The Gospels burst with content which is demonstrably non-legendary (i.e. honest non-fiction).
This page analyzes 7 arguments
This is relevant because it does NOT spew confirmed legendary content. We can conclude that some mechanism was resulting in an output of entirely or predominantly non-legendary content. And if such a mechanism were active, we can look over the content which is not confirmed to be legendary or non-legendary, and presume it is the latter (non-legendary).
The Gospels burst with incidental assumptions and details fine-tuned to a Palestinian milieu.
A full page will analyze 15 examples and kinds of evidence:
This is relevant given that, soon after Jesus was crucified, Gospel stories circulated through the non-Palestinian regions of Egypt, Italy, the Anatola and so forth. So the lies and legends would have been formed frequently enough in these outer regions. But if that were the case, then we would not expect to see references to esoteric features unique to Palestinian life because the liars would not know it. (There were no relevant reference works that could be consulted on this sort of thing.) By contrast, if the Gospel stories do all originate from honest eyewitness reports of Palestinians reporting things they experienced first-hand in Palestine, then it is only natural that these honest and accurate details would appear in the Gospel stories.
But so what? Plausibly…
The Gospels lack details which are geographically inappropriate (e.g. penguins roaming Jerusalem). This is relevant insofar as:
Rather than being anachronistic (with chronological absurdities), the words and themes in the Gospels are appropriate to the specific time of Jesus’s ministry in c. AD 30. This matters since on the standard legend model, the Gospel accounts are lies that were accrued by word of mouth as the stories of Jesus’s life, ministry, and death passed through Gentile regions and as more people converted to Christianity and spoke of him. But if that’s how Jesus-stories were forming, then historians would expect to see an abundance of accidental anachronisms (i.e. temporal absurdities).1 So the absence of any such anachronisms is evidence against the hypothesis that the Gospels have a non-negligable amount of legend in them which cropped up as Christianity spread.
Rather than inventing Jesus-biography, Christians in AD 30-80 were usually or always honest in their core reporting of it.
One page will analyze these 3 arguments
This is relevant because in AD 30-70 there were relatively few Christians, and if no one was trying to dishonestly inject faked Jesus-bio into the church then the Jesus-bio we ultimately see Christians/churches circulating wouldn’t ultimately be lies/legends.