ezekiel.

Apparent contradictions within the rabbinic writings themselves were treated similarly. The Gemara (the later part of the Talmud) commented upon the earlier part of the Talmud known as the Mishna. In the Gemara, harmonizing these rabbinic contradictions is common practice.

Line by line, word by word, the rabbis of the Gemara (known as Amoraim) examined the Mishna and explained its intentions. They never dismissed or belittled the rabbis of the Mishna over their apparent contradictions with one another. Rather, the goal of an Amorah was to explain, to clarify and often to resolve contradictions between one Mishna and another in order to come to the correct ruling - the Halacha [Jewish law].¹³

Elijah, The Problem Solver

Most Jews know Elijah as the prophet for whom we put out "Elijah's Cup" and open the door at Passover, hoping that he will arrive to announce the Messiah's coming. Less well known is that in Jewish tradition, Elijah is a kind of super Sudoku-solver. In the Talmud, when a particular problem of halacha can't be resolved, it is declared teyku: "stalemated," "unresolved." It is the same word that modern Hebrew uses for a "tie" in a game.

Tradition gives another explanation of teyku: that it is an acronym for tishbi yetaretz kushios u 'boyos "Elijah the Tishbite will resolve all contradictions and unresolved questions."¹⁴ Elijah, the great problem solver!

And so Judaism also recognizes that within the Old Testament there are problems to be resolved: whether now or at the coming of Elijah.

Incidentally, the New Testament contains a similar idea. When Jesus met a woman of Samaria, she told him that¹⁵ "when Messiah comes, he will explain everything." Apparently, the Samaritans people of the first century who were only partly Jewish by descent believed that the great explainer would not be the forerunner of Messiah, but the Messiah himself.

How Anti-Semites Used Problems In The Bible To Trash The Old Testament

We stated earlier how the tone of unscholarly critics of the New Testament sounds ironically like reverse anti-Semitism. This becomes apparent by substituting the words "Old" Testament for "New," and "Judaism" or "Jew" for "Christian" or "Christianity," etc. Can you imagine if the passage from Beth Moshe, quoted earlier, read this way:

This chapter is organized to display the contradictions within the Old Testament. The conflicting verses selected are representative of the many of which can be found. We will offer no comments about the verses, because the confusion and disarray are self-evident. . . . Can Judaism's Scripture, so lacking in harmony and coherence, so flawed in contrary statements, be considered other than unreliable as the word of God to the non-Jew? . . . If anything, the Old Testament's contradictions make atheism's authentic understanding of the Hebrew Scriptures even more certain for us. Let's now read these astonishingly opposing verses.

Or if Singer's quote read this way:

The stories told in the Old Testament, and the historical narratives in particular, are so inconsistent, that the story of Israel collapses under careful scrutiny. The conflicting testimonies of the redactors are so unreliable, they would not stand up to critical cross- examination in any court of law. In fact, there is virtually not one detail of the Exodus and Conquest narratives upon which all Old Testament authors agree.

As Jews we would be justified in asking whether the writers had a major anti-Jewish chip on their shoulder from the get-go. We might conclude that due to their extreme bias, their ability and inclination to make objective, much less scholarly, remarks about the Old Testament would be virtually nil.

And in fact many skeptics and even anti-Semites have written much in efforts to discredit both the Old and New Testaments.

In 19th-century Germany, among other places, anti-Semitism was on the rise. This anti-Semitism often fed off a type of modern biblical criticism, sometimes known as "the historical-critical method" or "higher criticism." Modern biblical criticism approached the Bible as a historical document and tried to interpret it apart from any particular faith tradition. (The term "critical" as used here does not mean judgmental, but as opposed to reading the Bible "uncritically," that is, naively, without reflection.)

In practice, this often meant approaching the Bible rationalistically (not to be confused with "rationally"), assuming for instance that supernatural events and miracles are not historical and real, but only constructs of "faith." This rationalistic denial of the supernatural is no longer a prerequisite for modern study of the Scriptures. For a long time, however, "higher criticism" was used to produce a picture of the Bible at extreme variance with the traditional picture that revealed a personal God who orchestrated supernatural events.

Enter Solomon Schechter, founder and president of Jewish Theological Seminary and the shaper of Conservative Judaism. In a well-known paper entitled "Higher Criticism Higher Anti-Semitism," Schechter "argued that at the root of German Biblical scholarship was a rabid and unexamined anti-Semitism."¹⁶ Though some disagreed with him,¹⁷ more recent scholarly voices have also suggested that "the issue of anti-Semitic influences on modern Biblical scholarship is far more complex and directly linked to political goals than most scholars imagine."¹⁸

Jewish Bible scholar Marc Zvi Brettler pointed out the merits of Schechter's position:

Schechter actually offered a fair critique of Higher Criticism as it was practiced in Germany in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. Like nearly all Christians of the time, its [higher criticism's] proponents believed in the moral superiority of Christianity to Judaism, and they used their scholarly works to illustrate this. Wellhausen, for example, likened Judaism in late antiquity to a dead tree. He applied that image vigorously, describing the late biblical book of Chronicles thus: "Like ivy it overspreads the dead trunk with extraneous life, blending old and new in a strange combination . . . [I]n the process it is twisted and perverted." As painful as such sentiments are for Jews, they neither diminish the brilliance of much of his Prolegomena, nor negate the correctness of its basic methodology.¹⁹

Brettler goes on to point out that this modern method of Bible study is not inherently anti-Semitic, and in fact many Jewish Bible scholars have since utilized it. Still, it is sobering to realize that there was more than a little anti- Semitism involved in some aspects of its development.

Much has been written about anti-Semitism and biblical²⁰ studies.Amazingly, some scholars advocated removing the Old Testament from the Bible, either because of its allegedly "lower" level of ethics, or because they denied the Jewishness of the New Testament. One of the more notorious among such scholars was Friedrich Delitzsch not to be confused with his father, Franz, who translated the New Testament into Hebrew. The son wrote:

. . . the Old Testament is full of all kinds of deceptions: a veritable hodge-podge of erroneous, incredible, undependable figures, including those of Biblical chronology; a veritable maze of false portrayals, misleading reworkings, revisions and transpositions, together with anachronisms; a never-ending jumble of contradictory details and entire narratives, unhistorical inventions, legends and folktales, in short a book full of intentional and unintentional deceptions, in part self-deceptions, a very dangerous book, in the use of which the greatest care is necessary.²¹

Friedrich Delitzsch was an extremist among extremists. And his quote about the Old Testament is similar in tone to the rhetoric employed by Beth Moshe and Rabbi Singer regarding the New Testament.

A Better Way To Look At The Old Testament And The New Testament

Recall Michael Fishbane's principle that "every text makes or conveys sense and that one should therefore construe it in the best possible light, taking account of all its factors." This is standard operating procedure in the fields of history and law. A Guide to Historical Method One is a standard textbook by Gilbert J. Garraghan.²² In a section entitled "Conflicting Testimony,"²³ Garraghan writes, "The historian frequently finds in his sources statements that disagree with one another, or are even flatly contradictory. The difficulty of reconciling them must be met." He then enumerates various principles for reconciling such statements, including the reliability of witnesses, probability, and so forth. His eighth principle is:

In certain cases the contradiction may be only apparent, not real. The witnesses may not be referring to precisely the same thing; they may tell of different situations, or report the same occurrence from different points of view, different angles of observation. Criticism along these lines sometimes succeeds in reducing apparently conflicting statements to agreement, at least substantial. Where reconciliation is impossible, the only course is to suspend judgment, and await possible new evidence toward a secure conclusion.²⁴

Garraghan concludes: "Almost any critical history that discusses the evidence for important statements will furnish examples of discrepant or contradictory accounts and the attempts which are made to reconcile them."²⁵

Similarly, in the field of biblical studies, V. Philips Long, Professor of Old Testament at Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia, writes:

The real question for those who are perplexed by differences between accounts of the same event(s) is: do these constitute irreconcilable differences that is contradictions that force us to question the writers' competence, motives, knowledge of the subject matter, or the like. It would be obscurantist to deny that the Bible presents vexing difficulties. I maintain that (1) a properly nuanced understanding of the nature and purpose of biblical literature greatly lessens the number of perceived difficulties and (2) the remainder of stubborn cases should be held in abeyance or, preferably, made the object of special study by those whose technical training and theological orientation might place them in a position to find . . . true solutions.²⁶

Some efforts to resolve various difficulties the Bible presents have been simplistic, naive, sometimes even seemingly desperate. But a Bible reader does not need to be simplistic or desperate when wrestling with apparent textual problems. Reasonable solutions exist. We find them when we approach the Bible as one approaches any document of history. The following examples show how we can resolve issues if we begin with the assumption that the text probably makes sense but that we, who are far removed from the culture and time in which it was written, may be misunderstanding it.

An Example From The Old Testament

The books of Chronicles parallel the books of Samuel and Kings (much as three of the four Gospels the New Testament accounts of Jesus' life parallel one another). Though Chronicles and Samuel-Kings recount the same history, Chronicles omits much that is found in Samuel-Kings, and also adds a great many things. Individual events are also recounted differently. Philip Long gives us the example of 2 Samuel 7:1-17, compared with 1 Chronicles 17:1-15. While some might claim that the differences are "hopeless contradictions," Long offers a fairer, more nuanced picture and suggests that many differences between the parallel accounts can be explained as paraphrasing, as stylistic differences, as quoting from a different version of the same text, or as based on the differing purposes of each writer. [see chart below]

SAMUEL-KINGS	CHRONICLES	PHILIP LONG
2 Samuel 7:5 "Are you the one to build me a house to dwell in?"	1 Chronicles 17:4 "You are not the one to build me a house to dwell in."	"Some [differences] may simply reflect the Chronicler's freedom to paraphrase or generalize as he does often in his composition."
Samuel-Kings prefers to use the long form of the Hebrew word for "I" anochi.	Chroniclers prefers to use the shorter form of "I" ani.	"Other differences seem to result from stylistic or lexical preferences."
2 Samuel 7:7 "Wherever I have moved with all the Israelites, did I ever say to any of their rulers whom I commanded to shepherd my people Israel, 'Why have you not build me a house of cedar?'"	1 Chronicles 17:6 "Wherever I have moved with all the Israelites, did I ever say to any of their leaders whom I commanded to shepherd my people, 'Why have you not built me a house of cedar?'"	"In still other instances, the Chronicler may simply be repeating what he finds in ... the text of Samuel with which he was familiar." [In other words, there were texts of Smeul with variations, and the author had one of those variations in front of him.]
2 Samuel 7:14, warning of potential divine punishment on David's descendants should they sin "I will be his father, and he will be my son. When he does wrong, I will punish him with the rod of men, with floggings inflicted by men."	Omitted in Chronicles	"The Chronicler could feel free, ... without pang of historical conscience, to omit the warning of 2 Samuel 7:14 as of little interest to his particular purpose for writing. After all, those who had experienced the Babylonian captivity [the audience for which Chronicles was written, later than the time of Samuel-Kings] and could look back on the checkered history of the divided monarchy, did not need reminding that wrongdoing leads to 'floggings inflicted by men.'" 27

An Example From The New Testament

In Matthew we learn that "[Jesus] went and lived in a town called Nazareth. So was fulfilled what was said through the prophets: 'He will be called a Nazarene'" (Matthew 2:23). But search high and low, there is no verse in the Old Testament stating that anyone "will be called a Nazarene."

Blatant contradiction or fabrication? We may opt to think so, or we may choose to step back and see if there is a better way to look at it. New Testament professor Donald Carson points out that though Matthew often cites the Old Testament, this is the only place where the plural "prophets" is used. Furthermore, Matthew uses a different grammatical construction here than in other places where he quotes the Old Testament, so that a better translation would be, "in order to fulfill what was said through the prophets, that he would be called a Nazarene." In other words, says Carson, "this suggests that Matthew had no specific OT [Old Testament] quotation in mind."²⁸

Rather, says Carson,

Nazareth was a despised place (John 7:42, 52), even to other Galileans (cf. John 1:46). Here Jesus grew up, not as "Jesus the Bethlehemite," with its Davidic overtones, but as "Jesus the Nazarene," with all the opprobrium of the sneer. When Christians were referred to in Acts as the "Nazarene sect" (24:5), the expression was meant to hurt. First-century Christian readers of Matthew, who had tasted their share of scorn, would have quickly caught Matthew's point. He is not saying that a particular OT prophet foretold that the Messiah would live in Nazareth; he is saying that the OT prophets foretold that the Messiah would be despised.²⁹

The study of the Bible can be invigorating, both in terms of what it clearly says, and in grappling with its more challenging passages. One can regard the Bible as (to quote Beth Moshe) "lacking in harmony and coherence . . . flawed in contrary statements . . . unreliable" or one can approach it with the kind of humility that comes from realizing that we are far removed from the time, place and culture of its authors. Frankly, it is the first approach that is na've or simplistic, not the second.

Many who have taken the time and trouble to read the Bible, study it, and yes, even question its problem passages have discovered that while the original messengers may be distant, the message is "stunningly" contemporary close to us as our minds and hearts.

Singer and Beth Moshe may have their own motives for attempting to discredit the New Testament. But what if the Bible is not filled with contradictions? What if it is reliable history, and more than just history, the story of what God has done for us? Wouldn't we want to know?

Further Resources

Starred titles (*) are recommended "starter" books on the subject; others are more academic.

• Barnett, Paul. Is the New Testament Reliable? 2nd ed. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2003.
• Blomberg, Craig. The Historical Reliability of the Gospels. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1987.
• Bruce, F. F. The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable? Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003.
• Geisler, Norman; Howe, Thomas A. When Critics Ask: A Popular Handbook on Bible Difficulties. Wheaton, IL: Victor Books, 1992.
• Kaiser, Walter C., Jr. The Old Testament Documents: Are They Reliable and Relevant? Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2001. Kitchen, K. A. On the Reliability of the Old Testament. Grand Rapids; Eerdmans, 2003.
• Miller, Glenn. "Good Question: Do the Resurrection Accounts Hopelessly Contradict One Another?" http://www.christian-thinktank.com/ordorise.html
• Wenham, John. Easter Enigmare the Resurrection Accounts in Conflict? 2nd ed. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1992.

Endnotes

1. Donald Hagner, The Jewish Reclamation of Jesus: An Analysis and Critique of Modern Jewish Study of Jesus (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, Academie Books, 1984).
2. "Rabbi: Jews Should Know New Testament," April 9, 2006, online at http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L3237779,00.html and other web sites. Cook is "possibly the only rabbi in the U.S. with a professorial Chair in New Testament" according to Hebrew Union's web site. http://www.huc.edu/faculty/faculty/cook.shtml
3. Beth Moshe, Judaism's Truth Answers the Missionaries (New York: Bloch, 1987). Reviewer Laura Barron (http://www.jewsforjesus.org/publications/other/moshe ) suggests that "Beth Moshe means 'House of Moses' and is probably a pseudonym for the group of rabbis who compiled this volume; the plural pronoun 'we' is employed throughout the book."
4. Ibid., p. 241-242.
5. http://www.outreachjudaism.org/resurrection.html
6. Fishbane is Nathan Cummings Professor of Jewish Studies in the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. http://divinity.uchicago.edu/faculty/fishbane.shtml
7. Michael Fishbane, Biblical Myth and Rabbinic Mythmaking (New York: Oxford, 2005), p. 18. Cited in a review by James West, RBL 05/2006 (Society of Biblical Literature).
8. Jewish Encyclopedia (1906), s.v. "Talmud Hermeneutics"; also Encyclopedia Judaica, s.v. "Hermeneutics," 8:370; H. L. Strack. and G'nter Stemberger, Introduction to the Talmud and Midrash (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996), p. 21.
9. Joseph H. Hertz, Authorised Daily Prayer Book, rev. ed. (New York: Bloch, 1961), "Morning Service," pp. 42-43. See also Stephen R. Schach, The Structure of the Siddur (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1996), p. 231.
10. See sources in endnote 8.
11. An acronym of his name Rabbi Abraham Ben David of Posquieres.
12. Shabbat 13b.
13. http://www.torah.org/qanda/basics/texts/gemarah.html.
14. See for instance, http://ohr.org.il/yomi/yomi227.htm . He is called the "Tishbite" because he was from the town of Tishbi.
15. John chapter 4.
16. Irving Hexham and Karla Poewe, "Tom Paine's Age of Reason and Modern Unbelief," Global Journal of Classical Theology 4:2 (June 2004), pp. 20-21. Available at http://www.trinitysem.edu/journal/4-2/paine-revised.pdf. The address may be found in Solomon Schechter's Seminary Addresses and Other Papers (New York: Burning Book Press, 1959), pp. 35-39.
17. See Hexham and Poewe, p. 21, for a dissenting quote by Leo H. Silberman and Hexham's and Poewe's own response.
18. Hexham and Poewe, referring to Henning Graf Reventlow, ed., Biblical Studies and the Shifting of Paradigms, 1850-1914 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995). Hexham and Poewe, a husband-and-wife team, trace what they believe to be the anti-Semitic origins of modern biblical criticism back to Tom Paine. Hexham is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Calgary in Canada; Poewe is Professor of Anthropology at the same institution.
19. Marc Zvi Brettler, How to Read the Bible (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2006), p. 4.
20. Some resources: Robert P. Ericksen, Theologians Under Hitler: Gerhard Kittel, Paul Althaus and Emanuel Hirsch (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985); Robert P. Ericksen and Susannah Heschel, eds., Betrayal: German Churches and the Holocaust (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1999); for earlier periods, the relevant sections of John Bright, The Authority of the Old Testament (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1967); Emil G. Kraeling, The Old Testament Since the Reformation (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1955).
21. Cited in John Bright, The Authority of the Old Testament (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1967), p. 66.
22. New York: Fordham University Press, 1957.
23. Ibid., pp. 311-314.
24. Ibid., pp. 312-313.
25. Ibid., p. 314.
26. Long, V. Philips, "The Art of Biblical History," Foundations of Contemporary Interpretation, vol. 5 (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1994), pp. 76-77, note 46.
27. Quotes from ibid., pp. 79-82.
28. D. A. Carson, "Matthew" in vol. 8 of The Expositor's Bible Commentary (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1984), p. 97.
29. Ibid.