MY BIBLE INTERPRETATION

Inerrant Bible, Part 2

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Let us revisit the question of whether Jesus was arrested before or after the Passover seder. (See Inerrant Bible, Part 1.)
On the first day of the Festival of Unleavened Bread, when it was customary to sacrifice the Passover lamb, Jesus’ disciples asked him, “Where do you want us to go and make preparations for you to eat the Passover?” Mark 14:12
NIV
It was the day of Preparation of the Passover; it was about noon. “Here is your king,” Pilate said to the Jews. John 19:14
NIV
So Mark says after, and John says before. One of them must be wrong. This is a clear contradiction.
But wait… According to the Dead Sea scrolls, the Essenes, a sect of the Jews, used a different calendar from the other Jews. The Essenes’ calendar had 364 days in a year, but the temple calendar had 360 days in a year. And, this web page shows that, in the year 30 AD, the temple Passover began one day after the Essene Passover. With this information, we can resolve the contradiction by supposing that Jesus ate the Passover seder in the Essenes’ quarter of Jerusalem on April 2nd, then he was arrested on April 3rd, and on that evening, Passover began on the temple calendar. The “clear contradiction” has been explained.


So what should I conclude? It certainly seems like the Bible is no more inerrant than any other books written by human beings. But then in the last example, we saw how a “clear contradition” had a reasonable explanation. Maybe there are reasonable explanations for all of these apparent contradictions, and until we have found them, we can maintain faith…


References
NIV New International Version. 1984. International Bible Society. http://www.biblegateway.com/versions/?action=getVersionInfo&vid=31
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