Avoiding the Pitfalls of the Passage-by-Passage Approach

This is another methodological discussion. What do I mean by the "passage-by-passage" approach to Gospel historicity, why is it a bad idea, and how do you know if someone is using that approach? What are "the criteria of authenticity" in studying Jesus and history? If you say that a passage is likely historical because it would be embarrassing to the Christians to include it, does that mean that you're using the passage-by-passage approach? Where does authorship come into this discussion?  I advocate a holistic approach to Gospel reliability. We should try to see if the evidence favors our trusting authors and the whole documents that they created. It is possible to do this in a reasonable, inductive, historically sound way. This is especially relevant to the Gospel of John, since a number of the stories, sayings, and discourses in that Gospel are not told in the other Gospels, so they are what is known as singly attested. And yet it is possible to obtain strong evidence for John's reliability nonetheless. When we have a good case that a whole document is reliable, we should not hesitate to use that case to support other passages and details in the Gospel, even if we have no special reason for believing that particular detail individually. 

Video originally uploaded to YouTube Jan 25 2021