I must say I enjoyed reading this response, sean-king. You have a very interesting point of view and your time spent studying this subject really shows! But I still disagree with your logic on several fundamental levels. You approach the subject of the Bible from that of a postmodernist. Postmodernism is a form of deconstructionism and has the same general philosophy that words and language cannot hold any inherent truth. Language in and of itself cannot be regarded as true, because truth is always subjective if we're not considering any existence of objective truth (God of the Bible or other religious theology). If this is the case, your argument of textual criticism won't work. Does the author really know what they meant? How can we have any idea what's true or not if we don't have anything to base truth on? Empirical data could play a role, but with history we can only give our best educated guess as to what happened since we weren't there.

But if we go with your argument of textual criticism in the context that you portrayed of anything adverse to self-interest is more likely true than anything self-rewarding, the Bible still stands up quite tall to the scrutiny. Here's a somewhat lengthy quote from theopedia.com that sums up my thoughts better than I could:
""At present, we have more than 6,000 manuscript copies of the Greek New Testament or portions thereof. No other work of Greek literature can boast of such numbers. Homer's Iliad, the greatest of all Greek classical works, is extant in about 650 manuscripts; and Euripides' tragedies exist in about 330 manuscripts. The numbers on all the other works of Greek literature are far less. Furthermore, it must be said that the amount of time between the original composition and the next surviving manuscript is far less for the New Testament than for any other work in Greek literature. The lapse for most classical Greek works is about eight hundred to a thousand years; whereas the lapse for many books in the New Testament is around one hundred years. Because of the abundant wealth of manuscripts and because several of the manuscripts are dated in the early centuries of the church, New Testament textual scholars have a great advantage over classical textual scholars. The New Testament scholars have the resources to reconstruct the original text of the New Testament with great accuracy, and they have produced some excellent editions of the Greek New Testament.

"Finally, it must be said that, although there are certainly differences in many of the New Testament manuscripts, not one fundamental doctrine of the Christian faith rests on a disputed reading. Frederic Kenyon, a renowned paleographer and textual critic, affirmed this when he said, 'The Christian can take the whole Bible in his hand and say without fear or hesitation that he holds in it the true Word of God, handed down without essential loss from generation to generation throughout the centuries.' " -- Philip W. Comfort, The Complete Guide to Bible Versions, (Wheaton, Illinois: Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.) 1991."

But I have to ask why you think Romans would want to minimize their role in Jesus' death? Most Romans weren't Christians, and Christians were seen mostly as a threat at the time that Constantine was attempting to merge the two cultures. It seems like more of an assumption to support your argument than backed by historically supported evidence.

If we stick with unhelpful facts only making it to print if they're so well known that people would immediately shun them, why doesn't the Old Testament portray the prophets and God's chosen people differently? They make horrible decisions and are generally disobedient and evil a lot of the time. The NT has an exaltation of women and the marginalized. This was completely counter-cultural for the region and religions of that day. Why would it admit that women were the first to the tomb when women were not regarded as important or relevant to many stories at all from that time? There are even more examples that I'm not able to recall, but the question stands. Why would the authors of scripture have changed things immediately to suit their own agenda? Could it be that so many people wrote about what actually happened? 6,000 manuscript copies is a lot of copies to all be so cohesive with each other. But just to clarify, I don't disagree with you that things should always be closely examined and that history written with obvious glorification should be scrutinized to make sure it's not propaganda. Hence the plethora of scholarly subjects, such as hermeneutics and textual criticism, that put all of these manuscripts to the fire.

As for Pilate acting in a reasonable fashion instead of being cruel, I wouldn't say he didn't act cruel. He let a prisoner go and crucified Jesus to appease an angry mob. To me, that's what any Roman ruler would do. They wanted cooperation from the already established power found in the Pharisees and other powerful religious groups. Why wouldn't he second guess killing someone as contested as Jesus? Also, Jesus himself was a Jew and was loyal to the law of Moses. Where do you get the notion that that's why he was in opposition to the Pharisees? To me the Bible clearly shows he was in opposition to them because they were using God's laws for their own personal gain instead of God's glorification. He basically says listen to what they teach but don't do what they do. Jesus himself fulfilled the OT law and turned Jewish religion on it's head by saying he was the way to God, not all of the religious works anymore. Salvation and then bearing fruit, not bearing fruit in order to be saved. Again, completely counter-cultural.

I like your example of parenting with textual criticism. As a father of two, the truth is almost always smeared a little bit when it comes to children. But that doesn't mean it's ALWAYS smeared. There is still a chance that they did call, didn't mean to wreck the car, and that the accident wasn't their fault. Again, we agree to be skeptical, but the translation of 6,000 manuscripts to one child taking a car without permission is an incredibly long leap with a lot of error along the way. For the sake of the definition of textual critisicm, I see your point. But beyond that it just doesn't hold water.

Also, we're in agreement that it's not logical to say that the Bible is "infallible". But stating that something is infallible conveys that you believe in some objective truth that exposes fallacy. I believe that God revealed himself to humanity over thousands of years and we have those stories (as well preserved as a broken humanity can have available). The authors of the NT did not present themselves in positive ways very often. Paul comes across as egotistic, but further study reveals that he's only portraying what a church leader needs to be like, and without confidence and faith in Jesus people aren't going to listen. Then most of them died in prison. Not very glorious.

I don't abandon reason and common sense when I read the Bible. I just have an objective truth given by God that I base my reason and common sense on when I read the Bible or any other book. And people need hope. The Bible offers the only logical form of hope for people on Earth. Without an end to our means, all really is hopeless unless we spend our whole lives trying to convince ourselves that it's not. Your contention of "...so what?" in regards to the concept of God and objective truth just demonstrates to me that maybe you haven't given proper logical thought to the implications of a loss of objective truth. Subjective truth can argue convincingly that Hitler was justified, and that's a huge problem. It's not a non sequitur to consider God's existence as the only possible reason for objective truth and ethics unless you have distinctly chosen to not believe in God. But there is no empirical evidence against God, so you would be doing yourself a great disservice from many logical and philosophical standpoints.