Maybe, but let us not forget, there exists a museum dedicated to creationism and a literal interpretation of the Bible.
Yeh, but even those people don't actually take everything literally.
Except that the criteria for telling the difference is just that, the word of some unknown people from along time ago.
I can think the resurrection accounts are utterly fake, and still make a judgement about whether they mean a physical or spiritual resurrection. I can think a text utter tripe and make a judgement call about whether it is intended to be literal or figurative.
The extent to which a text is true and the extent to which it is figurative are independent things.
So historians can make a judgement about whether the resurrection accounts are talking about a physical or spritual event without simply believing the texts. Of course, one is using other historical data, and making judgements about that - if you want to write off all historical work as "taking the word of people long ago" I guess you can do that.
Even then it's not consistent if you are to believe that Jesus referred to the Adam and Eve story as literal and you believe that story to be figurative.
You don't seem to have understood the point at all, and it's not being helped by equivocating the concepts of figurative vs literal with physical vs spiritual.
The phrases used for resurrection are physical and are completely out of place for a spiritual resurrection. If one really means the resurrection is figurative - ie nothing at all actually happened but it's a metaphor for some other meaning - then:
a. there is no reason for them to write anything at all because there is absolutely zero chance anyone would regard Jesus as anything more than a failed messiah. That's why the romans crucified would-be messiahs.
b. the language and thoughts just don't work.
In other places the texts clearly are working in figurative ways. And, indeed, quite often they do both at the same time. Very few texts ever written (if any) are entirely figurative or entirely literal.
In the case of Jesus and Paul talking about Adam and or Eve they are actually talking literally - but they are talking
about figures who are (whether they know it or not) figurative.
If I talk about Kirk saying "Beam me up, Scotty" I am literally talking about Kirk, but Kirk is a fictional, not real, character.
The way the early Genesis stories function when referred to in the New Testament is entirely independent of whether those stories are themselves figurative or historical.
So getting back to the point, you apply the same sorts of criteria to scriptural text to decide in what ways they are literal and in what ways they are figurative as you do to any other text. If I begin "In a land far, far, away...." you know the narrative that follows is a certain sort of fiction. If I say "the fall of the Berlin wall was an earthshattering event" you don't assume I'm talking about an earthquake. If I post some poetry you can probably tell it's poetry without being told, and will therefore make some pretty reliable inferences about the nature of the language used. If I say "I went to church on Sunday" you can probably assume I literally mean Sunday, since that's when churches tend to have their worship services. If I say "I was having a hard time today, but God gave me a hand and I got through it" you will probably corrently infer that that I didn't come home with three hands.
