Argument from the Bible.

There are still people who are persuaded by the evidence of the Bible to believe in God. The standard argument attributed to, among others, by C. S. Lewis (who should have known better) states that since Jesus claimed to be the son of God, either he must have been right, or he was a fool, or he was lying: “a fool, a liar, or God.” Historical evidence
that Jesus claimed any divine status is minimal. But even if they were convincing, the proffered trinity of possibilities is ridiculously inadequate. A fourth possibility, almost too obvious, is that Jesus was honest but wrong. Plenty of people are like that. As I said, there was no reliable evidence that he thought he was divine.
The lines he wrote are compelling to people who are not accustomed to asking questions like “Who wrote this and when?”, “How did he know what to write?”, “Did those people mean how we today interpret their words?” or “Were they disinterested observers, or did their goals color the content of what they wrote?” In the nineteenth century, trained theologians have s that the Gospels were unreliable sources for studying the history of actual events. They were all written long after the death of Jesus Christ and even after the letters of the Apostle Paul, who, however, does not mention almost anything of the alleged events of Jesus’ life. They were all copied and continually rewritten over several generations of “Chinese whisperers” by fallible scribes who certainly had their own religious beliefs. An excellent example of the coloring of history with religious content is the moving legend of the birth of Jesus Christ in Bethlehem and Herod’s subsequent murder of innocent virgins. When years after the death of Jesus, the Gospels were written, and no one knew where Jesus was born. But the Old Testament prophecy (Micah 5:1) led the Jews to assume that the long-awaited Messiah would be born in Bethlehem. In light of this prediction, it is in John’s Gospel is the specific remark that his disciples were surprised that he was not born in Bethlehem (Jn 7:41): ‘Others say, ‘This is the Christ. But others say, Is Christ to come from Galilee? Does not the Scripture say that Christ will come from David’s seed and the city of Bethlehem, where David lived?”
Matthew and Luke solve the problem differently, deciding that Jesus must have been born in Bethlehem. They got him there, however, by different routes. According to Matthew, Mary and Joseph lived in Bethlehem. They did not arrive in Nazareth until long after Jesus’ birth and after their return from Egypt, where they had fled from King Herod and his murder of innocent women. According to Luke, Mary and Joseph lived in Nazareth until the birth of Jesus. Getting them to the crucial moment in Bethlehem to fulfill the prophecy? And so Luke writes that when Quirinius was governor of Syria, the emperor Augustus ordered a population census, and everyone had to go “to his city.” Joseph was “of the house and the house of David,” so he had to go to “the city of David, which is called Bethlehem.” This seemed a good solution. Only historically, it is utter nonsense, as shown by A. N. Wilson in his book Jesus and Robin Lane Fox in The Unauthorized Version and others. If David existed, he lived nearly a thousand years before Mary and Joseph. Why should the Romans have demanded Joseph go to the city where his ancient ancestor lived a millennium ago? 
Luke, moreover, has botched his dating by the undiplomatic recollection of events that historians can easily verify. Under the governor of Quirinius, there was indeed an inventory – local, not imperial-for the whole empire, and later: in A.D. 6, when Herod was already long dead. Lane Fox concludes that “Luke’s story is historically implausible and internally incoherent,” but he is sympathetic to Luke’s distress and struggles to fulfill Micah’s prophecy. In the December 2000 issue of Free Inquiry, Tom Flynn, publisher of this excellent magazine, noted articles documenting the contradictions and yawning gaps in this famous Christmas story. He lists and discusses the numerous inconsistencies between Matthew and Luke, the only two evangelists dealing with Jesus’ birth (50). Robert Gillooly demonstrates there that the main characteristics of the legend of Jesus, including the star in the east, the virgin birth, the adoration of the infant king, the miracles, the execution, resurrection, and ascension to heaven are borrowed – to the last – from other religions, which by then had existed in the Mediterranean and the Middle East. Matthew’s efforts to bring about the fulfillment of the messianic prophecies (descent from David, birth in Bethlehem) to attract Jewish readers, however, came to a pernicious clash with Luke’s intention to adopt Christianity for the non-Jewish populations of these areas, and by mentioning typical features of pagan Hellenistic religions (virgin birth, worship kings). The resulting contradictions are glaring but are consistently overlooked by the faithful.
Educated Christians don’t need George Gershwin to convince them, “What the Bible says doesn’t have to be always true.” However, many not-educated Christians find it necessary to believe the Bible – who see the Bible as an accurate and faithful record of history and, therefore, evidence to support their religious beliefs. I wonder if these people will never open a book they think is true to the letter. Why do they not notice the apparent contradictions? The literalist holds to the slogan that every letter in the Bible is valid. How can he leave undisturbed that Matthew pronounces twenty-eight generations for David’s posterity after Joseph, but Luke forty-one? Worse still, the names on the two lists are almost non-overlapping! In each case, however, it is significant that if Jesus was indeed born of a virgin, Joseph’s ancestors are irrelevant (do not introduce) and cannot be used as proof of the fulfillment of the Old Testament prophecy that the Messiah would be a descendant of David.
In a book subtitled “The Story of Who Changed the New Testament and Why ” American biblical scholar Bart Ehrman reveals the staggering uncertainties clouding the New Testament texts.* In the introduction, he describes his personal development from a fundamentalist adherent to the Bible to a thoughtful skeptic, guided by his recognition of massive errors in Scripture. In doing so, he notes that as he moved up the ladder of American universities, from the rock-solid foundations of the “Moody Bible Institute” through Wheaton College (a slightly higher rung, but still Billy Graham’s alma mater) to world-class Princeton University at the top, at every step, he was warned that he would be in trouble if he stuck to his fundamentalist Christianity at when confronted with dangerous progressivism. He has proved it, and we, his readers, are the beneficiaries. More refreshingly iconoclastic books of biblical criticism are the aforementioned Unauthorized Version by Robin Lane Fox and Secular Bible.