Is the Bible Totally reliable ? The Nativity

I don't want to debate this as the facts are way too hard to check out and there's too much question about what they all mean. I'll trust the Biblical record as written and if you want to doubt it that's your business. But I did find this discussion I thought I'd post. I think it answers some of the sticky points:http://www.christian-thinktank.com/quirinius.htmlThis message has been edited by Faith, 06-18-2005 06:26 AM

It appears that THE source of all this doubting of the dates is this one Robin Lane Fox, who wrote the book The Unauthorized Version: Truth and Fiction in the Bible . Maybe I've overlooked other sources that have been brought up in this discussion? I have the impression that all the evidence has been mustered from this one source -- it's all the same reasoning used there. That's pretty flimsy evidence, facts from one book by one debunker, about which many doubts can certainly be raised, as others have pointed out including me( Message 25 ): http://www.christian-thinktank.com/quirinius.htmlAnyway, I would say that the very best evidence against all this eager assault on the Bible is that not a single Biblical commentator up until this very recent "discovery" ever found a discrepancy between Matthew and Luke concerning the dating of the birth of Christ, and you can be sure they would have if there was reason to think it, because there are excellent historians among them. The discrepancy is purely the invention of this work of debunkery, as usual forcing Bible believers on the defensive for no decent reason whatever. You read a book, learn the terms of the argument, you don't need to know much history yourself, certainly needn't bother to track down anything that might discredit the argument, just go with what the book says, and there you are, all set to disprove the entire history of Christianity.By the way, to say Luke was right because he was a good historian is not circular logic. That silly idea is repeated a lot here. Luke is a credible witness with a great track record for accuracy. Logically it is a positive version of the ad hominem: The man is known to be trustworthy, therefore it is reasonable to put trust in his report over a more recent report that has no credentials except itself.All your reasoning is based on this one piece of debunkery and the usual dismissal of the Bible as evidence in its own right. When are you guys going to see that if you have one witness with an excellent reputation (2000 years of trust in this case) you have to credit that witness with a LOT, but you do the unreasonable thing instead and dismiss that witness altogether. Instead you trust any old piece of imaginative reconstruction of the events, using a few selected historical facts viewed from 2000 years in the future, which necessitates ignoring who knows how many other facts that could disprove the claim, and then you treat ordinary Christians as ignorant and evasive because we haven't the means to answer such a frame-up to your satifaction. Cute.You need to think about what you guys are doing here. Anybody can play the game of discovering discrepancies in just about anything if there's a will to do that. It's easy to put your opponents behind the eight ball this way, require impossible scholarship to defend themselves and accuse them of copping out when the whole thing was a set up in the first place. Just assemble a few facts at a remove of 2000 years when it's a monumental task to track down any kind of information to rebut the claim, then accuse your opponent of all kinds of perfidious behavior. Not fair play to say the least.The Bible record remains unrefuted by any fair standard.

I'm really not in this argument. I'm not a historian. I have no interest in investigating facts that are just make-work for a nonexpert, and even for an expert very likely, because there's no way the facts can be shown to be *all* the relevant facts after 2000 years, no matter how good the historians. Your side has to construct your argument from these few facts. You have no idea what other facts are not available that might contradict your view, and no amount of investigation on my part is going to have any impact on any of that.I consider this kind of attack on the Bible to be unworthy of response. When Christians don't respond, of course, we get treated as evading the issue, as by jar early in the thread. Quite the set-up.You think a huge conflict has been proved that somehow went undetected for millennia. You think current scholarship based on what little information remains from 2000 years ago trumps the knowledge of all previous historians and Bible exegetes. It doesn't bother you that so little is being used to impugn the character of the Bible writers and later Bible scholars.The point about no commentator having discovered the discrepancy is that very early in church history, when the events were a lot fresher than they are now, something like that would have been noted, it would have been glaring at the time, it would have been discussed in the literature of the church fathers, it would have become a major point in the decision about which books were canonical, it would have been known to us now as an important controversy from the earliest time. Yes, it matters a lot that previous Bible commentators never noticed this supposed discrepancy.But I'm not in this argument. It's a huge waste of time and just another excuse to bully Christians.

And again I see a lack of any honest attempt to recognize the goal of this power game you are playing about "evidence."