How do you figure out who Jesus is? What sources of information do you rely upon to draw your conclusions about him?
Same way as you just more critically. Thereās truth behind and in the gospels even though they are not biographies nor are they likely to represent eyewitness testimony. The gospel of John represents post-easter developments. It treats the life of Jesus from the divine perspective. At this point Jesus is strongly identified with God but I donāt take any of the statements literally to excess. To the authors (plural is intentional) of John, Jesus was identifiable with God on earth and he restates traditional Jesus material in that context. The story is retold anew in light of changing Christology.
Vinnie
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I think this is an interesting point-but I donāt want to diverge from the subject, so Iāll post somewhere else when I get a chance (or PM) 
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Great question! Have you read Matthew Batesā āSalvation By Allegiance Aloneā? In it, he asserts that the Greek āpistisā has more to do with allegiance to a given concept or person (not belief against the odds of truth).
As someone who tends to the skeptical/naturalistic side of things, I kind of like that impression; even though I am a Christian. I agree with you!
Salvation by Allegiance Alone: Rethinking Faith, Works, and the Gospel of Jesus the King - Kindle edition by Bates, Matthew W., McKnight, Scot. Religion & Spirituality Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com.
How do you know that? You seem convinced, but it is unclear to me what it is that does the convincing.
Know what? That some of what the Gospels say is true? Or that some of it isnāt. Which one are you asking?
Spiritual truth comes from personal experience. Historical truth comes from historical analysis. Scriptural truth is determined by your model of inspiration.
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I wonder where he got that idea. When people realize that death is imminent, their mindset certainly changes, but is that harmful? What if the mindset we normally have when we arenāt confronted with our impending mortality is out of whack? If none of us knows the exact hour when we will be asked for an accounting, is it wiser to relax and not worry about it or are we better off coming to terms with the end of our lives first, before we embark on living life.
Both. How do you decide? Experience? Your personal model of inspiration? Is your path to those answers objective. When we have Jesus quoted as saying,
" āI am the true vine, and my Father is the gardener. 2 He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit he prunes so that it will be even more fruitful. 3 You are already clean because of the word I have spoken to you. 4 Remain in me, as I also remain in you. No branch can bear fruit by itself; it must remain in the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me.
5 āI am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing. 6 If you do not remain in me, you are like a branch that is thrown away and withers; such branches are picked up, thrown into the fire and burned. 7 If you remain in me and my words remain in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. 8 This is to my Fatherās glory, that you bear much fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples.
9 āAs the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love. 10 If you keep my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Fatherās commands and remain in his love. 11 I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete. 12 My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. 13 Greater love has no one than this: to lay down oneās life for oneās friends. 14 You are my friends if you do what I command. 15 I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his masterās business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you. 16 You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you so that you might go and bear fruitāfruit that will lastāand so that whatever you ask in my name the Father will give you. 17 This is my command: Love each other.
18 āIf the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first. 19 If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you. 20 Remember what I told you: āA servant is not greater than his master.ā If they persecuted me, they will persecute you also. If they obeyed my teaching, they will obey yours also. 21 They will treat you this way because of my name, for they do not know the one who sent me. 22 If I had not come and spoken to them, they would not be guilty of sin; but now they have no excuse for their sin. 23 Whoever hates me hates my Father as well. 24 If I had not done among them the works no one else did, they would not be guilty of sin. As it is, they have seen, and yet they have hated both me and my Father. 25 But this is to fulfill what is written in their Law: āThey hated me without reason.ā[
26 āWhen the Advocate comes, whom I will send to you from the Fatherāthe Spirit of truth who goes out from the Fatherāhe will testify about me. 27 And you also must testify, for you have been with me from the beginning."
How do you filter through each word to make a decision based on your criteria?
Well, knowing me, itās hard to say!
I thought you agreed with Marvin and Dawkins that belief depends more on our frame of mind than on facts. There is some merit there.
Trying to convince others that Christ was real and that we have accurate records of the things he said and did is like pulling teeth typically.
When economic insecurity prevails, the terminal diagnosis is given, when a loved one is in serious danger, presenting His claims can be like cake.
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thanks, thats more along the lines I am thinking. As I once had a chair collapse under me I know that it looked funny to everyone else, so the commitment here does not involve any serious risk. Going in a car or elevator is already different and my relative risk per mile if cycling to work is much higher than flying to / travelling Israel as I found out when having to give a risk assessment for going to a conference in Israel following 9/11.
The question here is how we do our risk/benefit analysis.
When it comes to proving your belief right or wrong, the reason one carries on believing could only be ignorance of the proof, not strength of faith, as we ignore at will. If however you accept the proof you will change and improve your worldview. So if we put ignorance aside, as it is de-facto idiotic but if you accept the proof, what does it do to your engagement. Proof eliminates the element of hope and the element of risk taking.
I remember a science fiction from the 70ās were scientists had solved the problem of death by ageing and that people started worrying of getting out and risk dying āunnecessarilyā
But back to the question, epistemologically speaking, does proof shift the subject proven from believe to knowledge?
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I have a question. You mean proof like in some mathematical system, when it 100% certain or like in more natural language sens, when proof speak for truth of something, but donāt give you maybe 60% of certainty? Since most of the proofs in live, and science too, are of the second kind, this looks quite important.
Yes and no. If Iāve sat in the chair before and it accepted my weight before then yes it will likely do so again. But can I assume the condition of the chair and my weight will remain constant? If instead of a chair we were talking of an old piton placed in a cliff with a thousand feet of exposure which one wanted to climb, the potential risk forces one to take more seriously the potential of conditions to change over time. If the chair collapses we are as amused as surprised. If the piton fails and is the only point of protection in that part of the climb no one will be amused, so no, having passed the test at one point in time does not make it a fact that it will do so again.
So it matters a great deal to separate out exactly what religious claims the Bible is thought to make from what may be ancient hyperbole which survives from an oral tradition. Presumably a book like the Bible makes a great number of claims. Are all of the same importance and are they all equally relevant today as when they were penned? If every word of the Bible is accepted as axiomatically true then some people will go on holding up passages for ridicule.
Personally I donāt rely on the Bible and even if I did I wouldnāt approach it as a reference book of empirical facts, so it is largely moot for me whether some people make unreasonable claims about it or other people lambaste them for doing so. But there is a larger point: is all truth reducible to incontestable facts? I would say there are truths resistant to proof worth taking on faith which will always be contestable. These should not be held to the same standard though when expressed with enough hyperbole will always provoke someone to object.
I read it, see how it fits in with the overall narrative presented about Jesus by the New Testament. You also have to perform source analysis and locate the Gospel chronologically within early Christianity and in relation to the three other surviving late first century works about Jesus. Once you do that the nature of John becomes transparent to me. Written after the fact from a perspective of divine sovereignty. Yes, Jesus is the true vine. But much of this is post-easter advice. Jesus says, āIf the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first." This is written several generations after Jesus was crucified and its meant to strengthen believers in the face of adversity, persecution and doubt. Jesus has already laid down his live for his followers. Verse 12 is more of a hindmost than a forecast. It is strong hyperbolic language (what do you mean they were without sin before Jesus testified to them?) meant to comfort persecuted, hated and rejected Christians. Jesus didnāt just speak to his followers in 29 AD. He was still speaking to them in the present at the end of the first century. Christian prophets could relay the words of the ever-present, transforming and risen Jesus well after he died. These can even make it into the gospels. John can write a quasi-historical Gospel blending what happened 60 years ago with what the ever present and transforming Jesus was telling people today from a perspective of Godās sovereignty where everything that happened was according to Divine plan.
I see strength and encouragement in the face of persecution and rejection. An affirmation that their beliefs are true and those who reject them hold false beliefs. Confirmation they are Godās children and Jesus loves them. That is the major thrust of the passage, the forest for me. I donāt much look at the trees in John because I donāt think the historical Jesus said much of what John attributes to him and that which he did has been colored by Johnās perspective. John is too different from the synoptics to be historically credible for me. This is not to say I disagree with John perspective overall. I do not. But none the less, we cannot read it like it is a list of facts. That is the difference between your model of inspiration and mine. Reading the Bible like this runs into way too many problems.
Vinnie
Have you ever tried just reading the Gospels from a purely narrative perspective, which treats each work solely on its own (no harmonizing) and trying to glean spiritual truths from it? It is definitely not a reference book of empirical facts. It is certainly a time-piece but its overall message is continuing.
Vinnie
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I may just do that. Iāve thought about some passages here and when it comes up in something Iām reading but otherwise no. I wonder if Rouser or Enns have articles or videos to whet my appetite?
Regarding faith and proof, this post made me think about how it has played out in my own experience. Memory is a funny thing, and I wish I had taken notes as a younger person, and if I have any advice to a teenager, it might be to write what you think about various topics and issues, so that you can look back and have an accurate record of your thoughts. Anyway:
I am sure as a child I accepted the stories of Adam and Eve and Noah as presented literally. Even then, however, it seems they were presented much like fairy tales and Santa Claus, with no deeper meaning or concrete form, and perhaps were perceived as well as being somewhat outside the realm of normal existence. As I grew to teenage years, I read science books constantly, and just observing the world gave me the impression of deep age, as we lived a mile or so from a canyon that no doubt took a long time to form. Finally, I remember when we dug a well on our farm, and pumped sand and mollusk shells up from the depths of the well at 400 feet below the high flat plains, forcing me to wonder at the fact that a sea of sorts once lay beneath the ground we plowed, and was covered by 400 feet of sediment from mountains ground to sand and clay that were far beyond the horizon. In that moment, the facts at hand negated any blind faith in a young earth that still lingered.
Later, in college, I studied such things as comparative anatomy and genetics, which showed how life is interrelated, and evolution happened. While Henry Morris was an unknown to me, in the early 1970ās the Christian community was pretty literal in interpretation, and the choice was to either reject Christianity or interpret scripture in a way to make it compatible, which I did. At the time, my thoughts were pretty superficial as is typical for the age, so I donāt think I had a deep understanding of what that meant, being more interested in classes, grades, friends, and females, not particularly in that order. However, again, it seems evidence definitely changed my understanding of faith. Fast forward to today, that understanding continues to be molded by experience, and experience by evidence. Ironically, as I learned more about the physical universe, my ideas of faith and Christianity became more metaphysical and spiritual.
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ā¦sighā¦ another illness going aroundā¦ pandemic? 
Indeed! Thus my companion definition of knowledge to go with your definition of faith isā¦
Knowledge consists of the beliefs we live by. As a corollary definition, scientific knowledge consists of the theories and findings by which scientists conduct further scientific inquiry.
Though truth be told I would define faith in a similar but slightly different way.
Faith is the choice to live and act according to a conclusion when there is no absolute proof. As a result faith is the basis of most knowledge because absolute proof is actually quite rare and the demands of life simply will not wait for any such thing even if it were actually possible to obtain it.
Except that proof is extremely rare. Mostly the best we can do is acquire evidence which only makes a belief less reasonable and as a result people stubbornly cling to a belief despite of such evidence.
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I think this is a core part of the confusion that you think of facts instead of evidence. A fact is a proof, thus a special case of evidence, most evidence is not that as it carries levels of uncertainty. The dead body with a bullet hole in the forehead is a fact with regards to the question if A is dead, but evidence with regards of how s/he came to death, e.g. who put the bullet there. Even the victims fingerprints and gunpowder residues on its hand do not give you a fact about the reason for the death. So Dawkins talking about belief without supporting evidence can only really account for for faith in atheism where he claims he cannot have any as there in no evidence for forming a belief in the first place thus talking about a not belief. The rational response if presented with evidence can only be a belief (e.g to believe or not belief) or to know better or be ignorant about the evidence. If the latter debate is futile.
Can you give me an example where you think I misunderstand the differences between fact and evidence? Iām confused.