[zeek]

If you are going to doubt the validity of the Bible then all bets are off, because the Bible says a lot of things for which the only evidence is the Bible.

That's true. You're making my case.

No one has been able to prove that anything the Bible claims is false. That's pretty amazing for a book written over a period of 1500 years by over 35 writers from all walks of life.

Your argument attempts to reverse the burden of proof to the one who is questioning the claims. Instead, it's incumbent on the one making the claim to present evidence for it. If the claim is neither verifiable nor falsifiable, then it is inaccessible to knowledge. Many Biblical claims are improbable, but are ultimately inaccessible to knowledge one way or the other. They are purely matters of faith or they are nothing.

This Bible prophesizes of and then witnesses to the appearance and life of Jesus. Here's the linchpin with me. No one could have made up this character. The way he lived, the way his spoke, the things he said. He had to be a real person. This person, as recorded, witnessed to the validity of the OT scriptures, which prophesized that he would be born of a virgin. In other words, there is internal consistency in the history coupled with the fact that the existence of this person Jesus cannot be explained without bringing a world beyond ours into the picture. You cannot explain Jesus without eventually considering that he must have been the Son of God. You cannot explain his existence even as a historical figure as simply a fabrication. You cannot even explain his existence as a fictional character. Fiction is full of fantastical characters: Gods, spirits, faeries, gnomes, wizards, demons, aliens, and people from other dimensions. You can take all the concocted dialogue from all the characters ever imagined and edit them down to the most profound sayings their creators and writers dreamed up for them and they would not hold a flickering candle to the blazing light of what Jesus said. Now, explain why that is so; and how a motley group of disciples concocted them while running for their lives. You can't even explain how a bunch of monks modifying the Bible could have done it. You cannot make a case that Jesus and the things he said were concoctions. Jesus could not have been invented by the mind of man. He is real and from some other place beyond our world. That must be conceded. Now this person witnessed to himself and validated the book that foretold his coming as the child of a virgin. Good enough for me.

I couldn't have thought of Hamlet either, Shakespeare surpassed my imagination. That doesn't make Hamlet a real person. [I'm not claiming that Jesus wasn't a real person by the way.]

Your skepticism makes sense if you are dealing with things of men. But you aren't. You are dealing with something beyond your intelligence. That was my original point. If you could come up with some solid evidence that the virgin birth did not happen, that should be considered.

Again you attempt to shift the burden of proof.

But that's not what this is about. There is no such evidence. There is just skepticism and an insistence on looking at everything through a natural lens, even if it is plain it cannot be viewed that way. You are stubbornly insisting on analyzing Jesus (aka God) through the same lens you would analyze the guy down the street. Big mistake.

Yes, God, if He exists, is beyond analysis. The "big mistake" of the Nicene fathers and the subsequent church counsels was to try and then make their analysis church dogma which the church then persecuted people for not accepting.

From the standpoint of knowledge, orthodox christology is unsupportable. Obviously we can't analyze Jesus like the guy down the street because we can't talk to Jesus like we can the guy down the street. Which just means that our access to certainty is less about Jesus. We can't fully understand the guy down the street either. Such is the state of human knowledge, like it or not.