How much of the Bible do you believe is true?

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What about the Masoretic Text??? You can't really do a fair comparison of scripture without both the LXX AND the MT!! !! 'Keet, where's you brain? (j/k)

י וְשָׁפַכְתִּי עַל-בֵּית דָּוִיד וְעַל יוֹשֵׁב יְרוּשָׁלִַם, רוּחַ חֵן
וְתַחֲנוּנִים, וְהִבִּיטוּ אֵלַי, אֵת אֲשֶׁר-דָּקָרוּ; וְסָפְדוּ עָלָיו,
כְּמִסְפֵּד עַל-הַיָּחִיד, וְהָמֵר עָלָיו, כְּהָמֵר עַל-הַבְּכוֹר.

in answer to the OP, i don't believe that anything in the bible is true, unless confirmed by an independent source. some historical and geological events have been confirmed, but everything else i don't believe.

So, what is the percentage of events which have been confirmed versus the percentage of those which have been denied versus those which have neither been confirmed nor denied yet?

what? that is a very odd question. why would i have calculated that? i answered the OP's question with my belief, and my belief is not based on percentages.

if your belief is based on percentages, i guess you should break out the calculator!

Ah, so your belief isn't founded by any data or evidence but your above response to the OP is a generalized statement of "what if" alone.

is data based on percentages only? i look at each item presented, on a case by case basis. if it is supported by credible outside evidence, then i will most likely believe it. if that part is not supported by credible outside evidence, then i most likely do not.

i don't understand why a person would require an overall percentage of supported evidence of a collection of documents... ? what a strange question. i.e. you may speak some truth and some falsehood, but what is the point in knowing the exact percentage of truthfulness (or lies) you speak? those parts of what you speak which were shown to be true i would come to believe. the rest i would discard as false.

A percentage is useful as a measure of how likely things are to be true. There are two main categories of events in an historical document, those that have been independently verified or falsified and those which have not yet been independently verified or falsified. You can use the parts which have been independently verified or falsified as a basis of probability for those parts of the document which as of yet have not been tested.

uh, really you can't. because each item needs to verified separately, by separate means.

i.e. consider a bowl of fruit, containing one of each of the following pieces: banana, orange, pear, apple, and watermelon (it's a big bowl). the banana, pear and orange are still fresh, but the watermelon is completely rotten - it is a stinking mass of flies, mold, and yeast. if you looked in terms of percentages, you could say that of the 4 fruits evaluated, 3/4 or 75% are perfectly fine.

therefore, could you then conclude that the final fruit - the apple, was still fresh? no, you could not. the watermelon is large and influential and may have affected the apple. you could not depend on a statistic to decide this for you, as each fruit is different. you would need to evaluate the apple separately for rottenness.

Actually, fruit usually has similar rotting agents, such as yeast which feed off of sugar, so they are the same in that respect. But in terms of probability alone, you could say that with the current sampling that you have that you have a 75% chance of gathering a fresh fruit or a 25% chance of gathering a rotten fruit.

but it isn't a 75% probability in actuality - that would have a large chance of being false. perhaps the evaluation should be made by considering the total weight of rotten food as compared to fresh? or by looking at the comparative rates of ripening and the actual age of each piece of fruit.

the same thing with that book, the bible. no statistic could encompass everything that goes into proving or disproving the potential accuracy of each event or book of the bible. it would be like... comparing apples to oranges. such a statistic may satisfy you, but it would not likely satisfy anybody else, because they would be looking at different criteria.

With fruit, the skin of it allows each to be considered a discrete package, separate from the others. This allows for boolean, true/false of each item rather than dissecting each rotten fruit and separating the edible from the refuse.

However, in regard to literature in general, such as Roman History by Dio Cassius, there is actually a fair amount of mythological refuse intermixed with real history, but the parts where real history is the case is not too difficult to delineate - especially if you ever spend time reading older European literature. With the Bible, for the most part ancient Hebrew literature and also having most of the New Testament written by Jewish people as well, there is a plain difference in writing styles. They write things as they are to the best of their ability, and once something has been written it has to be copied exactly (or the scribe is fired). Such is easiest to see in the history in the books of Kings and Chronicles, as they show both the good and the bad about both them and their enemies.

if what you say i true, then there would already be an established statistic. but there is not. any statistic i personally generate would not satisfy the biblical scholars. anyway, the whole idea of using a statistic negates the essence of the question, as it is based on opinion. each of has our own threshold of proof.

I am not sure it negates the point, but I do recognize your criticisms of statistics as valid. You can use them, but they don't give us the underlying reality so much as just some number that represents *something*, and in the case of any writing, the lines become TOO blurred to use, as the interpretation of the writing is full of question, as is what constitutes a truth-claim, as well as, what represents a claim about truth made by the text.

The modern bible translations? I'll confess, not exactly 100%... I'm a bit skeptic, as there are things that may have been mistranslated - With over 1,000 pages to write/type out, there's bound to be an error or two; I don't think the scribes were possessed by God to do it flawlessly. Taking human error into perspective.

Then there's the other things I'm not sure about. The very early church (I believe up until 500 AD) didn't believe in the doctrine of eternal hell at all (I follow this view, as I've said, I seem to have the inability to believe in hell); while nowadays, it's commonplace to believe in hell, and most churches back their belief in such a thing through their interpretation of various verses.

Not only 1,000 pages, but another thousand-number is in play - the stuff's been re-translated for over 2,000 years (not even going to guess how many for the old testament). I think that a lot of the biblical contradictions people find might just be mistranslations... which is either way, why I'm kind of skeptical.