The danger of the direction this discussion is going is for simple minded people to read this, in passing, and believe that the bible is just a collection of cute myths that were gathered together. It is far more than that based on MANY evidences. The most obvious one I would like to site is the thousands, thats right, thousands of documents we have discovered over the years from ancient history. The oldest of which, the book of Mark, was found to be dated within like a few decades of the ACTUAL events taking place. I have learned that the bible has somewhere in the neighborhood of 5,000 different manuscripts that are survived from that time period. These NUMEROUS attestations provide overwhelming evidence that the bible can be trusted as a whole as the inspired word of God, and our savior Jesus Christ. -matt