The best evidence that the gospels and Acts of the Apostles are mere works of fiction is scientific or historical or literary evidence,
We can even establish by literary analysis that the original New Testament gospel was a work of fiction. Rhoads, Dewey and Michie point out, in Mark as Story that the narrator would need to have had unlimited omniscience to know everything he wrote. They say:
The composer of this story has used sophisticated storytelling techniques, developed the characters and the conflicts, and built suspense with deliberateness, telling the story to generate certain insights and responses in the audience.
Literary evidence can also be used to demonstrate that the Acts of the Apostles is a work of fiction. For example, in An Introduction to the New Testament, Raymond E. Brown points to several problematic issues:
In his undisputed letters Paul gives us no information about the first missionary journey.
doubt has been raised about the Apollos episode at Ephesus as Lucan theologising
Since there is no confirmation in the undisputed (or even the pseudonymous) Pauline letters of the appeal to Caesar and the journey to Rome, some who challenge the historicity of Acts dismiss the account of Paul's hazardous sea journey in Acts 27:1-28:14 as novelistic fiction.
We can never verify the existence and martyrdom of Stephen, or the killing of James, son of Zebedee by Herod Agrippa
Arthur J. Bellinzoni takes this comment further, in The New Testament: An Introduction to Biblical Scholarship:
Whether this account [Acts 6] of the Hellenists and of Stephen's martyrdom reflects actual events in the history of the early church or is simply Lukan "theologized" history with little or no factual content is debated by equally competent scholars. The stories in Acts are permeated by literary, , leaving us with little confidence about details of the early history of the Jesus movement.
