Why Believe the Bible?

This post is not asking what arguments can be offered by those who advocate believing the Bible.

Rather, I am here posing the question where the idea comes from in the first place, that the appropriate thing to do with the Bible is to believe it. When precisely did the approach to religion arise that shifted trust from being directly on God to being on a text that God is thought to have inspired?

Of related interest, see Shaun Rufener’s recent post about believing the Bible, in which he makes the important point that people who say they believe the Bible inevitably have to twist and distort parts of the Bible so as to turn them into something they can believe.