Bizarre if Fiction.

If the Gospels were fiction it makes no sense to show Peter, the leading apostle, denying his master not just once, but three times and at the end even cursing him to save his skin. Why would anyone in the early church want to play up the terrible failures of their most prominent leader?  Bauckham reasons that no one would have dared to relate this event unless Peter himself was the source and had authorized its preservation and propagation.

Now consider Jesus, himself. Why would any Gospel writer make up the account of Jesus asking God in the garden of Gethsemane if he could get out of his mission?  

And if it didn’t happen, why would the leaders of the early Christian movement have made up the story of the crucifixion? Any listener to the gospel in either Greek or Jewish culture would have automatically suspected that anyone who had been crucified was a criminal, whatever the speaker said to the contrary.

Or why would anyone ever make up a story where the hero cries out that God had abandoned him?

Furthermore, in a society where women were assigned such low status their testimony was not evidence in court why invent women as the first witnesses of the resurrection?

Why constantly depict the apostles - the eventual leaders of the early Church - as petty and jealous, almost impossibly slow-witted, and in the end as cowards who either actively or passively failed their master?

If the authors had indeed concocted the Gospels, prudence and their cultural context would have prevented including, let alone crafting, these contrary elements.