There are no contradictions in the Bible

Wrong, humanity is not doomed to hell. Because of the atonement of Jesus, we receive the chance to enter Heaven. Romans 5:12-21" I did not say that all of humanity is doomed to hell. It's easy to create a straw-man and then knock it down. What I said was that all of humanity was punished with a sinful nature, original sin, due to what Adam did. It is, as St. Augustine put it: "the deliberate sin of the first man is the cause of original sin". This is portrayed in Romans 3:23 as we both referenced to. Before they were deceived by Lucifer, the snake, they were created perfect in God's image. Once he kicked them out from the Garden of Eden, he did that with full foreknowledge, that the descendants of Adam and Eve would inherit sinful nature and, thus, risk being descent into hell. Yes, Jesus came down and atoned for our sins, and as long as we don't have a relationship with him and acknowledge him as our savior, we are essentially doomed to hell since none of us are worthy of heaven on the based on the merits of our own righteousness, as John 3:18 puts it. Gen. 11:5 "5 But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower which the sons of men had built. " If he were omniscient, then why did he need to come down to see the tower in the first place if he knew what it was like (which would follow on the premise that he is omniscient). If the tower reached heaven, did he need to come a little closer to see it? No, it doesn't make any sense. If you are to posit that he is omniscient then it is incumbent upon you to show that there are no major contradictions surrounding his supposed omniscience, but clearly there are some. Your reply to my presentation of when Jesus was crucified in the gospels of Luke and Mark, is not an adequate response as to why the emphasizes are so completely different in these two gospels. What do you mean when you say they are different events? They are the same events - Jesus crucifixion - portraying Jesus in two diametrically opposite state of minds. They don't fit together. How do you reckon he went from being absolute freaked out in Mark's gospel to being in a state of serenity while giving comfort to other people in Luke's gospel? Do you posit that the son of God has an extraordinary labile psyche? "Matthew 28:2 does not say when the women arrived, the stone was rolled and it was open. Matthew was speaking of the cause of the earthquake before they got there. Some time passes." Mathew 28:2,5. "Suddenly there was a great earthquake! For an angel of the Lord came down from heaven... Then the angel spoke to the women... ". The word "suddenly " followed by a description of what takes place at the tomb after his descent from heaven, suggests that this is an instantaneous event that the women are witnessing (then otherwise, how could we have possibly known all these specific details in such great detail). if it were, as you posit, that the women were not present at the time when the stone was rolled away, then it wouldn't make any sense to write "then the angel spoke to the women" without mentioning that some time passes by before they actually arrived at the tomb. Then it should have said "when they arrived at the tomb the angel spoke to them". I'll grant you that the story does not include much detail, but as far as what is discernible, it is much more logical to conclude that the event took place with the women being present to witness it. When they arrived at the tomb In Mark's gospel they asked "Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?". Why on earth would they ask each other something like that if there were an earthquake that had rolled away the stone just before they got there? "John doesn't say Mary went alone. John was focused on Mary's perspective only." True, John doesn't say that Mary Magdalene went alone. If it were the case, that the purpose was to delineate the story from Mary Magdalene's perspective alone, then it would follow - if you posit that all the other accounts are both accurate representations of what took place and are reconcilable with each other - that the other accounts in the other gospels (in which the number of witnesses at the tomb differed from in each account) have chosen to focus on the perspectives of different persons for different reasons, maybe to accentuate certain aspects of the story, one could assume. If we, for the sake of argument, assume that John's gospel wanted to put emphasize on the meeting between Mary Magdalene and Jesus - since that is, undoubtedly, the most significant event in the story - then why was it important to mention that she went alone to the tomb? All that has accomplished is to have created even more confusion than has already been rendered by the three other conflicting gospels. Why didn't she enter the tomb (as in Mark and Luke) and, thus, didn't meet any angel inside the tomb whom - according to the other gospels - would have told her what had happened with Jesus? Since she didn't have a clue as to how the body had gone missing, she tells Simon Peter and the other disciple (and why didn't she meet the other disciples as was told in Luke and Matthew?) that the body had been STOLEN. For this reason she was crying outside the tomb in John 20:11 because she thought that someone had stolen the body? It was not until Jesus appeared to her and explained to her what had happened (John 20:11-13) that she managed to pull herself together to go down to explain to the disciples what had happened to Jesus and to instruct them were to meet him. However, in Mark 16:9, she has a personal encounter with the resurrected Jesus and there is no record of any emotional response at all (probably because she had already been told by the angels that he had risen from the dead.) How, then, can the encounter in Mark 16:9 be the same as in John 20:11-13 when, in fact, she knew that Jesus had resurrected in Mark's account while she was oblivious about this fact in John's gospel? Furthermore, what is the point of having Joanna in Luke's gospel and Salome in Mark's gospel if they don't contribute anything to the story at all. If all the different gospels are accurate representations of the resurrection, then it would follow that Salome, Joanna, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary all went to the tomb, though the different gospels chose to represent their perspectives differently (for some inexplicable reason). But if that were true, what would be the point of given that Joanna and Salome doesn't actually say or do anything that is at all relevant to the story? Matthew 28:8 is not reconcilable with Mark 16:8. "The women fled from the tomb, trembling and bewildered, and they said nothing to anyone because they were too frightened." is not equal to: "The women ran quickly from the tomb. They were very frightened but also filled with great joy, and they rushed to give the disciples the angel"s message." They are direct contradictions to each other. Remember that Mark abruptly ends the chapter at Mark 16:8, hence we are not old whether or not they actually told anyone about it. If you want to arrange Jesus"Resurrection appearances in a chronological order, then we can first infer that Jesus first appearance with his disciples would have been in Galilee, since when he met them "some doubted". If some of them doubted, then that would suggest that it would have been their first post-resurrection encounter with Jesus. However, in Luke he first meets with two of his followers, who later told the other disciples that they had seen Jesus face to face. At precisely that moment Jesus appears before all the disciples (In Jerusalem we can infer since that was where the followers were heading). However, Luke 24:37 describes their reaction as: "But the whole group was startled and frightened, thinking they were seeing a ghost!" To which Jesus responds "Why are you frightened?" he asked. "Why are your hearts filled with doubt?". You say that Jesus made several appearances. Well, which one of these two supposedly first post-resurrection appearances came first? Since both Matthew and Luke portray it as the disciples first encounter with Jesus, did he first meet them in Galilee or in Jerusalem? When we are debating whether or not the Bible contains contradictions, I presupposed that we are not only dealing with ostensible contradictions found in scripture, but also how that scripture is interpreted by mainstream Christianity. If I were part of the Dominican order, for instance, I would have argued in favor of slavery and invoked the Bible as divine support for my belief. However, the mainstream interpretation of the Bible denounces slavery, although it is found in the bible. Thus, my conditional statement was a criticism of the mainstream interpretation of the Bible, which I suppose you argue in favor of. If we are not including hermeneutic contradictions in our debate, then I see this debate as rather pointless since you can draw all kind of conclusions based on what the Bible says. If I were to say that slavery was condoned in the Bible, you would probably invoke the mainstream view to say that the Bible does not condone slavery, so I don't see why you dismiss my conditional statement as not being in line with this debate. Due to lack of space I didn't have time to respond to all the arguments that my opponent made. I will hopefully have time to do that in the next rounds and to expound upon the hopeless contradictions in the story. However, since the burden of proof is on my opponent to prove that the resurrection story does not contain any contradictions, I challenge him to devote all his energy in the next round to try to merge all these different descriptions laid out in the four gospels into a coherent and chronological narrative in which all the details fit together. If you manage to construct such a narrative, in which no specific details are omitted, then I would gladly let you win this debate.