Well folks, I might have just found the most heretical thing ever said from behind a pulpit…
Meet Episcopal “Priestess” Flourish Klink who just said Jesus was trans and God is non-binary.
Take a look here if you can stomach it:
Episcopal priestess says Mary assigned Jesus male at birth, but he was trans. And when he was resurrected, he came back as His true, transgender self. pic.twitter.com/ox1yIfAT9e
— The Dissenter (@disntr) September 23, 2026
At least based readers on X immediately slapped this with a Community Note.
The NY Post called it “outlandish”:
NYC Episcopal priest Flourish Klink claims Jesus is trans and God is nonbinary in outlandish sermon https://t.co/oOMmE9HigG pic.twitter.com/ax50htvMRt
— New York Post (@nypost) September 25, 2026
Eric Metaxas did not hold back, calling her mentally ill:
This woman is mentally ill, thinking this haircut makes her a man — and saying the looniest things imaginable from a pulpit in a church. The Episcopal Church leadership that made her a "priest" is, of course, heretical and vapid. https://t.co/1pUgVQ9oRd
— Eric Metaxas (@ericmetaxas) September 25, 2026
Others claimed she is not Christian to begin with:
This woman says Mary assigned Jesus male at birth, but he was trans. And when he was resurrected, he came back as his true, transgender self
This has to be the most ridiculous thing I've heard pic.twitter.com/jYw4ijOZUJ
These people are not Christians, they’re just writing fan…
— Defiant L’s (@DefiantLs) September 24, 2026
So, is that the worst one you have ever heard?
Top of the list?
How does it compare to these?
I guess we’re slaying some dragons today in terms of heretical teaching….
I just got done exposing the Catholic heresy of Purgatory (that article below in case you missed it) but now I have to deal with the Methodists.
Because this is just straight up nasty teaching.
According to Protestia, the video below shows Methodist Pastor Katie Gilbert, smugly and arrogantly claiming that the Bible is full of mistakes, errors and contradictions.
At least, that is, when she’s not plugging her own book from the pulpit.
Wow.
Watch here:
And honestly, don’t these two look EXACTLY how you’d expect them to look?
I can’t even describe what it is exactly about them, but this is exactly what I would expect someone who has this take to look like.
FULL TRANSCRIPT:
Now, if you noticed in our sermon title for today, which, like I said, is taken from a chapter in the book, this week we are going to admit that we love you, Bible, just not like that.
Over the years, we have worked to make sure that we aren’t worshiping the Bible or putting the Bible on a pedestal over and above the teachings and example of Jesus.
As we talk about in Manna and Mercy—I told y’all that I would be making some shameless plugs—we hope you can come and join us for that retreat. But in Manna and Mercy, we talk about this idea that we are called to worship God and not the Bible.
Now, the book that we call the Bible is a complicated and fascinating collection of different types of literature, jam-packed with stories and imagery, some of which we might never be able to fully make complete sense of.
As you heard Matt read in Proverbs chapter 26, there are contradictions just verse after verse, right there next to each other. And that’s only scratching the surface.
In Deuteronomy 20:17, God says to annihilate your enemies. Then we have Jesus come along and, in Matthew 5:44, tell us to love our enemies.
In Deuteronomy 23:3, we learn that Moabites were barred from worship in the temple, only to discover later that Ruth—who, for reference, is David’s grandmother and therefore an ancestor of Jesus—was actually a Moabite.
In Deuteronomy 23:1, we learn that eunuchs were restricted from the temple, only to then, in Acts 8, find Philip baptizing the Ethiopian eunuch.
I could go on, but I think you probably get the point. The Bible is full of contradictions.
And that’s to be expected from a text that was written by a variety of different authors, living at different historical periods of time, writing for different reasons, and in different languages and genres of text.
There is simply no way to reconcile all of these differences to find one coherent, literal, and linear progression throughout our text.
Even beyond those contradictions within the text, we have to consider those historical inaccuracies as well.
Kevin will get to dive into this more later when we talk about the cosmos, but modern science has shown us that the world was not created in a mere seven days.
In addition, there’s no archaeological evidence of a mass exodus of slaves out of Egypt, nor is there anything that supports the destruction of Jericho following the biblical timeline for such an event.
There’s no conquests of Joshua, and if you try to track down all the kings and leaders mentioned in the Old Testament—which, good on you if you want to—you’ll find a big old spider web of uncertainties and historical inaccuracies.
Because, you see, the biblical authors weren’t concerned with these kinds of accuracies. These tales weren’t intended to be factual accounts of their world. In fact, many of them are quite the opposite.
I like to think of them as the stories that I grew up on: Aesop’s fables.
These tales weren’t factual accounts of our world. But they were a part of an ancient oral tradition, some dating all the way back to the Egyptians, and they were passed down over time, eventually written down by the Greeks and the Romans.
And Aesop’s fables were intended to teach a truth or land a moral of the story.
You might recall stories like Tortoise and the Hare: slow and steady wins the race. Or The Boy Who Cries Wolf: no one will believe a liar, even when the time comes for him or her to speak the truth. Or The Lion and the Mouse, that teaches even the weakest can be of help to the strongest.
These stories were written to share not facts, but truth.
And something similar is at play when we consider the biblical authors.
And now, because I don’t want to leave you with bad teaching, let’s end with some rock-solid teaching.
Let’s go to Dr. Michael S. Heiser.
Here’s how Dr. Michael S. Heiser would “educate” this “Pastor”….Heiser makes her look like a mental-midget grasshopper in comparison to his real brain:
The Bible Is Not the Book Its Critics—or Many Christians—Think It Is
The first problem in most discussions about alleged biblical contradictions is that people begin with the wrong Bible.
Not the wrong translation.
The wrong concept of what the Bible is.
A critic approaches Scripture expecting something resembling a twenty-first-century history textbook, scientific monograph, courtroom transcript, chronological biography, or stenographic record. A fundamentalist often makes essentially the same mistake, except that he insists the Bible miraculously conforms to all those modern expectations.
Then the two sides fight over whether the Bible succeeds at being something it never claimed to be.
That is the first category error.
The Bible is an ancient collection of literary works written through human beings living in particular cultures, speaking ancient languages, using ancient literary conventions, thinking within an ancient worldview, and addressing ancient audiences. God chose those people and that cultural world as the means through which revelation would be communicated.
If you ignore that fact, you are not interpreting the Bible conservatively.
You are misinterpreting it.
Heiser repeatedly objected to judging Scripture by standards of truth and error alien to its original usage and purpose. He specifically approved that principle in the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy while criticizing formulations that seemed to pull Scripture toward modern categories it was never intended to satisfy.
1. Inspiration Does Not Mean Divine Dictation
Start here, because almost everything else follows from it.
The Bible says Scripture is theopneustos—“God-breathed”—in 2 Timothy 3:16. But that tells you the ultimate source and status of Scripture. It does not provide a mechanical theory explaining how every word arrived on the page.
Heiser argued that inspiration ordinarily worked through providence rather than continuous dictation.
The human writers were real authors.
They had vocabularies.
They had educational backgrounds.
They had personalities.
They had literary preferences.
They had sources.
They edited material.
They arranged material.
They selected material.
They occasionally quoted other writings.
They lived inside an ancient Near Eastern or Greco-Roman intellectual environment.
And all of that is visible in the text.
There are occasional passages where God explicitly dictates words, but those cases are unusual. If every biblical sentence had been dictated directly by God, those explicit dictation episodes would hardly need to be identified as such.
Heiser therefore distinguished between the immediate authors of Scripture—the humans—and its ultimate source, God.
That distinction matters enormously.
God did not erase the writers’ humanity in order to produce Scripture.
He used it.
That means inspiration should not be imagined as God turning Isaiah, Moses, Luke, Paul, or John into word-processing terminals.
Heiser compared inspiration to providence. Christians believe God can accomplish his purposes through ordinary human decisions without overriding human agency at every instant. He thought Scripture should be understood similarly: God superintended a human process toward an intended product.
2. Ask What Scripture Was Intended to Accomplish
This was central to Heiser’s approach.
People tend to begin with:
“What things must the Bible be incapable of containing if it came from God?”
Heiser wanted to begin somewhere else:
What does Scripture itself say God gave Scripture to accomplish?
Immediately after saying Scripture is God-breathed, 2 Timothy 3:16–17 tells you its purpose: teaching, correction, reproof, training in righteousness, and equipping God’s people for good works.
That matters.
It means Scripture identifies the purposes for which God gave it.
It does not say:
“All Scripture is God-breathed and profitable for teaching astronomy, plate tectonics, genetics, modern historiography, meteorology, or the precise physical structure of the cosmos.”
Heiser consequently argued that inerrancy has to be connected to what Scripture actually purports to teach, not every cultural assumption or rhetorical device appearing in the discourse.
That does not mean:
“Anything embarrassing doesn’t count.”
It means language has intent.
We use this principle constantly.
Suppose someone says:
“The sun came up at 6:15 this morning.”
Nobody screams:
“Scientific error! The sun didn’t come up. The earth rotated!”
Why?
Because we understand what the statement is doing.
It is observational language.
The speaker is not presenting a lecture in heliocentric astronomy.
Heiser’s point was that biblical language deserves the same elementary interpretive fairness.
3. Stop Imposing Modern Scientific Categories on Ancient Texts
The biblical writers possessed an ancient cosmology.
Heiser did not evade this.
He emphasized it.
Ancient Israelites described the world using concepts common to the intellectual environment of the ancient Near East. Their descriptions of the heavens and earth are not disguised astrophysics.
And Heiser explicitly rejected attempts to turn them into modern astrophysics.
He even made the provocative observation that the ancient biblical cosmology, understood as physical science, is demonstrably not our cosmology: spacecraft do not collide with a solid heavenly dome, nor do satellites orbit beneath one.
But—and this is the crucial distinction—he did not conclude:
“Therefore the Bible has failed.”
Why?
Because the biblical writers were not teaching astronomy.
Their ancient picture of the world was the conceptual furniture through which they communicated claims about God, creation, humanity, rebellion, divine sovereignty, sacred space, and redemption.
God accommodated revelation to human understanding.
And of course he did.
Every divine communication to finite humanity is accommodation.
If God communicated everything he knows about the universe in categories adequate to omniscience, nobody in 1000 BC could understand it.
Neither could anybody in 2026.
Heiser therefore regarded divine accommodation not as an embarrassment but as an inevitable consequence of revelation.
God speaks to people in terms people can understand.
4. The Bible Must Be Read as Ancient Literature
This eliminates a large class of alleged contradictions.
Ancient historians did not operate according to twenty-first-century documentary conventions.
They could:
arrange material thematically instead of chronologically,
compress events,
expand events,
omit material,
select different details,
paraphrase speeches,
summarize speeches,
use conventional numerical patterns,
use hyperbole,
structure genealogies symbolically,
combine sources,
rework earlier material for a new rhetorical purpose,
and present the same event differently depending upon the author’s theological objective.
None of those things automatically constitutes deception.
Modern writers do many of them too.
A contradiction exists only when two propositions are genuinely mutually exclusive and when both texts intend to assert those mutually exclusive propositions in the same sense.
That last qualification gets ignored constantly.
5. Different Accounts Are Not Automatically Contradictions
Suppose one Gospel mentions one angel at the tomb and another mentions two.
If the first text says:
“There was exactly one angel present, and no others,”
while the second says:
“There were exactly two,”
you have a contradiction.
But if the first author simply mentions one angel—the one who speaks—and another reports two, there is no formal contradiction.
One account is less complete.
That is not the same thing as being false.
This sounds elementary, because it is.
But enormous numbers of internet “Bible contradictions” depend upon treating difference as synonymous with contradiction.
They are not synonymous.
Neither are omission and denial.
Neither are paraphrase and falsification.
Neither are different perspectives and contradiction.
6. The Gospels Are Ancient Biographies, Not Video Recordings
If Matthew and Luke arrange the same material differently, the first question should not be:
“Which one screwed it up?”
The first question should be:
“What is each author doing with the material?”
Ancient biographical writing permitted topical arrangement.
It permitted selection.
It permitted condensation.
It permitted paraphrase.
The Gospel writers were theologians as well as narrators. Their arrangement of material communicates meaning.
The assumption that all four Gospels ought to read like four independently synchronized police body cameras is historically absurd.
Even modern witnesses describing the same event rarely produce identical reports.
In fact, perfectly identical independent reports would raise another problem: dependence or collusion.
The variations among the Gospels are exactly what one expects when different authors select and arrange shared historical traditions for different audiences and theological purposes.
7. Matthew’s Genealogy Is an Excellent Example
Matthew structures Jesus’ genealogy around groups of fourteen.
But Matthew omits individuals known from the Old Testament genealogical record.
Is Matthew ignorant?
Probably not.
The arrangement is deliberate.
Heiser pointed out that virtually every New Testament scholar recognizes Matthew’s genealogy as intentionally selective. One attractive explanation connects the number fourteen with David, whose Hebrew name דוד has the numerical values 4 + 6 + 4 = 14.
Matthew is introducing Jesus as the Davidic Messiah.
The genealogy is doing theology through literary structure.
The critic who says:
“Matthew skipped names; therefore Matthew made a mistake,”
has missed what Matthew is doing.
Ancient genealogies did not necessarily function as exhaustive modern ancestry databases.
“Begat” or equivalent genealogical language can describe descent across generations.
Selective genealogy was an accepted literary convention.
Once you understand the genre, the alleged error changes categories.
8. Numerical Problems Must Be Read Literarily Too
Heiser was particularly interested in the enormous numbers found in portions of the Old Testament.
Some traditional readings produce populations that appear difficult to reconcile with archaeology, geography, logistics, and the ancient world.
One reaction is to spend enormous effort trying to prove every number must represent a modern statistical census count.
Heiser thought that assumption itself needed examination.
Ancient texts frequently used numbers rhetorically, symbolically, schematically, or hyperbolically.
He pointed readers toward scholarship arguing that some large Old Testament numbers exhibit literary or mathematical artificiality.
If the number functions rhetorically, treating it as a modern census statistic is not defending Scripture.
It is misreading it.
The modern reader asks:
“Is that the exact head count?”
The ancient author may be communicating:
“This was an overwhelmingly enormous force.”
Those are different communicative intentions.
Hyperbole is not error.
If I say:
“Everybody in town was there,”
you do not disprove me by finding three residents who stayed home.
You first ask what kind of statement I intended.
The Bible deserves the same semantic intelligence we use everywhere else.
9. Psalm 105 and the Exodus Plagues
Psalm 105 recounts the plagues of Egypt differently from Exodus.
Some are omitted.
The sequence is not identical.
A simplistic approach says:
“Gotcha. Somebody forgot the order.”
Heiser used precisely this kind of example to argue that literary design must be investigated before declaring an error.
A psalm is not a police report.
The psalmist is re-presenting Israel’s history poetically and theologically.
Selection and rearrangement can serve literary purposes.
If an author deliberately reshapes known material to create a poetic structure, that is not the same thing as trying and failing to remember what happened.
Heiser’s principle was simple:
When a coherent literary explanation exists, literary artistry should not be mislabeled factual error.
10. Genesis 1 and Genesis 2
Another favorite alleged contradiction:
Genesis 1 has one sequence.
Genesis 2 supposedly has another.
Therefore, contradiction.
Again, slow down.
You first have to establish that both chapters are trying to provide the same kind of chronological account.
That is precisely what must be demonstrated rather than assumed.
Genesis 2 narrows the narrative dramatically, focusing on the human pair, the garden, sacred space, vocation, marriage, and the circumstances surrounding humanity.
Heiser discussed the apparent vegetation difficulty between Genesis 1 and 2 and explored whether Genesis 2 is describing a localized subsequent creative activity associated particularly with Eden rather than retelling the entire creation sequence as a competing chronology.
The broader point is methodological:
Don’t manufacture contradictions by flattening distinct literary units into the same genre and purpose.
11. Samuel and Chronicles: Sometimes the Problem Is Real
Here Heiser becomes especially useful because he did not pretend difficult texts weren’t difficult.
Consider David’s census.
2 Samuel 24 says Yahweh’s anger burned against Israel and that David was incited to conduct the census.
1 Chronicles 21 says a satan—an adversary—stood against Israel and incited David.
Heiser himself called the accounts, as they stand, explicitly contradictory regarding the immediate instigator.
That is worth emphasizing.
He did not say:
“There are never any passages that appear contradictory.”
He examined the Hebrew.
The Hebrew term satan is fundamentally a common noun meaning “adversary.” In much of the Old Testament it is not yet functioning as the personal proper name “Satan” in the later Christian sense.
Consequently, the interpretive possibilities are more complicated than an English reader assumes from seeing a capital S.
Heiser’s broader lesson is exactly the one critics routinely skip:
Before declaring that two texts contradict each other, examine the original language, semantic range, textual history, theology, and literary relationship between the passages.
Sometimes there is a resolution.
Sometimes several resolutions are possible.
Sometimes the evidence is insufficient to decide.
But “I can think of no resolution” is not logically equivalent to “no resolution exists.”
12. Historical Discrepancies Require Epistemic Humility
This point is often ignored.
To demonstrate a genuine historical error, you need adequate historical information.
But ancient history is reconstructed from fragmentary sources.
Often we have only a tiny fraction of the evidence that once existed.
So when an ancient inscription, Josephus, or another historian appears to disagree with Scripture, one cannot simply announce:
“The Bible loses.”
Why assume the surviving nonbiblical writer is necessarily correct?
Heiser raised precisely this methodological issue when discussing purported discrepancies involving Acts and Josephus.
Josephus was not omniscient.
Luke was not omniscient.
Modern historians are not omniscient.
If two ancient sources differ, historical criticism must determine what can actually be known.
A contradiction between sources may exist.
But identifying which account is wrong may be impossible.
And sometimes two apparently conflicting reports concern different people or events sharing similar names.
The evidence has to decide.
Not prejudice.
13. Unresolved Is Not the Same as Unresolvable
This is basic logic.
Suppose there are 500 alleged discrepancies and you can explain 450.
You are left with 50.
What follows?
Only this:
You presently lack persuasive resolutions for 50.
It does not logically follow that those 50 have no possible explanation.
To make that stronger claim requires knowledge you do not possess.
Heiser specifically said he could live with the proposition that unresolved discrepancies do not invalidate Scripture’s truth claims, because declaring them permanently irresolvable would essentially require omniscience.
That is not a trick.
It is elementary epistemology.
An unanswered question is an unanswered question.
It is not automatically a refutation.
14. But Christians Must Not Cheat Either
This is where Heiser differed from a lot of popular apologetics.
Do not invent absurd harmonizations simply because you are terrified of saying:
“I don’t know.”
Do not distort Hebrew.
Do not distort Greek.
Do not ignore manuscript evidence.
Do not pretend archaeology says something it doesn’t.
Do not manufacture scientific concordism.
Do not force every biblical number to operate like an Excel spreadsheet.
Do not make the biblical writers conform to your theology of inspiration.
Your doctrine of Scripture has to accommodate the actual phenomena of Scripture.
Not the other way around.
Heiser said explicitly that he wanted a definition of inerrancy that was honest, defensible, coherent, and consistent with the textual data and general revelation. He rejected pretending problems don’t exist simply because a particular theological formulation requires that they disappear.
That’s an important distinction.
Faithfulness to Scripture means following the evidence.
15. Manuscript Variants Are Real
Now we reach another enormous misunderstanding.
People say:
“There are hundreds of thousands of textual variants in biblical manuscripts! Therefore we don’t know what the Bible originally said.”
That conclusion does not follow.
First, manuscript transmission and inspiration are different questions.
Inspiration concerns the production of the biblical texts.
Textual criticism concerns their subsequent copying and transmission.
Ancient manuscripts were copied by hand.
Scribes made mistakes.
Letters were omitted.
Words were repeated.
Spellings differed.
Marginal notes sometimes entered the text.
Parallel passages occasionally influenced one another.
There are places where the surviving Hebrew text is damaged or uncertain.
Heiser was completely candid about this.
His work against the so-called Bible Code actually depended upon it: the idea that God preserved an absolutely identical sequence of Hebrew letters through history is demonstrably false. Manuscripts differ.
But that is devastating to Bible codes, not Christianity.
Why?
Because textual criticism compares manuscripts.
A copying error is not invisible when multiple independent witnesses survive.
If one manuscript reads ABCD and twenty earlier witnesses read ACBD, scholars can investigate which reading best explains the others.
The existence of textual variants is exactly what gives scholars the data needed to reconstruct the text.
16. 1 Samuel 13:1 Shows Why Honesty Matters
Heiser highlighted 1 Samuel 13:1 as a classic example.
The Hebrew text appears defective regarding Saul’s age and/or length of reign.
Modern translations handle the problem differently because the underlying textual problem is real.
A dishonest apologetic approach tries to pretend nothing happened.
A mature approach says:
Some information was apparently lost or corrupted during transmission.
That should bother a theory demanding flawless copying through every generation.
It does not logically refute the inspiration of the original work.
Those are two different doctrines:
inspiration
and
perfect transmission.
The Bible itself never promises that every scribe throughout history would copy every character without error.
Do not demand a miracle Scripture never promises.
17. Variants Do Not Mean We Have No Bible
This point requires perspective.
If you have thousands of manuscripts, you will have more textual variants than if you have five manuscripts.
Paradoxically, a large number of variants can be a consequence of having an enormous amount of manuscript evidence.
Imagine one book survives in a single handwritten copy.
Number of observable disagreements between manuscripts:
zero.
Does that mean we possess the original perfectly?
No.
We simply have nothing with which to compare it.
Now suppose the same work survives in 5,000 copies.
There will be thousands upon thousands of differences.
But now scholars can compare them geographically, chronologically, genealogically, and linguistically.
The raw number of variants by itself tells you almost nothing.
The important questions are:
What kind of variants are they?
How many affect meaning?
How many plausible readings exist?
Can the earliest recoverable text be reconstructed?
Do any uncertain readings overturn foundational Christian doctrines?
Heiser repeatedly encouraged people to learn textual criticism rather than panic over slogans popularized by skeptical treatments of manuscript variation.
18. A Translation Is Not the Original Text
This sounds obvious until apologetic arguments start.
Someone points to two English translations that differ and announces a contradiction.
That proves almost nothing.
Hebrew and Greek words possess semantic ranges.
Syntax can be ambiguous.
Manuscripts can differ.
Translators make interpretive decisions.
Translation itself is interpretation.
Heiser therefore urged serious students to compare translations and particularly appreciated resources such as the NET Bible because its notes expose textual and translational decisions rather than hiding them.
Sometimes what looks like a biblical contradiction is actually a translation issue.
You have not identified a contradiction in Scripture until you know what the underlying text actually says.
19. The Bible Frequently Uses Phenomenological Language
“The sun rose.”
“The ends of the earth.”
“The four corners of the earth.”
“Stars fell.”
“The whole world.”
Statements like these cannot simply be fed into a modern scientific parser.
Language describes things as humans experience them.
We still say “sunrise” while knowing perfectly well that Earth’s rotation produces the phenomenon.
Nobody petitions the Weather Channel to stop spreading geocentrism.
Why?
Because language operates contextually.
Ancient writers did the same thing.
Observational language is not a scientific hypothesis.
Poetry is not physics.
Metaphor is not geology.
Hyperbole is not arithmetic.
Symbolism is not journalism.
20. Genre Controls Meaning
This may be the single most violated rule of Bible interpretation.
If Revelation says a dragon stands before a woman in heaven, you do not ask NASA whether it has detected the dragon.
Why?
Genre.
If Psalm 98 says rivers clap their hands, you don’t accuse the psalmist of botanical or hydrological error.
Why?
Genre.
If Jesus says to remove the log from your eye, ophthalmologists need not intervene.
Why?
Genre.
Once everyone recognizes these obvious cases, the principle has already been conceded:
Truth is communicated through literary forms that cannot always be interpreted as literal physical descriptions.
The real interpretive work is determining where particular literary conventions operate.
That requires scholarship.
Not slogans.
21. Hyperbole Is True Communication
Biblical writers use exaggeration rhetorically.
Jesus tells people to cut off a hand or gouge out an eye if it causes sin.
The point is radical resistance to sin.
Treating the statement as surgical instruction would be grotesque misinterpretation.
Likewise, ancient warfare accounts often employ totalizing language.
“Destroyed everything.”
“Left none alive.”
“Everyone.”
Yet subsequent texts may mention surviving populations.
A critic immediately says:
“Contradiction.”
An ancient reader may hear conventional conquest rhetoric.
The question is historical and literary:
How did writers in that cultural world use such language?
If surrounding ancient Near Eastern texts routinely use total-destruction language rhetorically, then interpreting biblical warfare accounts without that background can produce fake contradictions.
The Bible was written for us.
It was not written to us.
That distinction is foundational to Heiser’s entire hermeneutical project.
22. Ancient Citation Practices Were Not Modern Citation Practices
New Testament writers quote the Old Testament in ways that sometimes differ from our English Old Testament.
Again:
“Contradiction!”
Not so fast.
Which textual tradition are they quoting?
The Masoretic Hebrew text?
The Septuagint?
Another Hebrew textual form?
Are they translating themselves?
Paraphrasing?
Combining passages?
Applying a Jewish interpretive technique?
Ancient writers did not use Chicago Manual of Style footnotes.
A quotation did not have to reproduce an earlier passage word-for-word according to modern academic rules.
Free citation was an accepted practice.
The Chicago Statement itself—at precisely a point Heiser approved—recognizes that free citations, topical arrangements, round numbers, differing selections of parallel material, observational descriptions, and lack of modern technical precision do not inherently constitute error.
23. The Old Testament Text Itself Had Multiple Ancient Forms
This is uncomfortable only if your doctrine of Scripture was formed without learning textual criticism.
The Dead Sea Scrolls show that ancient Hebrew manuscripts sometimes preserve forms differing from the later Masoretic tradition.
The Septuagint sometimes reflects a Hebrew Vorlage different from the Masoretic Text.
The Samaritan Pentateuch contains differences.
Jeremiah exists in significantly different textual forms.
That doesn’t mean:
“We have no idea what Jeremiah said.”
It means the transmission and editorial history of biblical books is more complicated than many Christians were taught.
Heiser’s response was:
Fine.
Deal with the data.
Your doctrine has to survive reality.
Reality does not have to conform to your Sunday-school theory.
24. Source Material Does Not Threaten Inspiration
Biblical writers used sources.
Luke practically tells you that he did.
Kings and Chronicles refer repeatedly to records.
Proverbs contains collections.
Biblical writers could inherit traditions, consult records, edit material, arrange material, and incorporate earlier documents.
Why should this threaten inspiration?
It only threatens inspiration if you have already defined inspiration as divine dictation.
But the Bible never demands that definition.
God can providentially use research.
God can providentially use memory.
God can providentially use sources.
God can providentially use editors.
God can providentially use literary artistry.
If providence is actually providence, none of this is difficult.
25. Similarities to Ancient Near Eastern Literature Are Expected
Another skeptical argument runs like this:
Genesis resembles Mesopotamian literature.
Biblical law resembles ancient Near Eastern legal collections.
Wisdom literature resembles Egyptian and Mesopotamian wisdom.
Therefore Israel copied pagan religion.
Therefore Bible debunked.
That inference is astonishingly simplistic.
Of course biblical writers share conceptual vocabulary with their cultural environment.
What else would they share?
Nineteenth-century American writers use nineteenth-century American conceptual categories.
Twenty-first-century physicists use twenty-first-century scientific categories.
Ancient Israelites lived in the ancient Near East.
The surprising thing would be if their literature bore no resemblance whatsoever to the intellectual environment in which they lived.
The theological question is not:
“Is there cultural overlap?”
Of course there is.
The question is:
“What does the biblical writer do with that material?”
Biblical authors frequently appropriate familiar imagery while radically changing its theology.
The shared cultural backdrop helps you understand the polemic.
It does not automatically undermine it.
26. Worldview Is Not the Same Thing as Teaching
This distinction was particularly important to Heiser.
A biblical author can possess an ancient understanding of the physical cosmos while making a theological claim that remains intact regardless of whether that ancient physical model corresponds to modern cosmology.
The writer’s worldview supplies the communicative framework.
The theology is what the writer is teaching.
Heiser summarized his position forcefully: Scripture does not teach science. Its writers were pre-scientific, and occasionally that shows. But a pre-scientific conceptual world appearing in an argument is not the same thing as Scripture presenting that cosmology as divine scientific instruction.
This distinction between rhetorical means and theological ends is one of the keys to his bibliology.
27. God Could Use Imperfect Means to Communicate Infallible Ends
This is perhaps the most controversial element of Heiser’s view.
He argued that God could permit the human writers’ cultural limitations to function as the vehicle of revelation without those limitations frustrating the truths God intended Scripture to communicate.
God’s objective was not to turn ancient Israelites into twenty-first-century scientists.
Nor was his objective to turn them into twenty-fifth-century scientists—which would only expose how temporary our own supposedly advanced understanding is.
God’s purpose was revelation concerning himself, humanity, sin, divine-human relations, redemption, covenant, morality, Messiah, resurrection, and the restoration of creation.
The human conceptual world was the vehicle.
Do not confuse the vehicle with the cargo.
Heiser described this accommodation as the unavoidable “cost,” so to speak, of God choosing genuine human communication.
28. This Is Not “Limited Inerrancy” in the Simplistic Sense
Heiser specifically resisted that label.
His proposal was essentially that Scripture inerrantly accomplishes its self-declared purposes.
That differs from saying:
“The Bible has errors, but fortunately the religious parts are correct.”
He thought that formulation imposed modern compartmentalization on Scripture.
Rather, the question must be:
What is the author actually asserting?
What is rhetorical packaging?
What is ancient worldview?
What is literary convention?
What is the intended teaching?
What purpose is the passage serving?
Those questions have to be answered by exegesis, not by arbitrarily putting verses into “religious” and “nonreligious” boxes.
29. The Bible’s Humanity Is Evidence of the Method God Chose
Some Christians appear embarrassed that Scripture looks human.
Heiser wasn’t.
Why wouldn’t it look human?
Humans wrote it.
Luke sounds like Luke.
Paul sounds like Paul.
John sounds like John.
Hebrews doesn’t sound like either.
Vocabulary differs.
Syntax differs.
Literary competence differs.
Theological emphases differ.
If inspiration required God to erase those differences, the data immediately falsify the theory.
But if inspiration means God providentially used real human authors to produce the revelation he intended, the differences are exactly what the model predicts.
30. Apparent Contradictions Often Come From Flattening Theology
There is another sort of alleged contradiction:
God is loving / God judges.
Human beings choose / God is sovereign.
No one has seen God / people saw God.
God is one / multiple divine figures appear in Old Testament passages.
The Messiah is human / the Messiah is divine.
Heiser spent enormous portions of his career showing that biblical theology often contains complexity that later interpreters flatten.
Sometimes “contradiction” is simply the label we apply when our theological system lacks categories large enough for the text.
Take statements about seeing God.
One passage says nobody can see God and live.
Other passages describe Abraham, Moses, Isaiah, Ezekiel, or members of Israel encountering Yahweh visibly.
The productive question is not:
“Which verse is wrong?”
It is:
“What distinction does biblical theology make between God’s transcendent essence and mediated or embodied appearances?”
Once divine appearances—the Angel of Yahweh, the Name, the Word, the visible Yahweh traditions—are studied within ancient Jewish theology, the supposed contradiction becomes part of a larger theological pattern.
That pattern ultimately contributes to New Testament Christology.
This is vintage Heiser methodology:
Do not eliminate difficult passages. Build a theology capable of accounting for all of them.
31. Context Is King—but Context Is Bigger Than the Verse
For Heiser, “context” did not merely mean reading three verses above and below.
Context includes:
the paragraph,
the book,
the author’s vocabulary,
the Hebrew or Greek,
the literary genre,
intertextual relationships,
Second Temple Jewish literature,
ancient Near Eastern texts,
Greco-Roman culture,
manuscript evidence,
and the worldview of the original audience.
You cannot responsibly pronounce something a contradiction while ignoring half the relevant data.
And yet that is precisely what much internet skepticism does.
Find two English verses.
Put them side by side.
Declare victory.
That is not scholarship.
32. Skeptics Can Be Fundamentalists Too
Heiser made this observation about Bart Ehrman’s approach to certain textual issues.
A person can reject fundamentalist conclusions while retaining fundamentalist assumptions.
For example:
Premise 1: If God inspired Scripture, there can be no textual difficulty whatsoever.
Premise 2: There are textual difficulties.
Conclusion: God did not inspire Scripture.
The skeptic thinks he has rejected fundamentalism.
He hasn’t.
He has accepted the fundamentalist’s definition of inspiration and merely changed the conclusion.
Heiser’s response is:
Why accept Premise 1?
Where does Scripture teach that theory?
That is the real question.
Theologically conservative believers and skeptics can therefore become mirror images of one another.
One says:
“If inspiration is true, there can’t be any textual problems, therefore there aren’t.”
The other says:
“There are textual problems, therefore inspiration isn’t true.”
Heiser says:
Both of you should stop defining inspiration before examining Scripture.
33. Christianity Does Not Stand or Fall on a Perfectly Preserved Letter Sequence
This is enormously important.
Christianity’s central historical claim is not:
“Every copyist in history reproduced every Hebrew and Greek character flawlessly.”
Its central claim concerns Jesus:
who he was,
what he did,
his crucifixion,
and his resurrection.
The manuscript tradition is sufficiently rich that the basic content of the New Testament is not remotely dependent on solving every textual variant.
Even major disputed passages do not create Christianity’s central doctrines out of thin air.
Remove the longer ending of Mark.
Remove the woman caught in adultery.
Bracket the Comma Johanneum.
Christian theology does not collapse.
Those doctrines and claims appear elsewhere in uncontested text.
Textual criticism therefore refines our knowledge of the biblical text.
It does not abolish it.
34. The Existence of Difficulties Is Actually What Serious Study Predicts
Think about what the Bible is.
Dozens of writings.
Produced across many centuries.
Several languages.
Different genres.
Different political situations.
Different authors.
Different audiences.
Different historical settings.
Copied manually for centuries.
Preserved across different communities.
If it contained no textual complexity, no ambiguities, no difficult chronology, no divergent perspectives, no obscure vocabulary, and no manuscript problems, that would be astonishing.
The presence of such difficulties is not evidence that scholars discovered some secret hidden from Christianity for two thousand years.
Jewish scribes knew manuscripts differed.
Church fathers knew Gospel accounts differed.
Origen knew textual variants existed.
Jerome knew.
Augustine knew.
Rabbinic scholars knew.
Medieval scribes knew.
The discipline of textual criticism did not suddenly discover that handwritten books contain copying mistakes.
35. “Contradiction” Has an Actual Meaning
This word gets abused constantly.
A genuine logical contradiction is:
A and not-A in the same respect at the same time.
Different numbers?
Potential discrepancy.
Different perspectives?
Not necessarily contradiction.
Different selections?
Not contradiction.
Different chronology?
Potential contradiction, unless topical arrangement or another convention explains it.
One writer mentioning X and another omitting X?
Not contradiction.
Paraphrases?
Not contradiction.
Different textual variants?
Transmission issue.
Ancient cosmological terminology?
Worldview issue.
Symbolic number?
Literary issue.
Hyperbole?
Rhetorical issue.
Translation difference?
Translation issue.
Only after those categories have been examined can one responsibly say:
“These texts make mutually exclusive assertions.”
Calling everything a contradiction before doing that work is intellectually sloppy.
36. You Do Not Get to Assume Authorial Intent
Suppose a text says an army had “ten thousand” soldiers.
Was the author asserting:
Exactly 10,000 biological males, such that 9,999 or 10,001 would make the proposition false?
Perhaps.
But you have to demonstrate it.
“Ten thousand” may function as a conventional large number.
Ancient literature used numbers differently from modern demographic reporting.
The same applies to genealogies.
Chronologies.
Battle reports.
Speeches.
Geographic descriptions.
Universal language.
The critic has an evidentiary burden too.
Skepticism isn’t exempt from interpretation.
37. The Bible Doesn’t Need Protection From Data
This is one of the healthiest things about Heiser’s method.
If archaeology creates a problem, study it.
If comparative ancient literature creates a problem, study it.
If Hebrew grammar creates a problem, study it.
If a manuscript has a different reading, put it on the table.
If Genesis resembles Mesopotamian material, read the Mesopotamian material.
If a traditional interpretation doesn’t survive the evidence, abandon the traditional interpretation.
The goal is not protecting an interpretation.
The goal is understanding the text.
Heiser’s confidence was that good interpretation makes Scripture more interesting, coherent, and intellectually serious—not less.
38. Christians Sometimes Manufacture Problems Through Bad Theology
A great many supposed attacks on Scripture are attacks on claims Scripture itself never makes.
“The earth must be 6,000 years old.”
Where does the Bible say that?
“The Hebrew genealogies contain no generational omissions.”
Where does the Bible say that?
“Genesis gives modern scientific descriptions.”
Where does Genesis say that?
“Every number must function as a modern statistical quantity.”
Where does Scripture say that?
“Every Gospel must narrate events in identical chronological sequence.”
Where does Scripture say that?
“Every biblical author possessed modern cosmological knowledge.”
Where does Scripture say that?
“Every manuscript copy must be perfect.”
Where does Scripture say that?
People construct an elaborate doctrinal house, label it “what the Bible teaches,” and then panic when evidence threatens the house.
Sometimes the right response is not to defend the house.
It is to discover that Scripture never built it.
39. General Revelation Matters Too
Heiser’s insistence on intellectual honesty went further.
If God is responsible for Scripture and also responsible for the created world, Christians should not construct definitions of biblical truth that require denying obvious realities of creation.
He explicitly said that a defensible doctrine of inerrancy must correspond both to the phenomena of Scripture and to the world around us.
If Scripture literally taught that pigs fly, Heiser said, it would be wrong.
That is important because he refused to save inerrancy by simply redefining “truth” into something unfalsifiable.
He held a correspondence view of truth.
Truth corresponds to reality.
The interpretive task is therefore determining what Scripture actually asserts about reality.
That is a much more rigorous position than:
“Whatever the Bible says must somehow be scientifically correct, therefore I will invent an explanation.”
40. The Core Mistake Is Confusing Our Reading With the Text
This may be the deepest point.
A person says:
“The Bible teaches X.”
Evidence shows X is wrong.
Then he concludes:
“The Bible is wrong.”
Wait.
Maybe your interpretation was wrong.
Those aren’t the same proposition.
Biblical interpretation involves intellectual humility.
The Bible is the object being interpreted.
Your interpretation is a hypothesis about that object.
Those two things should never be confused.
Heiser’s career is filled with examples where common Christian assumptions collapse once the Hebrew, Greek, ancient Near Eastern literature, or Second Temple context is examined.
His response was not:
“Bible disproved.”
It was:
“We’ve been reading the Bible badly.”
That distinction is enormous.
So, Is the Bible “Riddled With Errors and Contradictions”?
No—not in the sense usually implied by that slogan.
The slogan typically depends on several bad assumptions:
that every difference is a contradiction;
that every biblical passage is literalistic prose;
that ancient historiography followed modern rules;
that genealogies must be exhaustive;
that numbers must always be mathematically exact;
that authors cannot arrange material rhetorically;
that paraphrase is misquotation;
that a pre-scientific worldview is equivalent to false scientific teaching;
that manuscript corruption is equivalent to authorial error;
that translations are identical with the original-language text;
that all unresolved difficulties are therefore insoluble;
and that inspiration requires divine dictation.
Once those assumptions are removed, enormous numbers of alleged contradictions evaporate or become ordinary questions of language, genre, literary technique, manuscript transmission, historical evidence, or authorial selection.
But the responsible Christian should not then swing to the opposite extreme and say:
“There are absolutely no problems anywhere.”
There are problems.
There are uncertain readings.
There are damaged texts.
There are difficult parallel accounts.
There are chronologies scholars debate.
There are numerical differences.
There are ancient conceptual assumptions.
There are passages for which no universally convincing solution exists.
Heiser’s approach was powerful precisely because he did not need to pretend otherwise.
The Heiser Bottom Line
The Bible should be judged according to what it actually is.
God chose to reveal himself through human beings.
Real human beings.
Ancient human beings.
They wrote with ancient vocabulary, ancient literary forms, ancient historiography, ancient cosmology, and ancient cultural assumptions.
God did not need to erase their humanity to accomplish revelation.
He providentially used it.
So before somebody announces a biblical error, make them do the work.
Show me the Hebrew.
Show me the Greek.
Show me the manuscript evidence.
Show me the genre.
Show me the ancient literary convention.
Show me the author’s purpose.
Show me the relevant ancient Near Eastern or Greco-Roman background.
Show me that the two propositions actually exclude one another.
Show me that a number intended as rhetoric is being asserted as statistical precision.
Show me that an omission is a denial.
Show me that topical arrangement claims chronological sequence.
Show me that the biblical writer—not your interpretation—is making the allegedly false assertion.
Then we can have a meaningful discussion.
Until then, “the Bible is full of contradictions” is not an argument.
It’s a slogan.
And the same warning applies to the Christian who says, “There aren’t any difficult passages and I can explain every one.”
That’s a slogan too.
The intellectually serious position is harder:
Take the text on its own terms.
Do not make it more primitive than it is.
Do not make it more modern than it is.
Do not sanitize its humanity.
Do not confuse transmission with inspiration.
Do not confuse worldview with teaching.
Do not confuse difference with contradiction.
Do not confuse unresolved with unresolvable.
Do not force ancient literature to answer questions its authors were never asking.
And above all, don’t defend your idea of the Bible at the expense of the Bible that’s actually there.
Heiser’s argument was essentially that Scripture does not need to be rescued from serious scholarship.
It needs to be read seriously enough for serious scholarship to matter.
This is a Guest Post from our friends over at WLTReport. View the original article here.
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