>>Wait, they hadn't met American Americans yet, so smoking is out of the picture, but the Romans are in it. Weren't early Christians heavily persecuted? What was the average lifespan of anyone in those days, specially of those belonging to a forbidden religion? Thirty? Thirty-two?
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>sure.. on the environment maybe we find many that had been died/killed.. but it is almost impossible all was exterminated.. The authors Luke and John.. Markus, the apprentice of Paul they still supossed to be there.. Wasn't so long time.. It is the same of both of we talk about the 90's, 80's or 70's (I mean in case of how fresh is the memories)

That's where I begin to suspect that we're really having direct account of the events. If these guys were persecuted in their youth (and probably even more later as the movement began to spread), I'd expect they would have not died at such old age (actually extremely old for those times), but that their text went through hands of disciples, scribes etc. And this is a new movement, probably going through a lot of changes in the early years, and add to that that the witnesses are only human. This is not the Upanishads, where there was one text, carried over generations for a few millennia without change (when it got put to paper, there were no versions but one - in various parts of the subcontinent the text was identical).

So while I do think that some of the events did take place, I also think that the rest is based on personal realities of any number of writers who took part in the composition. I wouldn't take that for granted, no matter with how big a grain of salt.