In my younger days I spent 12 years in a "Bible believing" church. I finally rejected those beliefs when I started doing my own research on the Bible and reading numerous books by Bible scholars. This research has continued for the past 16 years. One thing I quickly realized is that there's a huge gap between what real Bible scholars know about the book and what many Christians believe about it.
Even the most elementary facts known to scholars for centuries are unknown to many Christians. For example, very few (if any!) of the books in the Bible were actually written by the men whose names are attached to the books today. This goes for both Old and New Testament books. While many Christians are shocked when they first hear this, it has been common knowledge among scholars for a very long time.
Sorry, but the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were not written by those men. How then did the gospels get those names attached? And who actually wrote the gospels?
No one knows who wrote them because they are anonymous documents - which was the common practice in the ancient world. The names Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were not attached to the gospels until the late 2nd century by early fathers of the Roman Catholic Church in order to give those gospels an appearance of apostolic authority. There were dozens of other competing gospels which never made it into the New Testament, as well as many other early Christian writings, and much dispute was going on over which ones were going to be put into the official canon of the church.
So they chose the names Matthew and John from early Christian mythology, as they are among the disciples of Jesus in the gospel stories. The names Mark and Luke were taken from early Christian epistles.
But the point is, these four names were arbitrarily taken from early Christian writings and attached to the four gospels that early church fathers wanted to be included in the New Testament. At best, it was just a wild guess, and not even based on any evidence at all. This is NOT a radical view, it is common knowledge and the mainstream view of all critical-historical scholars, but unknown to many Christians who know very little about the origins of their own religion.
The only New Testament books that might have been written by the man whose name is attached to them are some of the epistles of Paul. Of the 13 letters of Paul, about half of them may have actually been written by Paul. This is the mainstream view. But even this is under dispute, as there are scholars today who think none of them were actually written by Paul. A few scholars even argue that Paul was most likely not even a real historical person.
And speaking of Biblical figures who were probably not real historical people, I have concluded that very few of the characters in the Bible are based on actual people. Abraham, Moses, and Samson are widely regarded as legendary/fictional figures by scholars, as are everyone else in the early parts of the Old Testament. Characters like David and Solomon are currently under dispute. Even if some of these characters are based on real people, the stories told about them in the Bible are either entirely fictional or greatly exaggerated.
Who was Jesus? It is also clear to me that the gospel stories of Jesus and his disciples are literary creations. Western civilization has been mistaking literature for history for nearly 2,000 years. The writers are using fictional allegories to argue certain theological views. This is obvious for several reasons.
First of all, there is simply nothing original or unique about the gospel stories. Virtually every event described in the gospels is a rewriting of an older story found in the myths of other ancient religions or in the Old Testament.
Secondly, it is a fact that the gospels are choke-full of internal contradictions. The writers clearly had no qualms at all about contradicting one another. They were not disputing over events that actually took place on earth, but were merely making theological arguments using fictional stories about Jesus to make those arguments. This was common practice in ancient religious writings.
Thirdly, it is also a fact that the gospels are filled with all kinds of errors, including historical and geographical errors. For example, the gospel of Mark contains so many geographical errors that scholars believe the writer could not possibly have been from Palestine. He was almost certainly a Hellenized Jew living in the diaspora who knew little of the geography of Palestine.
Once one begins to dig deeper and do some research on the writings that make up the Bible and how they were eventually compiled into a single book, the entire traditional Christian view of the Bible falls like a house of cards.
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