I guess I expected a series reconciling Bible contradictions to focus on contradictions that are particularly egregious, or well known. This just seems like hair splitting.<\/p>\n
2 Corinthians 1:13\u2014For we are not writing any other things to you than what you read or understand. Now I trust you will understand, even to the end.<\/p>\n
2 Peter 3:16\u2014As also in all his epistles, speaking in them of these things, in which are some things hard to understand, which untaught and unstable people twist to their own destruction, as they do also the rest of the Scriptures.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
This really<\/em> does not feel like a contradiction. But bear with me, because in my confusion over why Answers in Genesis even felt the need to address this \u201ccontradiction\u201d I noticed something profoundly interesting.<\/p>\nPaul, who wrote 2 Corinthians, tells his readers that he is \u201cnot writing any things to you other than what you read or understand.\u201d In other words, he says there are no secret meanings in his writings.<\/p>\n
But you know what? I tried reading 2 Corinthians 1:13 in context and found myself utterly confused as to what Paul was trying to say. Why is this? It\u2019s in part because he\u2019s writing to people he\u2019s met, and he keeps vaguely referencing things that happened while he was with them.\u00a0Paul founded the church at Corinth. A few years later, he wrote them this letter. He\u2019s building on things he already taught them\u2014things we don\u2019t have access to\u2014which can sometimes make his letter difficult to understand for us today.<\/p>\n
While 2 Peter claims to have been written by the Apostle Peter, it refers to Paul\u2019s letters\u2014which would have been contemporaneous\u2014as \u201cscripture.\u201d For that and other reasons, scholars think 2 Peter was written between AD 100-150 and is pseudoepigraphical\u2014i.e., it only claimed to be written by the Apostle Peter.<\/p>\n
With this understanding of the timeline, the passage in 2 Peter makes complete sense. By the time we arrive at AD 100-150, Paul has been dead for decades. We know that the early church was a time of divergent sects and argument between different Christian theologians or church leaders. There was actually much more theological diversity in the early church than there is in Christianity today\u2014and every one of these groups would have been claiming to base their beliefs and teachings on Paul.<\/p>\n
It makes perfect sense that the person who wrote 2 Peter would reference \u201cuntaught and unstable people\u201d who \u201ctwist\u201d Paul\u2019s letters \u201cto their own destruction, as they do all the rest of scriptures.\u201d\u00a0He\u2019s intervening in a period of great theological dispute. He\u2019s insisting that he is Paul\u2019s true<\/em> theological heir, and that all those other people saying Paul\u2019s letters mean something else are wrong<\/em>.<\/p>\nNow, fundamentalists like those at Answers in Genesis don\u2019t leave room for\u00a0pseudoepigraphical books. If 2 Peter says it was written by the Apostle Peter, by golly,<\/em> it was written by the Apostle Peter. In this sense the larger contradiction is Peter\u2019s reference to Paul\u2019s writings as \u201cscripture,\u201d which would have been completely ahistorical\u2014not even evangelicals dispute that the Bible canon wasn\u2019t settled until much later.<\/p>\nEven from a fundamentalist standpoint, though, claiming there\u2019s a contradiction between these two verses still feels like splitting hairs. Why not assume that Paul said he was being straightforward in his writing, and Peter noted the obvious\u2014that some people were twisting Paul\u2019s writings to mean things they didn\u2019t?<\/p>\n
This really feels like missing the forest for the trees.<\/p>\n
When I read 2 Peter 3:16 today, my response is fascination. Disagreement over Christian doctrine\u2014doctrine I\u2019d been taught to think of as obvious or settled\u2014occurred so early on that the canonical books of the Bible themselves<\/em> refer to the swift divergence of disparate Christian sects.<\/p>\nThis makes me genuinely curious what else<\/em> I would find if I reread the letters in the New Testament today, as a nonreligious adult with some training in the classics, rather than as an evangelical teen. I wonder whether fundamentalist insistence in taking these passages literally and refusing to read them historically actually flattens<\/em> them, erasing meaning that might otherwise jump out at the reader.<\/p>\nI have a <\/b>Patreon<\/b><\/a>! Please support my writing!\u00a0<\/span><\/b><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When I read 2 Peter 3:16 today, my response is fascination. Disagreement over Christian doctrine—doctrine I’d been taught to think of as obvious or settled—occurred so early on that the canonical books of the Bible themselves refer to the swift divergence of disparate Christian sects.<\/p>\n
Click through to read more!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":845,"featured_media":46245,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[22,993,996,978],"class_list":["post-43605","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-evangelicalism-fundamentalism","tag-bible","tag-early-church","tag-historical-criticism","tag-new-testament"],"yoast_head":"\n
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