Richard Carrier compares the Gospels to the life of St. Genevieve:

http://www.infidels.org/library/mode...n/lecture.html

... In 520 A.D. an anonymous monk recorded the life of Saint Genevieve, who had died only ten years before that. In his account of her life, he describes how, when she ordered a cursed tree cut down, monsters sprang from it and breathed a fatal stench on many men for two hours; while she was sailing, eleven ships capsized, but at her prayers they were righted again spontaneously; she cast out demons, calmed storms, miraculously created water and oil from nothing before astonished crowds, healed the blind and lame, and several people who stole things from her actually went blind instead. No one wrote anything to contradict or challenge these claims, and they were written very near the time the events supposedly happened--by a religious man whom we suppose regarded lying to be a sin. ...

As he says, why do we disbelieve such stories? And if we have some good reasons for disbelieving this story, why not see if the reasons would also apply to the Gospels?

If I had to give reasons, it would be the question of independent documentation of Ms. G's activities. If Ms. G could create oil and water from nothing, why aren't there a whole lot of other accounts of her doing that? Same for the righted ships. And where are the accounts of blind men who whimpered that all they ever did was steal from Ms. G?

And the same can be said of Jesus Christ. He was supposedly a big celebrity, but why didn't lots of non-followers ever give any account of him? The closest we have is Josephus, who writes at length about John the Baptizer, but next to nothing about JC himself.