The Gospels are clearly mythical literature, and good literature at that. Richard Carrier has a fantastic synopsis explaing how they're literature, and the very complex structure that they take. They aren't recounting history, but retelling it within a historical context and sprinkling it with myth and mysticism.
Of course they match prophecy, as they were written intentionally to do so to make a point.
There are over 40 gospels that we know existed, not all of which survived. The ones that were chosen to be included in the Bible are the ones that match what the early Church followers wanted them to match.
The Gospels and Epistles seem to have been written around the same time - within the first 10-30 years after Jesus died and rose.
This is untrue. The best evidence we have shows that the Epistles predate the Gospels, which were written close to the end of the first century. We have no eyewitness accounts, and even if we did, the testimony of credulous 1st century Iron Age people are not reliable as confirmation that the laws of nature have been violated. Look at how goofily the Roswell incident has been blown out of proportion; look at 9/11 truther theories about an incident that happened right in front of us on video and in the midst of a 24 hour news cycle. People aren't very reliable witnesses the further you get from the evidence.
Ah, you’re a Richard Carrier devotee. That explains a lot.
There’s a book by Colin Hemer that you should read, called “The Book of Acts in the Setting of Hellenistic History”. Acts and the Gospel of Luke contain geographic information that contradicts the reference materials of that day but that is shown to be correct based on fairly recent scientific discoveries regarding the coastal sediment, etc for the areas mentioned. That’s just one example of how the claim that the historical claims about Jesus and the early church were made up later, as “myth”. Hemer has page after page after page of similar instances.
I once debated with atheists/agnostics about the historical accuracy of Luke, versus Josephus and other historians - I think that was about whether the proper historic word was “prefect” or “procurator”, and etchings in stone confirmed that it was Luke who was accurate. To his credit, at least one of the atheists with whom I was conversing acknowledged that Luke was more trustworthy than Josephus and that Luke was proven by the stones themselves to have knowledge directly from that time period.
After debating with Carrier devotees for some time, I met socially with a friend who was working on his doctorate in antiquities and asked him how he deals with people who claim that the Gospels were “myth” written long after the witnesses were dead. He laughed and said, “Nobody serious in academia is still making those claims. There’s way too much evidence in stone and papyrus for anybody to credibly make those claims any more.” He said those arguments come from the RELIGIOUS STUDIES people, not from the HISTORY/ARCHAEOLOGY or ANTIQUITIES people. It’s the “religious studies” people who can give “scholarly opinions” (like Carrier does) without having any documentation to back them up. The hard sciences such as archaeology, geology, etc operate much more scientifically than that.
But enough of that. You still haven’t answered my question as to why the claims of Christianity arose from Jerusalem/Judea at the very time that the hostile witnesses were there to refute the claims - and as evidenced by both the Jewish and Roman writings showing they had much motivation to refute the claims if they could.
Why do you suppose that happened? Archaeological remains show Christian symbols in first-century ossuaries for Temple priests. Temple priests became Christians. Why is that, if their own guard watched the tomb of Jesus and knew that the resurrection claims were bunk?