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

[Fake Messiah]

Yeah, what makes the Bible word of God but not the Illiad or Lord of the Rings books?

[The Grand Nudger]

Of the three, only lotr sits outside of the set of the word of god in an academic sense. Tolkein wrote his stuff in the style of an english mythology, though - at times explicitly, at other times it just coalesced that way.

What makes magic book the word of god today is the same thing that made homers stories the word of god then, and makes lotr the word of god no-when. They expressed the normative beliefs of the community from which they were derived with respect to the divine. I think you'd be hard pressed to find a single believing person who really thinks that god sat down and spit out all of those begats.

[Fake Messiah]

The way I see it or perhaps as it is, Judaism and Christianity are book-worshipping religions. For the masses, it doesn't matter much what exactly is in them, it just matters that they exist. Especially in the not-so-distant past when most people were illiterate. Like in Christian mass you still have a priest or a pastor read from the Bible and that's a tradition left from the times when people could not read so they were fed with a paragraph or two during the mass. Although it's not that they now know any more about what is inside the Bible, rather they imagine that there must be something extraordinary inside.

[The Grand Nudger]

At times they were, less so now (islam is sucking all the air out of that room). I guess if I was trying to pin them down I'd say that judaism worships a good life, christianity...a good death.

[JairCrawford]

To the OP, I don’t think there’s even a verse in the Bible to cite that specifically says so.

2 Timothy 3:15-17

Oh I know that verse is used all the time. But if we are to be absolutely literal, we have to figure out what exactly counted as scripture to the author of this verse. The Bible was not yet a whole entity at the time.

Then… we have to determine exactly what “God-breathed” means. The text does not make it clear that this is anything more than inspiration. Unfortunately that hasn’t stopped people from asserting that the verse is proof that God audibly dictated every word. Ironically, such an assertion is thoroughly eisegetical, and not exegetical.

[The Grand Nudger]

I'm not sure god-breathed is really all that difficult to quantify in a collection of stories about the sayings and doings of a man contended to be a god by that religion.

That said, if you attribute it to paul and use the dates that the afflicted prefer- he'd be speaking to a group of people in their early twenties or late teens. No one else could have known the holy scriptures from infancy then, circa 50ce. On that, there's literally nothing. There are no christian writers that made it down to history from this period whatsoever.

If you attribute it to some now nameless pastor in 110ce......they've got the whole shebang - plus some that won't make it to the final cut. It's contemporaneous with john and revelation. We have a really good picture for what a christian author believed and what they meant to convey from that time. Same outcome.

[JairCrawford]

I'm not sure god-breathed is really all that difficult to quantify in a collection of stories about the sayings and doings of a man contended to be a god by that religion.

That said, if you attribute it to paul and use the dates that the afflicted prefer- he'd be speaking to a group of people in their early twenties or late teens. No one else could have known the holy scriptures from infancy then, circa 50ce. On that, there's literally nothing. There are no christian writers that made it down to history from this period whatsoever.

If you attribute it to some now nameless pastor in 110ce......they've got the whole shebang - plus some that won't make it to the final cut. It's contemporaneous with john and revelation. We have a really good picture for what a christian author believed and what they meant to convey from that time. Same outcome.

What about Jude and Peter? Aren’t they usually dated even later than the pastorals?

[The Grand Nudger]

There would be another twenty years of literary syncretism even at 110, yeah.

[RBP3280]

I'm not sure god-breathed is really all that difficult to quantify in a collection of stories about the sayings and doings of a man contended to be a god by that religion.  

That said, if you attribute it to paul and use the dates that the afflicted prefer- he'd be speaking to a group of people in their early twenties or late teens.  No one else could have known the holy scriptures from infancy then, circa 50ce.  On that, there's literally nothing.  There are no christian writers that made it down to history from this period whatsoever.

If you attribute it to some now nameless pastor in 110ce......they've got the whole shebang - plus some that won't make it to the final cut.  It's contemporaneous with john and revelation.  We have a really good picture for what a christian author believed and what they meant to convey from that time.  Same outcome.

What about Jude and Peter? Aren’t they usually dated even later than the pastorals? Peter was dated around 60 BC, I don't remember when Jude was. 
Many of the Apocrypha's are dated much earlier. Until Constantine came along the Romans were doing everything they could to wipe out Christianity, so it only makes sense that many of the writing were discovered much later.  

[The Grand Nudger]

That's part of the christian establishment legend, but not actually true. The romans couldn't have told you the difference between a christian, a jew, or any other heathen.

Pliny the Younger in his letter to Trajan, which would have been contemporaneous with 2 timothy, makes that clear. Roman persecution comes much...much later, in the 300's, responding to the political threat that christianity had since become.