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There is other records of Jesus's life other than the Bible.
True, but these source are either written long after the life of Jesus, or they are not written by an objective observer, or they do not agree with the gospels or are simply too unspecific to give us any clue to the life of Jesus.
If we want to look at the life of Jesus the gospels are our main source.
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And if you don't believe the Bible is God's word then the N.T is eyewittness evidence of 7-8 people. Unless their record doesn't count simply because they were Christian.
If we look at these accounts purely as eyewitness accounts, then we do need to look at them critically, just like any other historical source. Which criteria you should apply is a matter that can be discussed, but you do need criteria.
In order to get an accurate picture of the life of Jesus we need to remove the writers religious bias. For example, if the writer believed Jesus is the son of God, we can no longer consider any references to Jesus being the son of God as objective. We simply do not know if the writer wrote about this subject because he believed it was true or because it was true.
This does not mean that Jesus isn’t the son of God, it just shows that we cannot use the gospels as proof to show he is.
On a side note: the assertion that the gospels are eyewitness accounts is widely contested. The gospels were written anonymous and the attributions was added centuries after the accounts were written. We do not know who actually wrote the gospels.
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The historian Joesephus also wrote about Jesus.
Josephus mentions Jesus only twice in Antiquities of the Jews. The passage that directly concerns Jesus is widely disputed to been written by Josephus himself. It is more likely that a Christian scribe inserted the passages into the work of Josephus.
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And you say the Bible has errors like it's an established fact. And it would be good to say exactly what versus your talking about, because not everyone thinks there are errors in the Bible.
It is fact that the bible contains inconsistencies. It is fact that the bible contains inaccuracies. Whether or not the bible contains errors depends on your definition of ”error’.
Take for example Mark 12:26, Matthew 22:30-31 and Luke 20:37. They all contain a direct quotation of Jesus. The three gospel writers disagree about the exact words that Jesus used though. Does this mean that Jesus said the same sentence three times, each time using slightly different words? No, indicates that at least two of the writers were a bit liberal in their translation from Aramaic to Greek. Perhaps all three accounts do no reflect the exact words of Jesus. There is simply no way to determine the exact words of Jesus.
Does this mean the bible contains an error? One could argue that the inconsistency mentioned above does indeed indicate that the bible contains errors. That however does not mean that the bible is automatically wrong, it just makes it a book that is difficult to interpret.
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You say the bible can't be inspired because things that it records people saying aren't true, that doesn't make sense. It doesn't record them as facts but to show that people are liars and/or don't know what they are talking about.
These are not the kinds of ”errors’ we are talking about.
In any way, errors do not disprove the existence of God, it only disproves the fundamentalist notion of an inerrant bible. Whether or not this also disproves the bible being inspired depends on your definition of ”inspired’.
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