Hello Mike, thanks for taking the time to respond.

My friend, I appreciate you responding. I'll respond back.

But I must say at the outside: you aren't rejecting the Bible.

You're inventing things that aren't true, assigning those inventions to the Bible, and rejecting your inventions. But you haven't yet touched the Bible.

You said:

"Eh. Sorry but the believability is all the same for me."

This is part of the problem, my friend. You equate Jesus with Elvis, ignoring the massive, massive difference in those who claim each is alive.

No one has ever been killed for claiming Elvis was alive.

Yet all of Jesus' disciples were willing to be executed for the claim that Jesus truly was alive.

No one has lost their livelihood for claiming Elvis is alive.

Yet all of Jesus' disciples were willing to lose everything in this life, if only they could persuade a few more to believe in Jesus before they were killed.

The level of "believability" between these two camps is so vast as to lose any sense of comparison.

You said:

"You’re wasting your energy trying to convince me that the magic tricks articulated in a book"

My friend, this explains much.

If you've already decided in your mind that it's all "magic tricks," despite the fact that no one would have killed Jesus for performing magic tricks, then you'll ignore any evidence saying they're not merely magic tricks.

Yet that explanation can't account for half the material in the Bible, including the details that secular, non-believing historians agree are true.

No one is crucified for magic tricks.

You said:

"that’s been edited, culled, and translated (with known mistranslations) over and over hundreds and thousands of years after these “events” happened."

This is perhaps the most fundamental bit, my friend.

If it's true that the Bible has been chopped up and re-written and mistranslated, well then, why accept any of it, no matter what it says? If it's been changed and corrupted and manipulated, sure, call it magic tricks.

But if the manuscripts have been accurately preserved -- if the content has not been changed -- then we have a different situation entirely.

And even Bart Ehrman, one of the staunchest critics of the New Testament, agrees that the text has not been edited, culled, and mistranslated.

Ehrman says in an interview found in the appendix of Misquoting Jesus (p. 252):

"Bruce Metzger is one of the great scholars of modern times, and I dedicated the book to him because he was both my inspiration for going into textual criticism and the person who trained me in the field. I have nothing but respect and admiration for him. And even though we may disagree on important religious questions – he is a firmly committed Christian and I am not – we are in complete agreement on a number of very important historical and textual questions. If he and I were put in a room and asked to hammer out a consensus statement on what we think the original text of the New Testament probably looked like, there would be very few points of disagreement – maybe one or two dozen places out of many thousands. The position I argue for in ‘Misquoting Jesus’ does not actually stand at odds with Prof. Metzger’s position that the essential Christian beliefs are not affected by textual variants in the manuscript tradition of the New Testament."

So what will you believe, my friend?

Will you agree with Ehrman that the text has been well-preserved, to the point that no doctrine is affected by the few minor points of disagreement?

Or will you disagree with Ehrman and keep acting as though the text has been changed?