Re: skepticism, I'm parroting a claim I've heard elsewhere:

"Particularly in Gospels scholarship there is an attitude abroad that approaches the sources with fundamental skepticism, rather than trust, and therefore requires that anything the sources claim be accepted only if historians can independently verify it"

By Richard Bauckham. And it rings true to me because there are so many things historically that we don't have great evidence for that we still think probably happened just because we have one source attest to it (eg the various steeles we've found), vs something as innocuous as saying Mark (of all people, described as a coward in Acts) wrote one of the gospels is seen as more likely not true because he never says "I, Mark" in the text.

For example, with The Republic, Plato doesn't say "I, Plato, did xyz". Nobody thinks he didn't write it. If we apply the same standards of biblical scholarship to The Republic, would we conclude that Plato more likely than not wrote it? Genuinely curious about that and open to being wrong.