How do you deal with a religious family?

[Aractus]

But I did answer all your points - which is why you are left with nothing. It is not only helpful to be divisive here - it is necessary. I'm divisive about what constitutes valid evidence and what doesn't - and I'll not compromise that principle and allow you to sneak in any invalid evidence.

I don't appreciate you claiming that I'm "sneaking in" invalid evidence, that's nonsense.

Your position - in a nutshell - is to say that you admit the unreliability of evidence but you'd still rely on it to establish the validity the story and that's a valid position to take. It isn't.

That's not my position and I'd kindly ask you to stop misrepresenting my position. The Bible is largely unreliable for history, but it is made up of 49 separate texts that need to be individually analysed. The 22 of the OT, and the 27 of the NT. Furthermore the OT needs to be further subdivided - for instance the Pentateuch into its 5 components. The events in Genesis at the time they are written down are all thousands of years old. The Exodus is written down around 1200-1000 BC and is a mythical history for a few hundred years beforehand. The Israelites never visited the actual Mt. Sinai, thus scholars refer to the place that they spent 40 years and where God gave Moses the Ten Commandments "Biblical Mt. Sinai".

Other events that are more contemporary are more reliable. And that's just the O.T. So you have a range from completely unreliable to at least based upon a historical narrative.

In the NT you have much better quality texts overall. You have contemporary writings - in fact all the books of the NT except perhaps 1 and 2 Peter would be considered contemporary by anyone's definition. They were written within living memory of the events, and the epistles of Paul, James, John and Jude are all present-day contemporary.

As there are 49 different texts (or 66 books as counted in the Bible) you cannot apply the rule you've discovered from one to apply to all the others.

And why would the fact that its not a deliberate lie make it any more reliable?

Because as I've already explained some of the events are factual or based on a real historical narrative.

Since the events recorded in the earlier books have a direct bearing on the events recorded in the latter one, the established factual inaccuracy of the former does call the historicity of the latter into question.

Rubbish. They're not even written by the same authors.

Textual inconsistencies, lies, unreliable witnesses and gross violations of natural laws - that's a lot to go on for now.

You're extremely narrow-minded. All historians make mistakes - Josephus is known to make mistakes, but he's also respected as a serious Jewish historian. Modern historians can scarcely agree upon the simplest of things - thus you'll find no two with exact beliefs about any historical subject matter.