Does the Bible contain scientific mistakes?

Some of the examples people raise are more about language and genre than actual scientific claims, and it helps to separate those out honestly rather than dismissing every question or treating every one as a real error.

We still say the sun "rises," and no one thinks that's a scientific error—it's ordinary, everyday language. Some biblical descriptions of the natural world work the same way. When 1 Kings describes a round bronze basin using measurements that imply a rough value for pi of about 3, that's most likely a practical builder's rounding, common in ancient measurement generally, not a claimed scientific constant.

Jesus calling the mustard seed "the smallest of all seeds" almost certainly refers to the smallest seed commonly planted in gardens in that region at the time—an ordinary figure of speech, not a claim surveying every seed on Earth. Some apologists point to Isaiah's description of the earth's "circle" as anticipating a round planet, but that's a stretch many scholars are cautious about—"circle" more naturally fits a flat disk in that context.

Christians genuinely differ on how much scientific precision to expect from the Bible's language about the natural world. Some try to harmonize it closely with modern science; others see much of it as ordinary ancient description, not intended as a technical claim, without that undermining what the text is actually trying to teach.