[jimbob]

A look at the historical timeline is all the evidence I need to tell you that the Bible was written after the historical events it supposedly predicts. How many times must I repeat this before you will start noticing it? 50? 100? My evidence is basic historical facts.

I'd like to see one of these historical "facts". I'd be very surprised that anyone on earth could make an accurate claim on when any ancient text was originally put to paper. Certainly historians can carbon date the earliest document found to date, but this simply does not rule out the existance of an earlier document. That said, I personally believe that the oral tradition is as good as the written tradition in many cultures. If you want, I'll dig up some "expert opinions" from the Classics department that agree. We have very few contemporary documents regarding Julius Ceasar or Alexander, yet the transcripts that exist are 1) widely regarded as being resonably accurate (even though the earliest surviving documents are easily 200 years post-Julius or post-Alexander) and 2) often passed down originally by oral tradition prior to their "codification".

My point is that Rags is wrong about the predictive capabilities of the Bible. That is what I have been arguing.

It seems this is so only because you have already decided that this is so. If you believe that accurate prediction is impossible, then we're already done here. But not on the basis that we have reason to doubt what happened a few thousand years ago, but because you have a world view that excludes the possibility that the writers were not lying.

The stories of the Bible were not being told before the historical events the Bible supposedly predicts, but afterwards.

But why do you believe this? If it's because of an expert opinion, please, for your own sake, check your source(s). If you have some good sources (or if you're a historian yourself) then please, share and enlighten us all!! If it's because you believe that anything supernatural is impossible, then it really isn't about the authorship at all.