1) I disagree that there was no time for myths about Jesus to develop. In the modern world, we have much better access to information than they did two thousand years ago, and we have myths arise and propagate with alarming speed, even in the face of evidence against them. Books about urban legends are full of such tales.

2) I doubt that the Bible was an outright lie. It does seem to show signs of what I might call “pious exaggeration” — that is, things listed as facts because the writer has faith that they must be true as opposed to because the writer knows that they are objectively true.

3) The “people were still alive to correct it” line doesn’t seem to me to be sufficient to erase doubt about the miracle stories being false. Attractive lies can spread far and wide, particularly when those who can refute them are only in a small area. One sign that this may be the case in the Gospels is that Jesus had trouble performing miracles in his home town, where people knew him the best and there was the least chance for false stories to develop.

4) There are several possibilities for the origin of the story about women finding the empty tomb. I think it is most likely that one or more women did find or report an empty tomb (or were said to have done so). That the Gospels are unclear about who it was and exactly what the circumstances were of such an important event might be seen as evidence that the story had evolved in the retelling, so I don’t see how we can rely on it as evidence for a miracle.

The main point here is that something can be horribly incorrect and not be a lie (in the sense that a lie is an untruth that someone intentionally designs and spreads). People are very adept at spreading stories, and those stories can mutate significantly in a very short period of time. One example from folklore: look up the “red velvet cake” urban legend and how it mutated into the “Mrs. Fields’ Cookies” legend (among others). That’s some serious mutation without any noticeable grain of truth to be found.

Many scholarly Christians would say that since the Gospels were written relatively soon after Jesus, there would have been no time for myths about Jesus to have developed. Since there were still probably a few eyewitnesses, or at least many people whose parents were eyewitnesses to the supposed miracles of Jesus (assuming Mark was written mid-to-late first century, which seems to be about when scholars agree), the argument is that stories about these miracles are true because there would have been no time for myths about Jesus do develop in the short time between his death and the writing of the Gospels.

If the Bible were not a development of legend but an outright lie, there is still the problem of how it became widely known, again since it was written when people were still alive who lived during the supposed miracles. Also, there are things, such as women finding Jesus’ tomb empty, that would probably not be in there were it all a lie (since women were very much second-class citizens, it seems more likely that, were the Bible a lie, men would be the ones to find Jesus’ tomb empty — why would you weaken your case by including women?).

How would an atheist respond to these comments?