More like “the stuff in line with extensive and repeated archeological finds which is present in lower layers of textual analysis below what’s clear anachronistic royal propaganda is probably true.”

You might be surprised. There’s a ton of BS, but the things it tried to cover up are actually pretty revealing.

For example, it talks about how one of the earliest leaders and prophets is a woman named ‘bee’ and in her song she talks about how the tribe of Dan “stayed on their ships.”

Well just in the past ten years there’s been a discovery of the only apiary in the region which was requeening their bees from Anatolia for centuries up until the period when Asa is supposedly deposing his grandmother the Queen Mother, when the apiary and only the apiary is burned to the ground.

Inside that apiary there’s even a four horned altar to an unknown goddess - a feature that becomes a part of later Israelite shrines.

Just a few weeks ago there were articles about what’s thought to be a very early Israelite graveyard where they were burning beeswax with a similar chemical profile to this apiary with the imported Anatolian bees and four horned altars.

Up in Anatolia was a tribe of sea peoples known as the Denyen, who an archeologist in the 50s thought might have been the lost tribe of Dan staying on their ships. And just in the past few years the lead excavator of Tel Dan was remarking that he might have been right given they found Aegean style pottery made with local clay in the early Iron Age layer.

There’s quite a lot more to all this, but while none of it is straight up acknowledged in the Bible, there’s very valuable evidence of it having been covered up and rewritten in the Bible.

Just because you don’t like the current version of royal propaganda doesn’t mean there aren’t earlier layers beneath what’s presented that have value in being learned about and analyzed, particularly for history buffs.

As the science historian John Helibron said, “The myth you slay today may contain a truth you need tomorrow.”

Here’s a chart of a poll of scholars on the letters: https://www.reddit.com/r/AcademicBiblical/comments/uq26n8/which_nt_epistles_did_paul_actually_write/

And yes, often people who pursue scholarship tend to have a deconversion moment, especially if they were coming from more conservative or orthodox backgrounds. I’ve also seen people go the other direction, which is a bit odd to me, but whatever floats their boat. The texts are a mess of revisionism and edits that fly in the face of any kind of literalism.

But those revisions and edits reveal a lot in what they sloppily cover up, or the motivations behind the changes, etc. It’s actually a really fun field of study.

For example, I disagree with the consensus linked for 2 Timothy, as if you look at the letters given a recent finding that covert narcissists talk about themselves more in their writing, Paul talks about himself vs others at a similar relative rate as the undisputed Epistles, which isn’t the case for any other disputed Epistle, and is much more than all the other Epistles. (Some other reasons too, but that’s the main data point I think is interesting.) Paul definitely appears to have been that type of narcissist, and it may reveal what he did or didn’t write.