Without citing the bible, what marks the bible as the one book with God's message?

[Oldandeasilyconfused]

I've heard of lots of scholarship being done to establish the existence of persons with the right names inhabiting the right places at the right times.  But lets cut to the chase.  Suppose there was a Mary and a Jesus and a Paul and Sneezy and Rudolph and whoever else the bibles says is part of its story.  Lets go ahead and grant you that the stuff the bible says happened is right too - within reason.  I can't grant you a talking snake, God speaking from a burning bush, a man living in a whale, a resurrection, a flood covering Mt. Everest, the story of creation or anything else that suggests the supernatural.  But I will grant, for the sake of argument, that every natural event described in the bible is historically accurate.

Given that, why should anyone believe the bible is the word of a supernatural god?  Why should anyone think its god exists at all?  

Okay Christians, again only for the sake of argument, lets suppose that god does exist and the bible records an attempt on its part to communicate with mankind.  How do you justify a literal reading of the bible?  Perhaps a poetic reading was intended, not by the scribes, but by your god.  If this god of yours is as ineffable and other worldly as is claimed, why would you think that such a being could communicate with beings as limited as ourselves in any way other than parables and poetry.  You may really be missing the whole message by concretizing the poetic.  

Remember Christians, the challenge is to justify 1) that the bible is the special book and 2) that a literal interpretation is the one intended by your god .. without (for obvious reasons) citing the bible itself.  I await your guidance.

 You're preaching to the choir mate, but I'll give my opinion:

 First, the believer needs to establish their god(s) exist. That has never been done so far. A being who doesn't exist cannot write or inspire anything.

Jewish tradition states that the Torah (the first five books of the old testament) were written by Moses. He is clamed by Judaism to have existed in the reign of Ramses The Great. He lived in the14th century bce. The Torah was written ca 500bce.  

Recent archaeology has shown that the Exodus almost certainly did not occur and that Moses almost certainly did not exist.

The Torah and the Tanakh are the mythology of Judaism.

The Gospels were written by anonymous authors at the earliest about 60 years after the putative death of Jesus. That means there are no eyewitness accounts of the life, teachings and death of Yoshua Ha Notzri . There are many contradictions. Perhaps the most glaring are the different accounts of the resurrection.  

Saul of Tarsus is said to have written the letters called 'The Epistles' in the New Testament. As far as I know there are five letters known to be forgeries, and there are  doubts about the rest.

The Epistles of Saul are said to be the earliest books of the New Testament, being written 20-30 years after Jesus' death. It is generally agreed that Saul didn't meet Jesus.

The origin of the epistles:  Saul  of Tarsus was allegedly on his way to Damascus when he fell of his horse and hallucinated.
As far as I'm concerned, that's calling a spade a spade:  If a person claims to have hear god speak to him and to have had visions, he is deemed to be mentally well.   I suspect suffered from epilepsy or perhaps Schizophrenia. 

The New Testament is the mythology of Christianity, no more a history book than the Torah.

The above are my opinions. I don't claim to know the truth. My opinions outline what I think is probably the case, based on the writings of modern scholars such as Bart Erhrman and Israeli archeaologists Siberman and Filklestein


Anyone claiming their holy books are true attract the burden of truth. It is up to them to demonstrate the truth of those books. It is snot my responsibility to demonstrate they are untrue.