Mike, I'd note that the vast majority of what we call the Bible was written long after the events described therein, not merely assembled thereafter, by people with a highly political agenda; it's questionable whether anyone originally recounting to a scribe the events claimed to have occurred in the Pentateuch was contemporaneous with those events. Further, with the possible exception of his crucifixion, since the account of his trial and crucifixion would surely be found in Roman records made at the time (I don't know whether anyone has looked and published that account), there isn't a single contemporaneous account of anything Jesus allegedly said or did for many reasons - no one took note of his birth at all except his parents and possibly a census taker or two over the course of his life, no one literate was around to record the turning over the usurers' tables outside the Temple, or even thought it was anything noteworthy, Paul's "conversion" happened years after Jesus died, etc. Eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable in any case, especially after more than about 1 day - ask any trial lawyer at all, and people haven't changed that much in 2000 years or so - so anything purporting to have happened or have been said 50 or so years prior to creating the written account has to be discounted. For clarification, I think the commonly known ethical teachings attributed to Jesus (love your neighbor as yourself, feed the poor, judge not, take the beam out of your own eye, the parable of the Levite and the Samaritan, etc.) are worthy and should form the basis for most social services; I say nothing about the religious teachings, which are a whole nother subject.