Well I'm happy that you responded to the points in a logical order, but I'm not sure you offered sufficent evidence for your claims. The Synoptic Gospels are anonymous, they were written without anyone signing their name. I could restate everything in my 2nd paragraph, but I'd prefer to see proof for the opposing argument. So without disproving the first part of the thesis, you go on to cite the Bible as evidence for itself. The fact remains that the earliest copies have the most mistakes and discrepancies. They also require interpretation. But let's just go to the second point of my thesis which is very important, and that deals with oral culture. Because you haven't proved authorship, you can't prove that the stories didn't result from an unreliable oral culture. So those are two big hurdles before you can cite the bible as evidence. Once you've done that, you will need to explain obvious falsifications like the story of Jesus and the adulterer, which appears nowhere in the earlier manuscripts. Or the very important one, the doctrine of the trinity, which was fabricated much later. Here is a quote form Misquoting Jesus, which talks about that, "Erasmus and the Trinity, "The larger point I am trying to make, however, is that all these subsequent editions — those of Stephanus included — ultimately go back to Erasmus's editio princeps, which was based on some rather late, and not necessarily reliable, Greek manuscripts — the ones he happened to find in Basel and the one he borrowed from his friend Reuchlin. There would be no reason to suspect that these manuscripts were particularly high in quality. They were simply the ones he could lay his hands on. Indeed, as it turns out, these manuscripts were not of the best quality: they were, after all, produced some eleven hundred years after the originals! For example, the main manuscript that Erasmus used for the Gospels contained both the story of the woman taken in adultery in John and the last twelve verses of Mark, passages that did not originally form part of the Gospels, as we learned in the preceding chapter. There was one key passage of scripture that Erasmus's source manuscripts did not contain, however. This is the account of i John 5:7-8, which scholars have called the Johannine Comma, found in the manuscripts of the Latin Vulgate but not in the vast majority of Greek manuscripts, a passage that had long been a favorite among Christian theologians, since it is the only passage in the entire Bible that explicitly delineates the doctrine of the Trinity, that there are three persons in the godhead, but that the three all constitute just one God. In the Vulgate, the passage reads: There are three that bear witness in heaven: the Father, the Word, and the Spirit, and these three are one; and there are three that bear witness on earth, the Spirit, the water, and the blood, and these three are one. It is a mysterious passage, but unequivocal in its support of the traditional teachings of the church on the "triune God who is one." Without this verse, the doctrine of the Trinity must be inferred from a range of passages combined to show that Christ is God, as is the Spirit and the Father, and that there is, nonetheless, only one God. This passage, in contrast, states the doctrine directly and succinctly. But Erasmus did not find it in his Greek manuscripts, which in- stead simply read: "There are three that bear witness : the Spirit, the water, and the blood, and these three are one." Where did the "Father, the Word, and the Spirit" go? They were not in Erasmus's primary manuscript, or in any of the others that he consulted, and so, naturally, he left them out of his first edition of the Greek text. More than anything else, it was this that outraged the theologians of his day, who accused Erasmus of tampering with the text in an attempt to eliminate the doctrine of the Trinity and to devalue its corollary, the doctrine of the full divinity of Christ. In particular, Stunica, one of the chief editors of the Complutensian Polyglot, went public with his defamation of Erasmus and insisted that in future editions he return the verse to its rightful place. As the story goes, Erasmus — possibly in an unguarded moment — agreed that he would insert the verse in a future edition of his Greek New Testament on one condition: that his opponents produce a Greeks manuscript in which the verse could be found (finding it in Latin manuscripts was not enough). And so a Greek manuscript was produced. In fact, it was produced for the occasion. It appears that someone copied out the Greek text of the Epistles, and when he came to the passage in question, he translated the Latin text into Greek, giving the Johannine Comma in its familiar, theologically useful form. The manuscript provided to Erasmus, in other words, was a sixteenth-century production, made to order."" So, it's very obvious the scribes did take liberties with the text. A final point, which I'll just restate, is this, "To suppose that, "since the New Testament is better documented than any other book from the ancient world, therefore we can trust it,"is a leap in logic. "Even if we somehow knew Plato's exact wording of The Republic, it does not mean that we can trust the work any more than we already do. It just means that we know what Plato wrote. Simply because The New Testament is better attested does not mean it is true or authentic."" Thank you for your response, I look forward to hearing more.
RE: The Bible is Historically Unreliable