How do you deal with a religious family?

[genkaus]

Your argument makes no sense. There's general agreement that the authors of Matthew and Luke used a common written source (or sources) along with proto-Mark when making their Gospels. I can show you Greek that is letter-for-letter identical, thus has to be from a common written source (or of course one is directly copied from the other). People that "make stuff up" don't meticulously copy down records from another source.

So, there was a common written source for all three which was made up. Which would mean that the authors themselves were gullible morons and whoever wrote the source lied about it.

The next most important author is of course Paul who wrote at least 8 or 9 of the NT books, and may have written 13-14. Firstly, if he was lying he would start to contradict himself.

Not if he got his story straight.

Secondly - why would he lie?

I've told you twice already.

He is maryterd for his faith according to early 2nd century church fathers and consistent with his reports of imprisonment. So there's no benefit in it for him to be a liar.

That the expected benefit didn't pay off doesn't mean that wasn't the motive.

That's a stupid question unless you have evidence. You may as well claim that all the ancient Egyptians were liars and their writings tell us nothing about their culture.

I do claim that they were liars - their writings are full of ridiculous stuff about gods and Pharaohs being gods in human form. What it tells us about their culture is a different matter - we get that from reading between the lines and using other sources to separate fact from fiction.