Moving on to the meat
First a quick aside: Credibility and the internet are an interesting pair. Unfortunately, we all spend a lot of time on this technological marval surrounded by messages and folks that we really can't afford to give the benefit of the doubt to. Yet we're all human beings who have egos and feelings, it's a conundrum. . .
Anyways, I'm sure most of ya are bored with my whining to the moderators by now. So on to it.
The first warning light that may go off when someone decides to devote a critical eye to the bible would be right off the bat, within the first hundred words of the first book of the New Testament - Matthew 1:1, the geneoalogy of Jesus Christ.
We'll table the discussion of who Matthew was, when he wrote his section of New Testament, and weather or not he was a tax collector turned disciple, for the short term. I'd say we can all agree that this book had a human author, and we might as well refer to him as Matthew. This Matthew begins his story of the Messiah by taking the time to prove that he is the Messiah, i.e. that he be a descendant of David.
This explanation gets broken into three parts. 'Abraham was the father of Isaac, Isaac of Jacob. . .' , 'David was the father of Soloman . . .' , and 'After the deportation Jeconiah was the father of Shealiel . . .' For the purposes of proving (Matthew 1:17) 'There were thus fourteen generations in all from Abraham to David, fourteen from David until the deportation to Babylon, and fourteen from the deportation until the Messiah.'
This all seems well and good and has that ring of prophecy that such numerology (which was apparently very popular in that era) tends to lend. Sure, it makes sense that if there were 14 generations between Abraham and David (the next big gun of the bible) and then another 14 before the deportation (a cataclysmic event in the history of the Isrealites) than it seems rather apporpriate that after another fourteen something really big might be going to happen. Like the rise of a Messiah.
Unfortunately, Matthew needs to fudge a few numbers to make this work out. If he'd bee born a few thousand years later, maybe he'd have been an accountant for Enron, cuz what he writes down sure looks good on paper but, darn it, it just ain't true.
First, if we actually take the time to count all of the names in each of these segments we discover that the third grouping has only thirteen names - dispite the fact that Matthew himself declares that there are fourteen. Problem #1.
Secondly, in the grouping of ancestors that Matthew includes which begins with David, he lists fourteen kings who ruled after him. In order to get his number fourteen to line up right, he chooses to omit several. Matthew 1:8 '. . . and Joram begat Ozias [Uzziah] . . .' The genealogy of the Kings of the Isrealites is pretty darn well documented, both in the bible and in other historical sources. Joram died in 844 B.C.E. Uzziah did not begin his reign until 780 B.C.E- yep, that's sixty-four years of missing time. In there you should have Ahaziah suceeding Joram, then after the interregnum where Queen Athaliah ruled, Joash, who gets followed up by his kid Amaziah - who finally got around to begetting Uzziah.
Also, in Matthew 1:11 - '. . . and Josias [Josiah] begat Jechonias [Jehoianchin] . . .' Actually, Josiah was the father of Jehoiakim, and the grandfather of Jehoiachin. Problem #2
So right here we have a couple of pretty hard to reconcile issues within the first chapter of the New Testament.
If the bible were written by humans and dictated by God, then how do we have these inconsistancies? If one is to believe that the bible inerringly represents the infallible Truth of the One True God - that it's a message so perfect that we souls living thousands of years after it was written in a technological world that bears almost no resemblace to this one, can find specific insight and wisdom from it's hallowed pages - how does one explain such problems?
Matthew was an educated man, I'd bet my sideburns the cat could count to fourteen. So the fact that there are only thirteen names in Problem #1 probably means that at some point in all the copying one name got missed. That makes the most sense. Yet that can't happen to a book that is the living word of God and His perfect statement on earth. It could happen to a written birthright of an ancient peoples, but it can't be permitted to be considered when on is dealing with a book that defines the black and white moral world that too many of my fellow sentiet beings want to live in.
Then you have problem #2. Even if the Will of God permitted that name to get excluded from problem #1 for reasons that we are not capable of understanding, problem #2 sure seems like somebody who's trying to make the numbers fit. We know what this is, where our zeal for evangelisim tempts us to brush over a few inconvient facts if that might cause us to lose that lost soul from our fish hook as we try to be 'fishers of men' for a greater good. This is 'ends justify the means' sort of thinking, where somebody is willing to sacrifice the truth for some slick rhetoric that might win over a few more converts.
Since this forum contains an Apologetics department, I'll add that at least the Catholic Tradition has prepared a defense against this attack. They state that these genealogies were largely oral traditions during the time that Matthew would have been writing, and to a greek like himself the specifics of it would not have been important in the way that culture thought about things at that time.
I've never liked this arguement, since the bible be God's Living Word, He would have the capacity to oversee it's writing in an omnipotent manner that would have been consistant for all readers over all time. That is the current belief of the sorts of christians I expect to encounter on a site such as this one. If it didn't matter to Matthew, well, it would matter to us, so God could have easily insured that it was right on from the start, just as he could have insured that not a single syllable was ever lost in translation.
What it shows is the human fallabilities of the humans who have contributed to the bible. This is the first few hundred words of the New Testament, and I'm afraid this is only the tip of the iceberg.
Thanks for read'n