Totally NOT a debate about the veracity of the gospels

[Fromper]

I guess the difficulty I personally have with the authenticity of the bible, other than the obvious issues with it, is that there is truly no independent evidence or verification of authorship or dating of the books included in the bible. Even historians are guessing, surmising. If you have ten "scholars" in the room, you'll get ten different answers. Even if they're subtly different.

So, that's one of the main problems I have with taking the Bible as a reliable history marker. (Putting aside the religious aspect of it for a moment)

Then you should be a historical skeptic with regards to every piece of ancient literature, not just the Bible.

I'm reminded of the Civil War class I took in college. On the first day, our professor pointed out that the Civil War was the first war in human history where the majority of the soldiers were literate, and left us literally thousands of diaries to study, so we really know what it was like for them. In earlier conflicts, it was mostly just the leaders, and sometimes only the winners, who left behind any sort of written account of what happened, so history books are full of self serving propaganda from the winners of various wars.