>I have been "arguing" (if you can call an illogical ad hoc argument an
>'argument') with a fundamentalist about this very thing for awhile.
>His "explanation" is that Herod murdered all the infants two years old
>and under (as we know), thus giving the Holy Family some time to do
>the Presentation (Luke) then flee to Egypt (Matthew). Luke just left
>the flight to Egypt out while Matthew chose to include it.
>Fundies often use this "one writer is reporting some of the events, the
>other is reporting some events -- but they all happened" routine to
>circumvent obvious inconsistencies.
Amusing that it never bothers the fundamentalist to do violence to his beloved text. Your man's being especially hard on Luke 2:39 (NASB): "And when they had performed everything according to the Law of the Lord, they returned to Galilee, to their own city of Nazereth" I guess you insert after "Lord" an implied parenthesis "(and after a quick flight to Egypt and an abortive attempt to return to their other "own city" of Bethlehem)". He also puts serious stress on Matt. 2:13, which has the Holy Family fleeing immediately after talking to the Magi in Bethlehem.....
To me this illustrates beautifully how difficult it is to argue with someone who has thrown Occam's Razor in the circular file (or who never learned to shave in the first place :-)) and is willing to entertain any number of explanations of any degree of complexity rather than yield a point. As many here have said, there is some way to "explain" _every_ Bible difficulty. I wonder how many inerrantists are ever led in to the vale of reason by being presented with an unanswerable contradiction?
I can only testify to my own experience: the cumulative weight of years of being bothered by many different difficulties led to me realizing that the standard explanations were simply too complicated, too baroque to accept, like a
Ptolemaic astronomer turning away from his multiplicity of epicycles and deciding it was simpler just to believe Kepler.
-Brian