(1) No. Luke is a propagandist who is faking the history he wants to exist. He doesn’t care about the truth or even if there is any truth. His preface is thus deliberately vague about what he means to be recording (what was true or what was passed down; and either way he is lying: he did not faithfully replicate his sources and thus did not pass down what he was told, but what he wanted to be told).

See How Did Christianity Switch to a Historical Jesus? and Establishing the Biblical Literalism of Early Christians, as well as (for perspective) How We Know Acts Is a Fake History (because there we can catch him in the act, pun not intended).

(2) Yes. That was the norm. Not only was it the norm for Christians (almost all Acts and Gospels, several dozens of them, are fake, so making things up was what Christians routinely did) but it was the norm for all religious writers. Jewish apocrypha are rampant with fake stories passed off as real, indeed they had an entire additional bible called The Biblical Antiquities that was nothing but that; and Plutarch in On Isis and Osiris explains all pagan literature worked the same way, giving the earthly gospels of Osiris as a paradigmatic example, which is exactly on point—Plutarch explains Osiris underwent his incarnation, death, and resurrection celestially, and the stories placing it all in Earth history were only allegories meant to conceal the truth for insiders to understand.

Second, the assertion that Mark created a parable, not history. Did a Christian like Mark have no difficulty literally inventing earthly events based on the teachings of the heavenly Christ (divorce, the last supper, and so on)?

Check Google Scholar for author and title and the word “review” to find possible academic reviews.

But often academic reviews will only discuss the usefulness of the book rather than its merits. To assess that you generally need to read books arguing the contrary perspective and compare arguments. I provide a guide for how to do that in A Primer on Actually Doing Your Own Research and with a specific example of applying the procedure in Galatians 1:19, Ancient Grammar, and How to Evaluate Expert Testimony.

For an organized bibliography of books and articles making contrary arguments to Christian apologists like Blomberg, see my chapter on this (chapter ten) in On the Historicity of Jesus.

Indeed. I’ve made this point before (examples here and here).

The Christian apologetic is ignorant in every possible sense (women were not distrusted as witnesses anywhere in antiquity; and women were an important market demographic for early Christianity and thus obviously would be importantly featured in their literature; and Mark adds them specifically to challenge common bigotries in society that women and the poor should take second place to men and the rich, so that in fact “the least shall be first”).

I’m interested in one question. Why is it strange for an evangelist to make women witnesses, if in Paul’s epistles we see women becoming prophetesses and so on, would it be so strange for them to do this?

The only question really is: was there a version of the text that said “pierced” then? It needn’t be the case that all manuscripts said it. Only, were there any that said it? The answer has been confirmed to be yes (see Hopkin’s study, “The Psalm 22:16 Controversy: New Evidence from the Dead Sea Scrolls”). In fact, the evidence suggests “like a lion” is third century corruption in the Hebrew Masoretic text. There is no evidence of it existing at all as a reading prior to that.

Do you think the pierced hands and feet version is the original and was in the Septuagint in Mark’s time?

Thanks for your reply. Being that I’m an autodidact lacking official academic credentials, I had published this idea from Isaiah 53:9 but was afraid that I had blundered because standard Bible reference works that I’ve checked don’t specifically mention this verse in reference to Mark’s tomb. Also, my hypothesis lacked the additional scholarship provided by your work on this subject. I’m an honest admirer of your diligent scholarship. Thanks again.

I don’t even think that requires that variant reading. They all basically outline what Mark does. But yes, Mark is reifying scripture and thus obviously got some ideas from Isaiah as to the burial, and might have been cued by this variant to specifically imagine a tomb fable. But he could as easily have just assumed being buried with the rich entailed a tomb (as a ubiquitous fact of the cultural system he found himself in: the rich are always buried in tombs).