The Gospel Challenge

All the recent hullabaloo over the historical Jesus (or Jesus McGee, as I like to call him) got me thinking about some of my past arguments regarding the historical reliability of the Bible. Oddly enough, the Bible's historicity or lack thereof wasn't really a factor in my deconversion 13 years ago; it was more spurred by what I perceived as the inanity of the theology (I've often said that reading the book of Hebrews did more to deconvert me than anything else). But the generally lousy reliability of the Bible as a collection of historical documents has certainly bolstered my confidence in my deconversion over the years. I'm talking specifically about the New Testament (and more specifically, the gospels), although the OT is cannon fodder as well. What's interesting, though, is that Christians actually tend to agree on a lot of the basic facts. We generally agree that: The gospels were written, at the earliest, several decades after Jesus purportedly lived, in