)  

  
 To be clear, fundamentalists assume that the text is unified; therefore, any inconsistency, contradiction, or repetition is the clue to some deeper truth. Modern historians make no such assumption.  Therefore, when they see inconsistencies, contradictions, or repetitions, they (1) separate out what they consider distinct segments of the text, (2) try to assign each distinct element to a period in history, based on its similarities or congruences to other texts that we know to be from that period, and (3) see if the new sequence of segments tells a comprehensible story.  This in fact is quite similar to the methods that had developed among geologists a century earlier, and that were being developed among archeologists, for reconstructing history (natural or cultural) through stratigrify.  My point is that the diagnostic difference between fundamentalists and modern historians is not belief in god versus atheism, or assuming that jesus did exist or assuming that he did not.  The diagnostic difference is in how they read texts.  The innovation that marked the rise of modern history was to abandon metaphysical questions (does God exist) in favor of hermeneutic questions (how does one properly read a text?)  (One thing i find interesting is that many atheists read texts just the same way that fundamentalists do; here the difference is in metaphysics, here the difference is in whether they believe in God or not