I was all set to mention Ehrman and the field of historical-critical Jesus scholarship, and then you went and took the wind out of my sail. 🤣

The Bible isn’t one book, obviously. What Ehrman and other scholars like him know is that writings that made it into the New Testament, and writings that didn’t, tell a compelling story from multiple perspectives. The idea that all these people just made it up doesn’t make sense.

Counterintuitively, inconsistencies and minor contradictions of fact add persuasively to the evidence of Jesus as a historical figure. Witnesses appear to report small things differently from each other just like we would expect them to today. If they had all agreed to spread a made-up story, you’d expect them to have done a better job staying on the same page.

The New Testament can’t be read as a work of professional history, but it can be textually analyzed, and scholars who do that say the New Testament itself is evidence for the historical reality of Jesus.

P.S. I’m an atheist too, but I’ve long had an amateur fascination with the Greco-Roman world, including the part Jesus lived in. Hence my interest in Jesus scholarship.