I don't think religion is completely separate from history (especially Christianity), and so credible historical evidence is quite important. I see where you're coming from, though.
Well, I wouldn't expect them to be verbatim recordings of what occurred - such accounts never existed in ancient times in the form we have these days. I do think it's quite interesting, though, that many people will dispute historical accuracy based upon the differences between the gospels (particularly the three that are very similar, Matthew, Mark & Luke). They differ about 10-40% on matters of quotes (notably, Greek has no punctuation for quote marks - word-for-word recording was evidently of lesser importance than capturing the essence of someone's message) and orders of events, which is exactly the amount that people in ancient times saw as the standard for stories passed on by oral tradition. If they were exactly the same, cut-and-dried, I would have been more suspicious that the writers had met up beforehand and conspired to decide on a version of events that each would write about to make sure there were no inconsistencies.
