Talking with a friend, I was reminded of some things I've read in the Bible that I just don't understand. Mind you, I'm a dedicated student and I've looked into these already, but reading the original languages, the commentaries, and study guides haven't really shed any light on them.
1. The Tree in the Garden of Eden
There were two trees in the middle of the Garden, in fact. The Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The second one is the one Adam and Eve were told to stay away from, and as we know they did not.
But hang on - why did God put the tree there in the first place? God already knew the difference, and He didn't want Adam and Eve to. So what did anyone need the tree for?
2. The Physics of the Day God Made the Sun Stand Still
In the conquest of Canaan, Joshua commanded the sun to stand still so they could finish a battle, and God made it happen.
Did God cause the earth to stop? Granted, if He did, He could also have stopped everything from sliding west at thousands of miles an hour from the inertia, but that also would have lengthened the day all over the world. On the other side, they would have had night for an unusually long time. Are there any records of that? God also could have created an image of the sun and light just over the battlefield. When the sun eventually started moving again, did it jump ahead to where it would have been or just start up from where it was? The only other idea I had is that God could have isolated that area in time so that they had hours where everyone else had minutes. But the Bible doesn't give any clues as to which, if any, of these methods He used.
3. Jesus Withering the Fig Tree
In the book of Mark, Jesus enters Jerusalem at the start of Passover week and sends someone ahead of him to find a colt he says they will find tied up, and says that when the owner asks them what they're doing to say that the Master has need of it and will send it back shortly. Sure enough, the colt is there, and the answer they've been given is sufficient to borrow it for Jesus' entry into the city. At the end of the week, on the night of the betrayal, Jesus sends someone into the market and tells them they will see a man carrying a jug of water. That man will have a guest room prepared for the Passover feast and they are to ask him if they can use it. Again, just as Jesus said, they found the man and went to his upper room for the feast.
In between these two displays of omniscience, Jesus is riding through the city and he sees a fig tree in the distance. He sends someone to see if there are any figs on it. His followers say there won't be, as it's the wrong time of the year for figs. Sure enough, there aren't any. Jesus curses the tree and the next day they notice it's withered away to nothing.
What was that about? Jesus had already fed thousands of people from just a small bit of food twice. Why not command the tree to make figs? Instead, he had to send someone to find out something his own followers already knew, and when he was disappointed with the answer (again, not a surprising one), he destroyed the property of an innocent person. That's not like Jesus at all. Why did he do that?
4. God's Repentance
God is recorded as being constant and unchanging, knowing everything from the beginning of time to the end of time. In the story of Jonah, God calls the prophet to go to Nineveh and urge the people to repent. Apart from the famous part of the story with the fish, Jonah does as God ordered and the people of Nineveh did repent. The difficulty is found in the last sentence of chapter 3: "And when the Lord saw that the people of Nineveh repented of their evil ways, He had compassion on them and repented of the evil he would do."
That sentence requires you to accept that a) God was prepared to do something evil until b) He changed His mind. Both of those are ideas that are pretty hard to imagine God doing. Unless of course He never really meant to carry through with it in the first place, in which case He lied to Jonah at the beginning. There's no interpretation of that idea that's not hard to square with the image of God given over and over in the Bible.
5. The Timing of the Resurrection
In Matthew, when Jesus is being pursued by the mob seeking a miraculous sign, he turns to them and proclaims them a wicked generation, and that they will get no sign but the sign of Jonah, for as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the fish so shall Jesus be three days and three nights in the earth. Mark's version is a little more flexible: Jesus says he shall revive within three days. Matthew's, on the other hand stamps it out: three days, and three nights.
In every account of the crucifixion, however, Jesus dies Friday afternoon, is buried that evening, spends all day Saturday buried, and revives sometime in the night before Sunday morning. That's at best a day and a half, and two nights, one of those incomplete. Was Jesus being literal? As I've pointed out before, and have other people, time doesn't mean the same thing with God as it does with us. But given that it's a pretty important prophecy about his death and resurrection, why would Jesus be giving us "God days" and mean us to understand them in "Man days"?
I have a few other things I don't know for sure about the Bible, but these are the five stories I really can't tell you which is the right answer.
While I'm thinking about it, here are some common misconceptions addressed:
The viper that bit Paul after the shipwreck was dormant in the brush he threw in the fire, and when it bit him it latched on. Vipers have retractable fangs for injecting their venom and they're not strong enough to hold onto something, which means it bit him out of surprise just looking for a way out of the fire, and couldn't have injected any venom.
Jesus was probably not an only child. Although Mary was a virgin when Jesus was conceived, and Joseph also didn't touch her until after Jesus was born, Jesus is recorded as having brothers in the Bible and some non-Gospel sources name them as Joseph, James, Jude, and a sister named Mary.
Paul probably didn't write Hebrews. Experts who've examined the writing style, word choice, etc. think it was more likely written by Timothy, but ultimately we may never know.
There is no book called Revelations. The book of The Revelation has no S at the end of it. Be very careful of people who cite it that way, as they probably didn't look it up at all. Moreover, the word Antichrist does not appear anywhere in it. It only appears in the book of Jude and never refers to an individual.
Jesus's medical cause of death was probably internal hemorrhage. It's possible that under all the physical and emotional stress he endured his blood pressure got so high a major blood vessel ruptured. This would explain the sweat like blood in the garden the night before, and how he stayed conscious throughout the entire ordeal. The spear in the side didn't kill him; it just served to show that he was indeed dead.
There really are no "ten commandments." In the first list God gives out there are 14, and the whole of what he gives to Moses are 613, all of which were written on the stone tablets. The so-called ten are not necessarily the most important, either, they were just the first few God managed to say before he was interrupted.
Noah didn't take only two of any animal on the ark - they were taken "by twos, the male and his female," two by two being four. Further, the clean beasts were brought by sevens, making 14 each of those.
Jesus called a total of 87 handpicked followers: the 12 apostles and 75 disciples who accompanied him and the apostles on most of their missionary work.
Judas did not betray Jesus for money. He had decided that it was the right thing to do, because he believed in the authority of the Jewish Sanhedrin above the authority of Jesus. It was when they paid him out of gratitude, that he realized he had made a big mistake.
Peter's name wasn't Peter. He was Simon. Jesus named him Peter (Petros - stone). Similarly, James and John, the fishermen called along with Peter and his brother Andrew, were sons of a man named Zebedee. Jesus named them Boannerges - Sons of Thunder - for requesting that he strike a city with lightning after they refused to listen.
Jesus's name wasn't even Jesus. His name in Hebrew was Yeshua - Joshua. Jesus is the Greek version.
God's given name of Jehovah is a double mistranslation. It was coined by Martin Luther. Because in the Hebrew, Yahweh was never spoken aloud, it had the vowel markings for the word adonai, meaning lord. Luther read it as Yahowai, but because he was translating it into German the Y,W, and I were changed. Jehovah is the Anglicized spelling of the German mistranslation of the Hebrew.
In the movie adaptations of the Exodus story, the magicians of Egypt are always shown to be faking their versions of Moses' miraculous signs through some sort of trick. However, the Bible indicates that their powers were indeed real, although they were not as powerful. Likewise the Witch of Endor is portrayed as actually having revived Samuel's spirit from the grave. While the Bible forbids pursuing of these practices, it gives every indication that the supernatural powers are genuine.
Unlike God, there is little to suggest that the devil is all-powerful or omniscient.
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