A comprehensive reading of the Bible just shows what it really is. It's a cultural history of a band of people in the near east and their oral traditions and myths. It's the use of religion to enforce societal rules and a way to try to explain why calamities (enslavement in Egypt, famine, Babylonian exile, etc.) happen in furtherance of cognitive dissonance. Everything has to happen for a reason and impactful moments of history for that tribe are preserved in cultural memory (like a regional flooding disaster) and written down after being passed down orally for centuries. Often these writings were done for political purposes, or later edited for political or social reasons to enforce a belief or behavior, laws, or historical truthiness that certain powerful people desired.
The New Testament is the same. It's the founding myth of a religion that began as a small local cult during Roman occupation. It was written down and assembled by various writers almost 100 years after the actual events from oral traditions. Christ was interpreted as the fulfillment of ancient prophesy and the religion persevered and eventually engulfed the entire empire. The Gospels were written with different motivations and audiences and many of the Pauline letters have dubious authorship. An actual canon that became the modern Bible was not assembled until the 3rd century while men with dark ages education, dark ages political motivations, and dark ages moral reasoning decided which elements to keep and which elements to throw out as apocrypha. As an example of the typical thinking of the time, one of the most important and hard-fought debates at the council was whether or not Adam had a belly-button because logically if he had no earthly mother, he would have had no umbilical cord.
Both Islam and Christianity are absolutely startling in how such small movements, basically two tiny cults (Islam also usurped many of the iconography and practices of the pre-Islamic religions in the region) managed to conquer entire empires and change the face of the world for thousands of years and will be with us for a much longer time.
Sometimes I wish other ancient religions had survived to give us more variety in the world. The ancient Norse religions and Mithraic Mysteries have always fascinated me.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mithraic_mysteries