History is written by the winners.

All the ancient histories, as one of our wits say, are just fables that have been agreed upon.  ~Voltaire, Jeannot et Colin

A history in which every particular incident may be true may on the whole be false.  ~Thomas Babington Macaulay

Dan, 

I'm sorry, but I will not take reliance on word of mouth alone to be 100% accurate proof of anything.  I'm not going to budge on this. Understand that I'm not asserting that this means word of mouth is 100% innacurate.  What I am saying is that if all you have is word of mouth to go by, then you don't have 100% verifiable evidence. Sure, many parts could be accurate, but there are many parts that could be wildly inaccurate.

For example: Let's talk about the Trojan War and the stories that came from it.  It's stories have been told for thousands of years.  We have, in recent years, found evidence to support that the war actually happened and that Troy actually existed.  Does this mean I have to believe the stories are 100% accurate?  No.  I don't believe there was a man named Achilles who was actually immortal all over his body except for his heel. I don't believe that general Odysseus actually fought off a cyclops.  Are we to say that Homer was a liar? No, but I'm going to say he wasn't 100% accurate.

How is this any different from the stories of the Bible?  Sure there are many historical accuracies, but there are also many inaccuracies.

Getting back to my circular reasoning argument: Why are the only stories of Jesus from the Christian point of view?  Where is the public record which takes into account the miracles he performed?  Where are the non-Christian stories of Jesus from that time?  Where is the archaeological evidence to back up the claims?  There simply are none.

I still assert that the "scientific" method is the best tool we have to properly derive the truth out of any given claim.  But let's go ahead and use the "historical" method you brought up and put the four gospels to the test. 

Here is a copy/paste of the core principals of the Historical Method of which you linked to in your post with my notes in green intersected in between:

• Human sources may be relics such as a fingerprint; or narratives such as a statement or a letter. Relics are more credible sources than narratives.

There aren't any relics to back up your claims. Like I said before, the gospels were made decades after, and the oldest fragment of the gospels we have is dated to 117-138 AD which is almost 100 years after the life of Jesus.

• Any given source may be forged or corrupted. Strong indications of the originality of the source increase its reliability.

This is a significant part of my argument. I believe the stories of Jesus HAVE been forged or corrupted.

• The closer a source is to the event which it purports to describe, the more one can trust it to give an accurate description of what really happened.

You have acknowledged that the writings of Jesus were written decades after the event.

• A primary source is more reliable than a secondary source which is more reliable than a tertiary source, and so on.

I have already stated that I believe the gospels to be secondary sources at best.

• If a number of independent sources contain the same message, the credibility of the message is strongly increased.

Considering all of the sources we have for Jesus' life are in the New Testament, NONE of the sources are independent.

• The tendency of a source is its motivation for providing some kind of bias. Tendencies should be minimized or supplemented with opposite motivations.

If you are trying to claim your leader is the foretold Messiah, your stories are most absolutely biased and motivated to saying he is who you claim he is.

• If it can be demonstrated that the witness or source has no direct interest in creating bias then the credibility of the message is increased.

Again... the gospels were written by the followers of Jesus.  They are absolutely biased sources in terms of making claims of him being the Messiah.

I'm sorry, but all of your evidence doesn't even comply with the method you're trying to use.  To use the Bible as evidence for Jesus is to use biased testimony from a biased source.

I appreciate your sparring with me Dan.  I think it's time that I make note that I hope you understand that even though we have this debate, I respect your beliefs even if they aren't my own. I do think we're getting close to having to agree to disagree on what constitutes valid evidence, which is where I expect the argument to go.

Take care!

-Mike