Originally posted by Stryke 9
Not really. I assume you're referring to the time the Bible spent as a series of oral traditions. Which are, indeed, inherited from the Sumerians and so on. Which, if anything, lends credence to the idea that the Bible is historically accurate to some degree.
...which I was just about to say. The legendisation would never have gotten very far even for those who really wanted to change the story about who Jesus was, because there were still eyewitnesses alive who would have disputed the story being told - "it wasn't like that, I was there, this is what happened". And before the eyewitness generation was gone, most of the New Testament had already been written.
I think I'll also nip in the bud the objection that parts of the New Testament (namely, the synoptic gospels) were written much later on and then attributed to more famous names. This misses the fact that it would have been quite foolish to attribute the gospels to characters like Matthew, Mark and Luke. Matthew, a tax-collector, the most infamous of the apostles after Judas Iscariot; Mark and Luke, who were not even apostles. The facts point to them being factual accounts carried on from the oral tradition of eyewitnesses, about which there was no question of whom the authors were.
