"We are in almost perfect agreement here!"

We are indeed. :)

I think you mentioned this in passing before, but another problem I see (as a journalist and history writer and child of a literary historian) is what happened during oral transmission of the original stories, followed by transmission of the Hebrew and Greek texts. I tend to think that biblical scholars make these matters much more complicated than they actually are - the sort of complex layering they do of texts is very much out of fashion in Shakespearian scholarship - but on a fundamental level, there's a difference between what a person says, what that person's statements are reported as in oral transmission, what they are eventually written down as, and what they are written down as after the manuscripts have been recopied several dozen times and the original texts lost. If this weren't the case, we'd have the same stories being told in the exact same manner in all four Gospels (though, as Dorothy L. Sayers has pointed out, a lot of the inconsistencies can be accounted for by the probability that Jesus told particular parables on more than one occasion).

Even if one believes that the Gospel writers were divinely inspired when they wrote the Gospels, there are certain things they quite simply could not have known, unless "divinely inspired" is defined as Gospel writers being secretaries who took dictation from God.

That said, I think the severe skepticism showed by most modern biblical scholars is really off the wall. That sort of skepticism, if applied consistently to other aspects of classical history, would result in Alexander the Great being removed from history textbooks, since we have no contemporary references to him.

Dusk (who isn't actually Christian, but who finds Christian theology enthralling)