On Mon, 1 Mar 2004, John W Burgeson wrote:
> OK, Try Matthew's genealogy. 14 + 14 + 14 = 41. Of course, we may assume
> that arithmetic was different in the 1st century. But that, too, is an ad
> hoc, isn't it?
This seems typical of so many of the alleged errors in Scripture. Rather
than alleging that an intelligent person made an error excusable for
someone of his era, imply that the author was so stupid that he couldn't
count. Matthew was able to count well enough to omit some generations in
order to make the first two segments come out to have fourteen
generations each. If we saw something like this in a book other than the
Bible, wouldn't we consider other reasons for the discrepancy such as
copyist's error or a misunderstanding on our part of the meaning of some
word? I am not proposing that either of those is the explanation, but I
don't think that we should be too quick to jump to the conclusion that the
author made a mistake in the original.
Gordon Brown
Department of Mathematics
University of Colorado
Boulder, CO 80309-0395
Received on Tue Mar 2 18:32:16 2004
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