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Was asked to justify taking the Bible for granted [I do know who asked but can not find that post] There is a prophecy in Daniel chapter 2 that is interesting. The basic story goes that the king of Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar, had a dream. And he wanted to know the meaning of that dream. I read the text as that he would not tell the dream to his wise men. Others read the text as that he forgot the dream. He told the wise men to tell him the dream and its meaning or die. Only Daniel, with his friends, was able to tell. Daniel told of an image of a man made of several metals. What is interesting to this discussion is that the feet were made of iron mixed with clay. The meaning of the several metals are of kingdoms starting with Babylon and ending, by most commentaries, with Rome as Rome was a nation of Iron. Many commentaries state that as the feet are made of iron and clay that after Rome there will be no world power such as the empires represented by the several metals. They base that on the fact that iron and clay do not hold together so that there will be no people that hold together after Rome. The story took place about 603 BC. And Daniel would have written it down sometime before about 530 BC. And since the fall of Rome no group has been able to gain the control that Rome and those other kingdoms held. Rome fell sometime around 530AD. Thus a prophecy that has held for almost 1500 years that was written a thousand years before the fall of Rome. Thus a key example that the Bible can be trusted and is true. However Mr. Sceptic Yes, there are those that claim that although Daniel lived till sometime around 530 BC that the book that we know as Daniel was not written until about 168 BC. But anyway that version of the Prophecy has still stood the test of time for nearly 1500 years just that it was written only 600 years before Rome fell. However there were at least six copies of Daniel found in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Had Daniel just been written a few years before they started collecting scrolls why would they have included so many copies of Daniel? A book that they would have known to be a fake. The answer is that they saw Daniel as old – 400 years old. Oh and what is a very common building material today? Concrete – A mixture of Iron a Clay. [[Any one else still here?  Am going though the book and finding more that I can answer then I could 2 years back.  But it is going to take forever to answer everything]]

“In attempting to say who Jesus is, the best we can do is to utter words provoked by the collective attempts to do so over the centuries-- a choral work we cannot possibly translate back into a few phrases, any more than we can assume that a concert is adequately described by its listing in the program, or that a painting is interchangeable with its title. Reading the program or the museum's catalogue, we have no notion of what actually was performed or displayed. We can extend the metaphor: a literal reading of the Bible amounts to little more than what we learn from a concert program, or even the score. It is the symphonic whole that bears the meaning that nothing less can remotely capture.” ― James P. Carse, The Religious Case Against Belief