Is the NT reliable? Stock arguments against that I find unconvincing, and why

There are a number of stock arguments circulating among skeptics that target the reliability of the New Testament. I would not ask a skeptic to assume divine inspiration; I simply intend to point out some historical realities in the early Christian church that may not be widely known among skeptics, and how these verifiable historical situations tend to make certain arguments non-starters. These selected arguments are ones that I find glaringly at odds with facts that anyone who took the trouble can easily verify. The remainder of this discussion won't assume anything about the New Testament documents beyond this: that they were in circulation in the early Christian community, that the early Christian community believed them to be honest. That is a fairly minimalist starting point and should allow us to start out on common ground on which both parties agree.

Here are some of the arguments that I intend to review and show why I think they are non-starters.

• The early Christian church was gullible and superstitious; they would have accepted anything.
• The early Christian church was an easy mark for forgeries; all it took to gain acceptance for a document was to tack on the name of an apostle.
• Forgery -- or pseudonymity -- was a widespread and acceptable practice; the early Christian church would not have cared if someone had adopted a disciple's name as a pen-name.
• The Gospel of Luke had to have been written decades after the Gospel of Mark because it would have taken that long for copies of the Gospel of Mark to become widely circulated.
• The appendix to the Gospel of John disproves the traditional authorship of the Gospel of John.
• None of the gospels claims to have been written by an eyewitness.
• The early church lacked our concept of critical scholarship for considering the authorship of a text.
• The early church lacked our concept of critical scholarship for the actual content of the text. They had no way to deal with discrepancies among hand-copied manuscripts.
• The use of prophecies in the New Testament shows that the prophecies were retroactively invented to fit events after they occurred.
• The four gospels now considered canonical were no more viable than the alternative gospel suppressed by the church.

In upcoming posts, I will go into the basic background on each and show why I think that, given the known facts, these arguments are non-starters.