Geisler's "A General Introduction to the Bible" goes into some of the arguments for the conservative side... it at least gives a good jumping off point.
As for the supposed discrepancies in the easter story, don't forget that you are looking at it from a modern view of "accuracy" and "fact". The ancients did not think as we do. It was extremely common in Graeco-Roman literature to take a story that everyone knew, twist it up, tear it apart, and take only the pieces you wanted so that you could prove your point.
From Kitto's "The Greeks":
"As the Greek is trying not to give a representative picture of life, but to express one conception, as forcibly and as clearly as he can, the form that he achieves is much more logical and taut. . .[comparison of "Agamemnon" to "Antony and Cleopatra"]. . . Aeschylus, like Shakespeare, had a long and complex story to work with. The difference is that Aeschylus tears his to bits, and with the bits he begins to construct a play about a certain conception of justice: roughly speaking, that retributive justice inflicted in plain revenge leads to chaos. His framework is not the story, but this conception. Those bits of the story which he does not want. . . he throws away, and those which he does want he uses not in chronological order, but in the order that suits him.
(He is able to treat the story in this way because his audience knew its main outline already. One great advantage in using myth was that the dramatist was saved the tedious business of exposition.) He is, in this special sense, creating something new, the Form is entirely under his own control. His theme. . . he states a first, a second, a third time, with ever increasing tension, and the result is a logical, beautiful and powerful structure. All Greek plays are, in this way, built on a single conception, and nothing that does not directly contribute to it is admitted."
I see a lot of this happening in the gospels. They're stories, told to illustrate truth--they are not meant to be modern academic theses. Ancient literature also focused on psychology and meaning rather than linear facts--for example, when Tacitus wrote a biography of his father-in-law Agricola, instead of giving a linear list of events from Agricola's life, as a modern biography would, he wrote about a single event which he felt described Agricola's character. This one event portrayed all that Tacitus felt was important about Agricola's nature.
Richard Burridge, quoted in "Four Faces" by Mark Tully, said:
"we have to look at the Gospels with a first-century understanding of the notion of truth and the way in which facts relate to the truth, rather than understand them in terms of the twentieth-century debate between legend and facts."
I agree.
As for the supposed discrepancies in the easter story, don't forget that you are looking at it from a modern view of "accuracy" and "fact". The ancients did not think as we do. It was extremely common in Graeco-Roman literature to take a story that everyone knew, twist it up, tear it apart, and take only the pieces you wanted so that you could prove your point.
From Kitto's "The Greeks":
"As the Greek is trying not to give a representative picture of life, but to express one conception, as forcibly and as clearly as he can, the form that he achieves is much more logical and taut. . .[comparison of "Agamemnon" to "Antony and Cleopatra"]. . . Aeschylus, like Shakespeare, had a long and complex story to work with. The difference is that Aeschylus tears his to bits, and with the bits he begins to construct a play about a certain conception of justice: roughly speaking, that retributive justice inflicted in plain revenge leads to chaos. His framework is not the story, but this conception. Those bits of the story which he does not want. . . he throws away, and those which he does want he uses not in chronological order, but in the order that suits him.
(He is able to treat the story in this way because his audience knew its main outline already. One great advantage in using myth was that the dramatist was saved the tedious business of exposition.) He is, in this special sense, creating something new, the Form is entirely under his own control. His theme. . . he states a first, a second, a third time, with ever increasing tension, and the result is a logical, beautiful and powerful structure. All Greek plays are, in this way, built on a single conception, and nothing that does not directly contribute to it is admitted."
I see a lot of this happening in the gospels. They're stories, told to illustrate truth--they are not meant to be modern academic theses. Ancient literature also focused on psychology and meaning rather than linear facts--for example, when Tacitus wrote a biography of his father-in-law Agricola, instead of giving a linear list of events from Agricola's life, as a modern biography would, he wrote about a single event which he felt described Agricola's character. This one event portrayed all that Tacitus felt was important about Agricola's nature.
Richard Burridge, quoted in "Four Faces" by Mark Tully, said:
"we have to look at the Gospels with a first-century understanding of the notion of truth and the way in which facts relate to the truth, rather than understand them in terms of the twentieth-century debate between legend and facts."
I agree.
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