internally consistent, historically-accurate Bible
Not quite. But it may not be a good idea to get into this argument.
In the book it shows that the historical facts in the NT are very accurate, given the destruction of Jerusalem, the diversity in the Roman Empire, and how the roman officials liked to make up fancy titles for themselves, it would be hard to do if the documents were written at a time far removed from the events recorded and if the writers where not either eyewitnesses or spoke to eyewitnesses.
The numbers I've heard were that the NT books were written somewhere in the region of 50 to 150 AD. This is pretty close to the actual events so it makes sense that the Roman Empire personalities and large historical events were accurate (they did, after all, have history books in those days, and the Roman Empire didn't fall until ~450 AD). The thing is that after 20+ years events tend to get embellished and slightly exaggerated, especially if they are stories being told in order to help bring followers into the faith. (I'm sure you have seen this in cubing; you might do a solve that is 20 seconds, but the person who saw it will think it is 15 seconds, and then they might tell someone else it was 10 seconds, until eventually someone you know tells you that their friend's friend saw this guy do a cube one-handed in three seconds.) However accurate the NT is according to our knowledge of the big events of the time, it's extremely difficult to say whether any or all of the written events of Jesus's life took place. The fact that the four Gospels differ in the details and pacing doesn't help matters much.
Would I die for something I know that I made up just to play I nice trick on people down the road?
If you'd started something huge and you wanted it to keep going? Maybe. Sometimes the continuation of an organization (company, country, religion) can end up to be considered more valuable than individual lives. No country that didn't believe this would ever go to war
Besides, while I'm not saying that this necessarily applies to religion itself, it can happen that if you keep up a lie long enough, and act on it, you start to believe it is true.
I am of the opinion that if any person genuinely tried to seek the true God themselves then God would send someone to them. And by that I mean admitting that a god must exist due to creation (don't take that word too far it just basically means all the stuff that exists) and try to seek Him and know that as a man you can't match up to God.
This is a tricky argument. It definitely does make sense that God would send some kind of message to anyone who wished to worship Him but didn't know how. The problem, though, is that people from many different religions (and many different sects of the religions) have had experiences such as this. All major religions have converts and have people who have had religious visions, so how could there be anything about a particular person's conversion or religious vision (even if that person is you) that proves that particular religion is the correct one?
Did you realize that everyone in the bible with your kind of attitude died, or lived horribly. I'm just saying, its faith.
Don't quote me on this, but it seems to me that the only reason the Bible mentions people who don't have faith is to use them as allegories or examples of what can happen if you don't believe. Remember that at the time of the NT there were millions of Jews in the area around Jerusalem, and I seriously doubt that all of them were immediately killed or had horrible lives. I suppose this also brings up the point of Job, who was essentially punished with a (temporarily) horrible life because of his belief.
