Richard Carrier summarizes the historical "reliability" of the gospels. They don't come off so well.
Quote:As I noted earlier, this should have consequences to future research on the Gospels. We need to shift entirely to asking the question 'What is the author attempting to say or accomplish with this story, or with his revision of this story?' and not 'Did that actually happen?' Because the latter simply wasn't a concern of these authors. Even if they were concerned to convince people it happened, they were not themselves concerned if it actually did. They had a different agenda, and are crafting the myths they need to sell it. The Gospels were produced by faith communities for preaching, teaching and propaganda, and not as disinterested or even interested biographical
inquiry. There is no indication in them of a quest to determine what Jesus really said or did. There is no discussion of sources or of reasons to prefer one claim to another or of attempts to interpret contradictory data or even any mention of the existence of real alternative accounts (even though we know they knew of them-because they all covertly used them as source material). Each author just makes Jesus say or do whatever they want. They change the story as suits them and neglect to mention they did so. They craft l iterary artifices and symbolic narratives routinely. They frequently rewrite classical and biblical stories and just insert Jesus into them. If willing to do all that (and plainly they were), the authors of the Gospels clearly had no interest in any actual historical data. And if they had no interest in that (and plainly they didn't), they didn't need a historical Jesus. Even if there had been one, he was wholly irrelevant to their aims and designs.
These are thus not historians. They are mythographers; novelists; propagandists. They are deliberately inventing what they present in their texts. And they are doing it for a reason (even if we can't always discern what that is). The Gospels simply must be approached as such. We have to stop thinking we can use them as historical sources.
pgs 508-509
