The Historical Reliability of the New Testament

[Esquilax]

You believe much.  You know little.

Is that what passes for an argument in this forum? C'mon...

Well, some of that is just Min being Min; think of him as the forum's angry grandpa, I guess.

But also? This isn't new stuff for us; many of us have been dealing with these arguments for years, we've typed out our responses to them more times than I can count, and we're tired of it. You've come into this fresh, but we didn't start existing the moment you came here to make your arguments; we have our own histories with these concepts.

For my part, I don't really care if you can prove historical accuracy, because that wouldn't prove the mystical stuff that's at the heart of your religion. See, you're discussing historical academia now, which means there's a very important component of that you need to keep in mind, which is that the bible is not the only historical text to make supernatural claims. And the way historians deal with the supernatural claims in any other one of those texts is to ignore them, or take them as the superstitions of the time, not to be classified as real historical events. An account of a Roman battle contains a reference to a supernatural portent that helped them win the battle, the historians do not conclude that actual supernatural forces are involved, and there's a reason for that; the supernatural, as far as we can tell, does not factor into the real world.

So if historians won't accept supernatural accounts as fact even from otherwise reliable historical documents, then there's simply no reason to expect that arguing successfully for the bible as a historical document will demonstrate the truth of your religion. I'm certainly not going to make a special case exemption and allow your holy book to take on the reputation of historical accuracy while simultaneously skipping a couple of steps in the process. You're going to need a little more oomph, to make the case you're actually trying to make; you're not going to be able to just slip the crazy claims under the guise of the mundane ones.