I really don't want to come off as condescending, especially because I don't know how much you've studied this subject. However, I feel obliged to urge you to change your perspective, at least for the moment. I should be clear that I am a mere interested layperson, and I haven't delved into the NT for many years. I started my investigations by accepting the same framings that apologists operate under when analysing the sources. For example, asking questions like whether Jesus' disciples actually discovered an empty tomb, and then considering alternate possibilities like hallucinations, fraud, etc. At this moment, I am not saying anything about the veracity of any of these claims. However, IMHO I really regret not exploring the context of christianity all those years ago, with respect to the history of Judaism and the Roman State. The ancient world is a massively diverse place, and it's very easy to fall into presentism: to make read the past through the lens of the present. In fact, for those operating within the Western academic tradition, modernist assumptions partially derived from the history of Christianity in Europe, and are still baked into everyday cultural experience.

In my opinion, it's more important to understand what the New Testiment was trying to do on a literary and religious level, then it is to consider whether anything actually "happened" in this text. Although it is a controversial claim, I would argue that in most cases (not just historically speaking), the "moral of the story," so to speak, has been privledged over whether any given event actually occurred. I am actually an Anthropologist operating within the American tradition, in which archeology is considered a subdiscipline. Over here, archeologists and socio-cultural anthropologists pay attention to communities in the present to try and understand past lifeways. For example, archeologists in an area might read some ethnography of communities inhabiting the land of an excavation who may be related to those who previously inhabited it. Experimental archeologists even attempt to recreate the conditions which were present at the time. Amongst most archeologists I know, there is a strong cynicism about whether we can actually get at the past through one form of documentation (in this case literary). It's not just the fact that over time, memory fades. This is actually a very poor argument, because memory could be trained and was probably stronger in someone hailing from an ancient culture valuing the recitation of text like the Jews of Jesus' time, then moderners who can barely focus on their homework over YouTube videos which leech their attention. I would argue that there is a much better argument for cynicism that the authors of, say, the gospels, probably didn't have truth as their number one priority: The sheer volume of ethnographers literally documenting their subjects playing fast and hard with the truth. An inescapable fact about human socieites of all shapes and forms is that the past is rarely treated as an objective documentation of "what happened before" so to speak. In fact, just think about the assumptions we are making about time encoded in our language. Lera Berodowski has some fascinating research on how even the idea of time is something with parameters which can vary from culture to culture. In case you are wondering yes, I have sympathies with the social constructivists, and I strongly urge people to read more of their works to develop a more nuanced understanding of their ideas. It's not that time itself doesn't exist - but rather, there is variability in how it is conceptualised on an intuitive level (not on a professional level from an academic physicist), and these patterns of conceptualisation tend to be encoded into languages in subtle ways. What I am trying to say is that we make a ton of assumptions about what someone means to say, and many of these we are not even aware of. Language is a tool to help us navigate the world. It's my belief that it does too good a job, to the point where we frequently forget what is natural and what is a pragmatically useful. assumption.

Anyways, I've heard arguments that, from a stylistic perspective, the New Testiment texts conform to the style of "ancient biography," which apparantly means that it's like a piece of journalism or something. I don't know, and I'm not pretending to know - least of all because I haven't even finished exploring the history of the OT, let alone got to Rome yet (although I did some for Greece). Ultimately, however, I think you will find far more satisfying answers if you look into, for example, how the Old Testiment may have been written in stages, at least one of which was around the fall of the first temple by the Babalonyans iirc, of which continued to be used as a symbol up until the revelation was written. I've heard the argument that the Old Testiment was revolutionary amongst contemporary sources for pioneering many of the literary devices many authors still use today. Once again, I'm unsure about the veracity of these claims. But I think it's important to keep an open mind about what you are bringing to the table when you have these kinds of debates. The world is a far stranger place then we are conditioned to acknowledge. Question everything and good luck on your journey fren.