GoodK wrote:If the only evidence (and it has been repeated here for over ten pages that the evidence for Jesus is the New Testament) can't get the details of the story right, and we have nothing else to go on besides this inconsistent story, an intellectually honest person would question the story.
Yes, they would! And that is precisely what scholars do.
As E. P. Sanders explains:
The gospels present impressionistic portraits of Jesus. We can learn from these impressions, but we can also discover quite objective information. . . . The basic means of establishing evidence is cross-examination. The gospels must be treated as 'hostile witnesses' in the court room. . . . The gospels want the reader to believe that Jesus is the son of God and that faith in him saves. The material in them is shaped--more or less completely--to this end. In attempting to persuade the reader, however, the evangelists used material, and that material as a whole has some relationship to the historical man Jesus. . . .
At first it seems that all the evidence is biased towards Jesus. It is, however, extremely important to note that, while we have for Jesus no equivalent to Aristophanes on Socrates, we can discern in the gospels that he offended many and that he was executed on a serious charge. That is, the gospels, though biased in his favour, give us a glimpse of views held by those who were biased against him.
Once we can discern both favourable and unfavourable portraits of Jesus, we can ask what is common to both portraits, and we may have considerable confidence that what is common is historically sound. The discovery that sources are biased should not lead to the view that they are useless, but rather to patient and careful analysis and examination to ferret out the hard historical data which they have employed for their own purposes.
-- E. P. Sanders and Margaret Davies, Studying the Synoptic Gospels [London: SCM Press, 1989), 301-302.
Dale Allison enumerates some of the criteria scholars use to authenticate material that goes back to Jesus:
The plausibility that a complex or topic originated with Jesus is . . . increased if the Christian tradition has seemingly struggled with it, and especially if there are signs that the early Jesus tradition itself sought to domesticate or reinterpret the item. . . . One example is Jesus' prophecy of the destruction and rebuilding of the temple, which receives more than one interpretation and is in Mark attributed to false witnesses. A second example is Q 6:27, the imperative to love one's enemy. It has, because of its extreme demand, been modified in or dropped altogether from the paraenesis in the canonical and extracanonical parallels to Q 6:27-38.
The plausibility that a complex or topic originated with Jesus is increased if one cannot concoct a persuasive narrative explaining its emergence in the post-Easter period. . . . Consider [for example] the topic of Pilate as Roman governor when Jesus was crucified. Even if one were to attribute all of the post-Markan references to Pilate to Markan influence and further deny a historical core to the story in Mark 15:1-15, it would be difficult to offer a convincing explanation of why Christian legend landed on Pilate in particular. Here is a case where a topic--Jesus crucified under Pontius Pilate--seems historical apart from the issue of whether it appears in any authentic complexes.
-- Dale C. Allison, Jesus of Nazareth: Millenarian Prophet (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998), 52-53.
If you are really interested in examining the evidence for the historical Jesus you can find it laid out in painstaking detail over 2, 130 pages in John P. Meier's multivolume series,
A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus. He does not accept the testimony of the Gospel writers uncritically; instead, he applies a rigorous historical-critical methodology throughout.
The consensus I noted earlier regarding the basic outline of Jesus' life reflects the assured results of decades of critical scholarship. That you glibly dismiss it with the absurd insinuation that the New Testament writings cannot yield factual information because they contradict each other in places suggests that you have little or no understanding of historical Jesus scholarship, or indeed of historical research generally.