Of incredible importance to this sort of discussion is something that is often either seemingly missed or glossed over by many scholars of some repute.

In the first century CE the overwhelming majority of the population was illiterate. Even kings and government officials often could not read and had to rely on scribes and priests to read them scriptures and laws. (Leaving room for a little ass-kissing via prophecies yet to be written, perhaps?)

All of the Gospels have their earliest roots in an oral tradition. This is, at best, unreliable. One can prove that to themselves by engaging 50 friends and, after writing down a story of a few paragraphs in length, telling the first who then tells the next etcetera, with no one allowed to write the story down. The last person in the chain tells you the story and in no case that I have ever heard of or experienced is the story the same as the original that you wrote down.

An oral tradition is extremely difficult for modern man to understand since it has been all but eliminated from our modes of communication. Everything of any importance is written down either on paper or electronically these days. Perhaps the only oral tradition that we have left to use as a guide to understanding the oral traditions of the first century is the joke. How many times have we been told a joke that we have heard before but this time it is a bit different? The mouse is now a cat and the cat is now a dog and sometimes even the punch line has changed!

A good example of how this could have affected the gospels is the following:

Jesus has a small group of about 50 people gathered together for a discussion. Between them they have only a few loaves and some fishes for food. Jesus very fairly and judiciously divides what little food there is so that all manage to have a few bites to hold them over until they get home.

All are impressed by this and tell their friends about how amazing it was that Jesus could make so little go so far simply by being fair and prudent.

One of those that hears the story is impressed and tells a friend. He feels that the story will be much more impressive if he adds a 0 to the number of those that Jesus feeds. Now we have 500 being fed with this meager amount of food. This is bordering on a miracle.

By the time this oral tradition has gone around and around a few times and Mark gets ahold of it we have arrived at, perhaps, 15 loaves and 8 fishes with 4000 being fed. As he writes it down he increases the 4000 to 5000 and decreases the loaves to 5 and the fishes to 2.

Apparently blessed with an incredibly bad memory Mark later writes of 7 loaves and a few fishes. Matthew doesn't enhance these numbers now because there is no need to. The miracle is obvious.

The entire OT and NT is based on such oral traditions and to ignore this and make no attempt to understand the nature and unreliability of such traditions is a fatal error.

It is important to remember, also, that the NT gospels were written by early Christians thereby being formed by (oral) Christianity. That is to say that Christianity formed the gospels, the gospels did not shape Christianity at the time. Although grossly eisegetic interpretation of the gospels has most certainly changed Christianity since the oral traditions were first written down (much redacted and editorialized).

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"In my life, I have prayed but one prayer: Oh Lord, make my enemies ridiculous. And God granted it."
[Voltaire]

Virtual Gods: http://users3.jabry.com/sjewins/library/__philorelig.htm