Are the Gospels a myth?

Have you looked at the work of Sir William Michell Ramsay who after digging up a lot of the middle east could declare' Luke is a historian of the highest order, always accurate.'

I have to disagree with how your link defines myth. It says: " When they say “myth” and mean “fairy tale” what they really mean is that “this is a made up pretend story which has no basis in history or scientific veracity.” When they say “myth” they mean “this is not a story like they read in the newspaper or in the history books and because it is not factual it is useless, silly and probably harmful.”

Actually many myths are loosely based on fact. There was, for example, almost certainly a John Henry, and he did dig tunnels for the C&O Railroad. C&O employment records were later destroyed in a fire, but former co-workers later remembered him. Did he die after winning a race against a steam drilling machine? Probably not, particularly given that no drilling machine was used in the construction of the Great Bend Tunnel, where he is said to have died. Most likely he was a good worker who could outdrill most men, and he probably was one of the many workers killed in a construction accident. Similar tall tales grew up around Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, and Mike Fink, all of whom were real people. Numerous tall tales likewise grew up around George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.

I've studied the historicity of Scripture and they do not qualify as myth, not even close. The Scriptures are a living history, the best preserved history from the ancient world.

“Most of the atheists making this comment do not seem to have a very knowledgeable understanding of myth and how it works”

I find this to be quite true. This is one reason why a lot of us regard Campbell’s ideas about the monomyth so badly flawed, in fact. A lot of myths are actually radically different from each other and that tends to get ignored.

The gospels were not trusted by mainstream historians for decades because they recorded details which existed no place else in the historical record. But eventually, subsequent research proved the gospels to be correct about those details. There’s an awful lot of historical detail in those writings for a supposed myth.

I suppose it’s worth remembering that degrees in history and archaeology don’t qualify a critic to comment intelligently about literature.

With the atheists in my family, they don't care what the Truth is--so, they dismiss it as a "book of myths and fairy tales". They want to live their lives any way they want and have a very negative outlook on life in general--the bible and it's teaching don't fit into that.

There is a 1964 Instruction on this. I tried finding it on the Vatican's website but couldn't find an English version: "The Historicity of the Gospel" or "On the Historical Truth of the Gospels."

It is undoubtedly easy to regard the accounts of the gospel as just faith experiences with just some pieces of historical facts, since in our days we don't see the kinds of miracles that Jesus performed. That is why many exegetes and theologians have assumed a reductionist approach to the gospels. It carries the danger of distorting (and even rejecting) the divinity of Jesus Christ.