In reading the article about this on the AZRepublic I found a comment that more eloquently puts what I have been trying to say, so I will quote it here.
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"Based on the responses above, I believe "faith" is again being confused with scholarship. It is an old habit. Faith is what a person chooses to believe is true. The goal of scholarship--be it historical, archeological or paleographical--is to find out what actually happened. The Biblical Gospels, like other gospels, are not meant to be histories, but personal statements of what their writers believed (i.e. had faith in) was true. Their purpose was to persuade others to have a similar faith. Even the four canonical gospels disagree among themselves about key details. Yet they deserve study, as do all documents of that period.
Our New Testament is the product of the Council of Nicea in 325. It was comprised of church leaders tasked by Emperor Constantine to sort through all of the Christian writings in circulation and decide which were canonical and which were not. The criteria they used were by modern standards somewhat arbitrary and flawed. Nevertheless, they reflect beliefs held in the third century about what happened in the first century. The rejected writings however are still valuable. All reflect the mindset of their writers as to what they believed. Each in its own way is another clue that modern scholarship has to help determine what actually happened.
So let us not let personal faith get in the way of using another God-given gift--the human brain and its ability to sort through all the evidence and make an informed, reasoned, critical judgment as to what actually happened. If faith gets in the way of that process then it deserves to be called by another name--prejudice"
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I don't think even DA could have said it better.
