The idea that the Bible is literal history is so baked into much of modern Christianity that people seem unable to unwrap their minds from around it, even when they know it can't actually be true.

I was watching an exchange on Quora the other day in which some razor-sharp, extremely well educated people were discussing ancient Greek religious beliefs. Somebody wanted to know how the average Greek of the classical period dealt with the fact that myths (god stories) from different sources differed from one another a lot, sometimes radically. Several of the people in the conversation presumed that the average Greek must have been to at least some extent atheist.

Even after a couple specialists weighed in to assure people that was not true, people had a very hard time wrapping their minds around the fact that "scriptural accuracy" played no role in religious sensibility or belief at that time.

Stories about the gods were generally presumed to reveal some kind of truth about the gods, but nobody presumed the stories were true in the sense that they described factual history, so nobody got upset that the details varied from account to account.

Modern Hindus may find themselves shaking their heads in agreement here, because Christians often get confused by Hindu storytelling, presuming all religions must elevate sacred texts to factual history.

But this is really a fairly new notion, and one not found in the Bible, I might add. It's unlikely that the ancient Greek-speaking world that formed the nucleus of early Christianity possessed a modern sensibility about inerrancy or factual history. That would have been very alien to them.