"But what about the moderates?"

[Vicki Q]

But if there was no Eden and no Adam and Eve, there was no "fall" and thus nothing to save us from and thus Christianity collapses. If you have some way to salvage it while discarding the OT, I'm keen to hear it.

(Chokes a little. Spittle flies off in various directions.) Discard the OT? Absolutely not! It's an essential part of Christianity.

Perhaps some form of summary might help here. The Bible has a meta-narrative of 'Sin, exile, forgiveness, restoration'. Thus we have the story of Adam (the Hebrew word for humanity), gone wrong. We have a creation gone wrong. We have a nation, Israel, charged with sorting out the problems of humanity (the promise to Abraham), but also they kept going wrong.

And then you have Jesus. As Israel's Messiah, he accomplished Israel's rescue from it's own plight. As Israel-in-person he completed Israel's vocation to rescue humanity. As the truly human one, he re-established God's rule over the cosmos. Three stories, one meta-narrative.

I'm curious how you feel about the Book of Acts in particular.

Since I owe the above to N.T.Wright, I might as well just go for a quote here- “None of this means that Acts can be used naively as it stands as a historical source. But it means that we must hold off from dogmatic negativity, and look at the actual evidence afresh...nothing massive will rest on Acts.” There's history there, some of it is just plain accurate, but best not to use it uncritically.

Science studies the repeatable; history bumps its nose against the unrepeatable.

There would have been no Roman census since Rome didn't rule over it directly...Luke goofed on how long a period it was between the death of Herod the Great and the Roman acquisition of Judea.

There's plenty of room for such a census (if Rome wanted one, a wave of a sword would have done the trick). However perhaps Luke's point is being missed- the census was set at the time of the great revolt of Judas the Galilean. Luke knows of the revolt, and allows Gamaliel to compare the Jesus movement with that rebellion. Luke is aligning Jesus with the Jewish kingdom movements, with their motto “no king but God”.

I believe firmly that history is the friend of Xianity, not its enemy.

I'm quite comfortable arguing to the contrary if you like...

I'm curious as to which parts of JC's story you take seriously or if the entire biography is allegorical

The questions of history supporting Xianity and NT accuracy would require very long answers. My new years resolution for 2014 was to do shorter posts; and while there's still time...

For the latter, there are a range of historical tools available (e.g. criteria of continuity/discontinuity). For my general line on the former, other posts I've made on this forum should enlighten and confuse equally.

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I think if Christians honestly examine the facts they will find that their moral intuitions trace back not to their religion and the Bible but rather to the Enlightenment of the 18th century, which did so much to civilize the Christian God and his followers.

I feel guilty about not giving this important post a (proper) reply. Experience has shown that engaging with one person properly is far better than trying to engage with several.

I might risk the wrath of the mods by resurrecting this after Xmas.