There are a lot of contradictions in love, but i'm actually referring to something pretty specific. This came up in a conversation on a group I'm involved in.

Exodus 20:5 "I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God…"
1 John 4:8 "God is love"
1 Corinthians 13:4 "love is… not jealous"

It's kind of elegant. After pointing out the contradiction the poster concludes, "The Bible is not true."

He is correct that there are contradictions in the Bible. This is something that drives literalist Bible students crazy. They insist that the bible must the literal, inerrant, and perfect word of God and come up with all sorts of convoluted ways to claim that such contradictions aren't really contradictions at all. The arguments sound absurd because they are absurd. They defy simple logic.

But does that prove the Bible is a pack of lies, or simply that a literalist approach and convoluted logic are the wrong way to try to understand it?

The Bible was written over the course of more than a thousand years, by people living in different times and situations. They also wrote for different purposes and had different theological understandings. It's actually fairly easy to find these contradictions once you know what to look for because there is a sort of debate running through all of the scriptures.

Some authors, particularly in the Old Testament, believed that the dominant quality of God was holiness and purity. They reasoned that God was pure and that humans had to keep themselves religiously, morally, and (most important) ritually pure to stand before God. You can see this in the sections of the first five books of the Bible, or Pentateuch. The writers of the section of Exodus containing the 10 Commandments fall into this school. For them the logic is simple. God can't anything ritually impure, and that includes those who worship idols. If you worship an idol it will upset God, because God is JEALOUS of anything that makes you impure.

But there's a different understanding of God that we see in many other places. It maintains that God's dominant characteristic is not purity but compassion. You see this in most of the prophetic books. It is very strong in Micah, for instance, where God is said to spurn lavish sacrifices and desire only justice and righteousness (defined by Micah as caring for the poor and defending the rights of the helpless).

You can really see the struggle between these two theologies when you contrast Ezra and Nehemiah with Ruth. Ezra and Nehemiah were written in a period when the Jews were repopulating their homeland. There is some pretty fierce rhetoric in these books about the need for Jewish men to remain pure and not to marry foreign wives. We can understand the reason, given the historical context, but the message still leaves a bitter taste in the mouths of modern readers.

Ruth was written at roughly the same time as Ezra and Nehemiah. It's the sweet story of a foreign woman (who we are set up to sympathize with, and the Jewish man she seduces and marries. Ruth is the last person in the world who the writers of Ezra and Nehemiah would want the Jews to sympathize with. But, as the writer of Ruth's story reminds us, good things can come from unexpected places. This foreign woman's grandson is King David. It's a powerful counterpoint to the anti-foreigner sentiment of the other books and a reminder that God may be pure, but God is also so compassionate that he breaks his own rules.

We really see this in the New Testament when Jesus regularly breaks the purity in order to talk to, share meals with, heal, and embrace a variety of people who scriptural rules say are too impure to have contact with. Strangely, he doesn't see himself as breaking the law with these actions, but fulfilling it.

It's this all-embracing, self-giving, unselfish love, exemplified by Jesus, that Paul and the author of 1 John are writing about. With a contradiction like that, we would be likely to say that Paul is right and the commandment is wrong, but Paul doesn't make that distinction. He still sees a lot of truth in the Commandments; he just understands that their notion of who God is was limited. It didn't have the same focus on grace, on the unlimited love of God that he describes in his own writings.

Is there a contradiction? Clearly, the answer is 'yes'.

Is there still wisdom and truth in these scriptures? Again, I think the answer is a clear 'yes'.