Religious Background

[SteveII]

1. If your hangup is on the first three chapters of Genesis, then you have to realize that many many Christians do not take the story to be literal. Augustine 1700 years ago did not think that the creation account was literal. There are good reasons to think the six days were not really six days.

a. not written in the same Hebrew as the rest of the book of Genesis--but in an older Hebrew.
b. poetic formulation of the versus
c. how it is clearly not meant to be in order because even by ancient reasoning, day and evening don't come before creating the sun.
d. How it very likely was the story passed down in order to draw a healthy distinction between other creation myths, where nature is endowed with spiritual qualities, to the correct view that the universe is an orderly thing not to be worshiped.

2. You are over-stating your case about interpretation. The core theology is quite easy to ascertain from the NT. Common sense and a little reading for context usually takes care of the rest. Perhaps give an example?? 

3. Since there are good reasons to believe the NT is true, the events described there are indeed distinguishable from mythology.

Only 3. Good reasons to believe the NT is true, well it does refer to some places that we know existed at the time, for the rest, moot, please provide the evidence and then I will introduce you to Min.

Regarding the events surrounding the life and death of Jesus, we have plenty of evidence. 

1. The first NT documents were letters written to churches who already believed the overall theme of Christianity. So now we have two bodies (not pieces) of evidence: multiple churches existed throughout the Roman empire by 50AD and the documents written to them--believing the same thing about Jesus.
2. We also have documents that pre-date the gospels from which the gospels we have (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) referred to (Q being one of them) --written within the lifetime of eyewitnesses. So now we have 3-4 other pieces of evidence to add to the fact that people believed the content just following Jesus' death.
3. We have the gospels themselves written within the lifetime of eyewitnesses. More evidence for what people believed to be true.

The only evidence we will every get of events like this that happened in the first century is written. We can quite reasonably infer from the multiple sources of evidence that a large group of people (including the authors of the NT) believed what was written because they witnessed or knew and believed the witnesses of the events.

These facts make the events surrounding the life and death of Jesus the most attested to series of events in ancient history.

LOL about Min. I haven't seen one of his posts in years.