There is NO way to know ANYTHING about Jesus Christ outside the Bible, none, period. The Bible was given to us so we COULD know about Christ and everything else about the nature of God.
Does this mean that anyone who has never read a Bible is damned?
The entire human race is damned, we're born damned, we're born fallen, out of touch with God, spiritually dead, incapable of relating to God, and on top of that in thrall to Satan, who "won" the right to rule us when he deceived our first parents. God didn't HAVE to provide any kind of salvation for us, but He did, and He promised to do so all the way back in Eden when He promised to send the Seed of the woman who would bruise the head of Satan.
Those who understood the message, which at that time was of course passed on by word of mouth down through Adam's progeny, looked forward to the Messiah, and in every generation there were those who got the message and looked forward to the Messiah. Job did not have the Bible and yet he expected to see his Redeemer. Those who knew of the Redeemer would have been saved.
There were also distorted versions of the messianic hope that spawned many of the pagan religions, and nobody gets saved through a distorted message. If there are any now who still have the true message handed down through their own ancestry they too are saved, and some missionaries have reported surprising traditions that do seem to preserve such a message, and they receive the gospel gratefully. The odds aren't good that there are any more left, it's all degenerated into the distorted demon-driven religions.
So now we have to take the gospel to all the unreached peoples. It's the gospel that saves, not the Bible, but the Bible, again, is now our source of the information in undistorted form.
Is God so limited so as to be unable to reach them any other way than through a book?
See above.
ABE: I'd just add that NOW, 2000 years after the coming of the Messiah promised down through all the preceding centuries, NOW, when we have it all in undistorted written form inspired by God Himself, NOW, it would be extreme foolishness to think you can make up who God is and ignore the written testimony of the witnesses of Christ.
Edited by Faith, : No reason given.
Edited by Faith, : No reason given.
He who surrenders the first page of his Bible surrenders all. --John William Burgon, Inspiration and Interpretation, Sermon II.