The way to epistemologically approach the Bible is the same way all books one reads need to be epistemologically approached. Being a religious text, the Bible is something many people make assumptions in favor of or against without truly understanding almost anything about logic, epistemology, or the Bible itself with any consistency or depth. It does not matter what kinds of assumptions are made about it: they are all beliefs that stand on ignorance. Perhaps the assumptions are true, and perhaps they are false. No one can have knowledge about anything at all through assumptions whether the idea in question is true or false. Cutting both into default dismissals of the Bible and belief based on faith, this fact means that the Bible, just like any other book, has to be rationalistically analyzed in order for one to know if its contents are true, false, probable, or improbable.
First, is the text making claims that are internally consistent and that do not contradict logical axioms? If not, it does not matter what the book says or who endorses it. Its ideas are already false at the very start if they are not consistent with both themselves necessary axioms like the inherent truth of reason. Even if a book's claim(s) did not contradict themselves, or at least not to the greatest extent possible, this would not make them logically possible. A consistently irrational metaphysical or epistemological concept still contradicts the laws of logic and is disqualified from the realm of mere possibility in doing so. Not even total truth in all of a book's other claims will save a single error of this most egregious kind.
What if a book like the Bible does not have any internal contradictions--not that it never initially seems to have any contradictions, but that its claims do not truly contradict themselves when understood as they are? Then one can more directly consider which parts of it might be necessarily true. In other words, this entails identifying the concepts affirmed by the text that are logically provable without divine revelation or sensory experiences (whether or not someone is introduced to the idea by their own reflection or by reading the text). An example in the Bible is the concept of substance dualism--even if there is no afterlife or if consciousness has purely material causal origins, a mind is still an immaterial thing that does not metaphysically reduce down to matter. Biblical passages like Matthew 10:28 and James 2:26 acknowledge this despite having other ideas built around this objectively true distinction.
At this point, after the ideas in a book that could not possibly be false due to logical necessity have been recognized, there is another step one could take. This is where epistemological limitations prevent absolute certainty of whether certain premises like Yahweh being the uncaused cause are true, but one can still have absolute certainty of what follows from various ideas that cannot be proven. Scientific and historical evidences are now at their point of relevance in a person's rationalistic approach to a written work. For the Bible, this is where the scientific evidence for a specific beginning point of the entire cosmos (though the logical impossibility of time and matter having always existed takes clear precedence over this empirical evidence), like the seemingly accelerating expansion of the universe, and documents referring to Biblical figures like Jesus of Nazareth or Herod Agrippa has its place.
Although the Bible has its more unique contents as a theological work that addresses historical claims, metaphysical claims, moral claims, and so on, this general approach of starting with basic consistency and moving on to logically provable truths to logically possible and then to fallible, evidence-based reinforcement is the rational way to handle any book that makes philosophical claims. Since all claims about reality are philosophical, this means that all scientific, historical, or broader philosophical texts can be assessed like this. The core of philosophy (logical axioms and self-awareness) and all sorts of logical truths that go beyond first principles can all be known without the aid of books. A book that elaborates on such a truth can be helpful even though it is never epistemologically necessary. Beyond this class of truths, the only valid way to approach a book's claims is the aforementioned sequence.
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