Internal consistency of the Bible

The question of the internal consistency of the Bible concerns the coherence and textual integrity of the biblical scriptures. Disputes regarding biblical consistency have a long history. The church father Origen (184/185 – 253/254 CE) replied to the writer Celsus, a critic of Christianity, who had complained that some Christians had remodelled the Gospel to answer objections, admitting that some had done so.

Classic texts that discuss questions of inconsistency, from a critical secular perspective, include The Age of Reason by Thomas Paine, the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus by Baruch Spinoza, the Encyclopédie of Denis Diderot, and the Dictionnaire philosophique of Voltaire.

For many believers, the internal consistency of the Jewish and Christian scriptures is of importance because they feel that any inconsistencies or contradictions could challenge belief in truth of their contents and the view that they are of divine origin. On the subject of the Jewish text, B. Barry Levy writes about the Torah that "the textual integrity of every biblical book should be extremely important to those interested in either the Hebrew Bible or classical Jewish thought." Levy also writes that "Despite the popular, pious-sounding assumption that the Torah text is letter-perfect, frequent and extensive discussions by highly respected rabbinic leaders demonstrate that they, in some measure similar to modern scholars, were concerned about its true textual state; some of them even tried to clarify known textual doubts and to eliminate many troublesome inconsistencies." However, the modern writer Joshua Golding states that even though it contains inconsistencies, this "does not imply that God did not reveal the Torah."

...
Wikipedia