Two takes on the same problem, this an unsent comment on a post at Crooked Timber:

Heresy is in the heart of the beholder, mostly. Much that's dogma now, including the teachings of the founder of Christianity himself, were heretical and even blasphemous in their contemporary context.
It's interesting how the acceptance of the narrative lock, stock, and barrel as it's received parallels the acceptance of the framework around much of the more immediately political arguments that occupy the socius these days.
Torture is debated as a legal phenomenon, or by its efficacy, or its permission in the founding documents, but only rarely as an inhuman and dehumanizing event primarily.
Rational science debates the origin of life with unqualified and confused opponents and the result is a refutation of any larger context other than lone humanity against the inanimate void.
These all-or-nothing displays have more agreement at their outset than they do conflict in their subject.
It seems certain that a man appeared 2000 years ago and dramatically shifted the course of subsequent terrestrial history. The encrustation of his narrative with proprietary figures and codes and add-on mechanistic applications that purport to treat with metaphysics while creating wealth and reservoirs of earthly power has left us a package that's hard for many to open without scorn and/or disappointment.
But as with the presence of a cosmic divine behind and before the relatively recent molecular concatenation that led to organic life as we know it, nothing is totally disproven or proven, nor can be from here.
Fundamentalists with their heads up their digestive systems equals no divine hand upholding the world whatsoever.
Mumbo-jumbo nonsense permeating what became Christianity after years of persecution and co-option, that basically turns its documented principles inside out - the uplift and rescue, both physical and metaphysical, of the suffering changed to a patient acceptance of poverty in the poor and active scorn for it in those more fortunate, that that uplift originated in opposition toward.
These changes aren't that obscure or hard to read in the public record, but like most insights of this import and gravity they radicalize, and erase the luxury of non-committal dithering.
Judas was an agent of God's will only if you accept the rest of the traditional doctine - resurrection and other-worldly reward. Part of that traditional doctrine is that you must accept all of it or you can have none of it.
Arguments for or against veracity in the narrative that don't get outside that frame are schoolboy exercizes and wankery.

-
From WBB:

“Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.”
-Richard Dawkins

There’s an insistent demand at the heart of most militant religionists’ cause – that their dogma is all, that their religion as they have it is central and true to its origin and goals. They get attacked on that ground regularly, taken at their word and their arguments demolished.
But every other thing similar to religion that I’ve seen and known anything about has been co-opted and perverted and chopped into manageable bits and pablumised. That’s when it’s been transformed into something acceptable.
Otherwise it’s been demonized or worse, and scorned.
My suggestion is that this has happened consistently to what threatens the status quo, and in commensurate degree.
To place the blame for sexist or more accurately misogynist bigotry at the feet of religionists ignores the likelihood, or at least the strong possibility, that the religion in question has been used by those who were already disposed toward misogyny to begin with, as a kind of organizing principle or as a mechanism of domestication.
Dawkins sweeps away the living straw-men of fundamentalist clamor, as do Daniel Dennett and the other stalwarts of rational-positivism, but along with the fundamentalist boobs go the Gnostics and the mystics and a good-sized legion of believers whose faith isn’t reducible to the cartoons and caricatures that make these others so easily dismissed.
And speaking of faith, I’m under the impression no one’s come up with irrefutable evidence for the Cartesian cogito ergo… yet. It’s simply an assertion, a vital and necessary place to begin all the rest of the scientific construction that rests on its foundational presence. But at its heart it’s no more than an act of faith.
There is no communicable proof of your thinking or mine. We believe this about ourselves and we concede it in each other, and thus begin the work of knowing where and what we are, and communicating what we learn.
The winning argument against Intelligent Design illustrates – by presenting the very simple and easily-demonstrated fact that, given enough time, the energized flux of matter will produce orders of complexity that can, and in our local case did, give rise to an organized form that will develop self-consciousness and a tendency toward both scepticism and credulity – the means of its own refutation.
Look at the infinite time scale and the infinite spatial dimensions that pertain where that event or series of events took place. 4billion years on earth to go from chemical soup to human cooks. In a universe 14billion years old, possibly. A local universe. That exists within…well it’s not done to talk about that, because we have no evidence or even workable theories for what it might be.
Strings may make it up, or paisley-shaped disappearingly infinite clusters of multi-dimensional aluminum foil, each definition and description leading toward the childishly obvious question “What’s that in then?”.
The polite response is to pretend it doesn’t exist. Which is, in an inverse way, a kind of faith.
Because our timeline is open-ended even if the dimensions of our chronology have distinct end-points. And the dimensions of this place have no exterior boundaries we can draw without becoming arbitrary and engaging in acts of faith.
Precisely the argument that insists no guiding hand was necessary to shape our beginnings makes plausible the existence of something very like that same hand. The same flux of matter on a vastly greater scale through a vastly greater, even infinite time period.
Superstitious bigotry is a failing and a dangerous one in a crowded world. Using the argument that refutes superstition as a cudgel to drive out all spiritual inquiry, and replacing it with only those things which can be proven isolates us, throws us back on self-interest alone – and not incidentally undermines everything about our moral system that depends on things outside the self for direction and goal.
Replacing the dangers of blind obedience to superstitious mumbo-jumbo with the myopic illusion of Xeno’s paradox is only progress by comparison.
Science and religion are indistinguishably present, merged in the daily lives of every succesful so-called primitive indigenous culture. As civilised beings we’ve become separated from that experience entirely.
That division, not the supremacy of either the antagonistic religious or scientific world-view, may be the real problem.