The Bible is not an accurate record.
Of course it isn't. Storytellers enhanced their tales as they told them, and memory is so flexible that researchers found recently that there is no such thing as an "original memory" of an event. We remember little salient bits of events and reconstruct them each time we recall them. So that is why contemporaneous notes are much more reliable than later eye-witness testimony.
It was about three hundred years before anybody wrote down the gospel stories. But evidently
something happened in the Middle east around 30 CE, since different disciples went off in different directions and their stories were written down eventually.
Because of this, I believe much along the lines of Thomas Jefferson: There probably was a man named Josua, who preached a kinder gentler cant than contemporary rabbis. All the miracles and Joshua's divinity are borrowed "features" from other religions and myths of the time. Storytellers played rusty telephone for many generations and then people started writing stuff down. Every time they revised it, they threw in whatever their favorite moral or political sacred cows needed. The result is The Book that millions of people claim is perfectly accurate.
When I say "Jesus said", and quote the Bible, I am just talking to or about those people. If they claim it is true, then they should do what Jesus supposedly told them to do. The funny thing, is that even in the Bible, Jesus said nothing at all about abortion or the gays. All that stuff comes from Jewish commandments, which is essentially a different religion! If people want to follow those commandments, then there are something like 600 other commandments they should be keeping.
