Also, remember that nothing in the bible is actual history, even the bits that look relatively professional. Again, to take a single example: Luke's gospel states that Jesus was born "when Quirinius was governor of Syria". Quirinius didn't become governor of Syria until AD 6. But in Matthew's gospel king Herod (Herod the Great, that is) features very prominently in the story. Herod the Great died 10-12 years before Quirinius became governor of Syria, so clearly one of those versions has to be wrong. Similarly, we have records of all the Roman censuses carried out at that time, and none of them involved people going back to where they were born, as Luke insists happened. (The idea is obviously insane: imagine the US government saying "we need to know how many people live in New York, so we'd like every person in New York to go back to the cities where they were born, and we'll count everybody there.") Luke had to tell the story that way, because there was a prophecy that the Messiah would be born in Bethlehem; Jesus wasn't actually from Bethlehem; so they had to invent a reason why his parents were in Bethlehem at the time of his birth, and that's the story they came up with.

None of this necessarily affects the importance of the Bible's *message*, but you should never view it as history, more as fan fiction.