Talk:Criticism of the Bible

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In the authorship section there should be a mention of every undisputed author

I believe some books written by the prophets have legitimate authorship, such as Amoz and Jeremiah.Alexandre Newman (talk) 04:56, 30 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia articles mainly act as summaries of reliable sources. Further, Wikipedia doesn't publish original research, so your interpretation of the Bible as a Wikipedia editor cannot be cited. If you know of reliable sources which discuss this as it relates to criticism of the Bible, please feel free to propose them here. Grayfell (talk) 05:08, 30 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

'Internal Consistency' Final Paragraph

The final paragraph under this section talks about how Ahaziah of Judah's age is inconsistent. However, there are a couple issues.

Firstly, I feel it can be written better. There are some minor grammatical errors, such as forgetting to capitalise 'Kings' in "2 Kings 8:26". As well as this, it also uses numerous colloquialisms such as "when you look at earlier manuscripts [...] , it says 20 years not 42.", instead of, for example, "earlier manuscripts [...] suggest Ahaziah's age to be 20 years old." My biggest issue is with the last sentence, which states, "Nobody can become king at 22, captured by an invading army, and 20 years later, when he is free and is king again, he is 2 years younger than the original age he became king." I feel it does not carry a neutral tone as stated in the Wikipedia policy.

Secondly, I believe it is better suited for the 'Translation issues' section. From what I found from https://www.biblestudytools.com/2-chronicles/22-2-compare.html, some translations state his age was 22, while others have written 42. Unless corrected for consistency, it is likely a translation error. Uncomfortably Underwhelmed (talk) 08:42, 15 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The answer is that we don't know what the Bible originally said about that. Bible manuscripts were copied by hand, and all those manuscripts have errors, some are spelling errors, other are gross errors.

A classic example is "Abraham saw a ram behind him" vs. "Abraham saw one single ram". Theologically it is not very important, but it is an error in some manuscripts and translations. tgeorgescu (talk) 16:37, 15 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]