Why believe the bible?

[SteveII]

Evidence is a piece of information or fact. A claim is an idea.  The evidence is the actual book or letter. The content of that book or letter is the claim.

So the Bible is both the evidence and the claim.

No, the Bible contains claims. The claims exist independent of the Bible. They were not all written down for many years so it is logically necessary that they existed prior to us having anything we can call "the Bible". Paul, the earliest writer referred to beliefs way before the gospels were written. 

The reason they are not the same is that you can have multiple pieces of evidence (books or letters) written by different people over decades that have basically the same claim.

Again. Both the claim and the evidence.

You could argue the same applies to a scientific paper for example, but a paper will make it clear what the claim is and what the evidence is. That way a reader will be able to evaluate both the claim and the evidence individually. Nowhere in the Bible does this occur though.

Sure it does. As I mentioned above, Paul was referring to beliefs that his recipient already believed to be true YEARS before the gospels were written. There is ample evidence that people believed the core content of Christianity long before the gospels were written. Paul wrote to churches scattered throughout the Roman empire starting around 50ad. 

Different set of claims separated by four centuries. Lumping them together serves no discussion purpose other than to make irrelevant point by people who don't know the difference.

Oh right. Your only answer to that is arrogance.

It only seems that way because you don't know what you are talking about. You are throwing out objections that you think are successful because someone else told you they were successful or they sounded good when you read them. You actually don't know the beliefs of the people you criticize or what the Bible may or may not contain. 

Nope. Science does not disprove these things because no one ever claimed they were naturally occurring events (and therefore the purview of science). To think so is question begging--the most popular sport of AF.

And you presume that the supernatural exists despite there being no evidence of it or even any logical definition of what the supernatural could even be.

Well, the NT is evidence. I thought you conceded that above? Easy, the supernatural is anything that not originating in the natural world.