Bart Ehrman destroys Christianity in under 12 minutes.

[Jehanne]

I would actually strongly disagree with you that those examples show that scribes were, generally speaking, quite willing to make alterations.

No one in the modern era would tolerate it, at least without the "f-word" ("fraud") being used.  I grant you that the alterations from the 2nd century on became less and less, but they were still there.  Take John, Chapter 21; everyone agrees that it was a later addition.  Point is that John itself, as a Gospel, could have gone through a number of revisions until the "final" version settled down near the end of the 1st century or early into the 2nd.  Even then it was not an issue in the early Church for someone to come along and append an entire extra chapter to it.  Given this layering upon layering of the Gospels, it is difficult to say how, exactly, the very first manuscripts appeared.  And, then, these very early manuscripts were written at least a generation (40 years) after the death of Jesus, and both you and I agree that there was embellishment upon embellishment, especially, with the Resurrection accounts.  I would agree with you that the Gospels contain some of the words of the historical Jesus, but even scholars themselves cannot agree on which ones Jesus actually spoke!

And, so, there is substantial doubt about all of it.  We know that Jesus existed, that he was an historical figure during the early 1st century Palestine, but even then, the Romans did not bother to even mention his existence, let alone anyone else.  As such, it is reasonable to conclude that his influence on the cultural of his day was "unremarkable".  To me, this means that the Romans viewed him as yet another apocalyptic loon whom had a doomsday prophecy, and after his disturbance in the temple in Jerusalem (at the end of his ministry and not at the beginning, as John puts it), they arrested him, and some Roman official (probably, not even Pilate) sentenced him to die.  The rest, as they say, is "history".