continuing with my attempt to find the starting point:

1. the gospels are really our only record of anything
to do with Jesus.
2. as such, with only this one reference, we are to
read them (the gospels) and place reliability levels
on what we read based on what is most reasonable to
us.

does this seem an accurate analysis?

Regarding (1), I would include Josephus as a very significant record of the times and places discussed by the New Testament. Other contemporary authors are also somewhat relevant, at least insofar as they do or don't comment on the wide-scale nature miracles alleged in the gospels.

(2) is a little vague. Again, different narrative elements have different confidence levels, based on a variety of factors like plausibility, apologetic intent, fantastic-ness, agreement across gospels, and embarrassing-ness.

as a brief aside, one of your 'contradictions of the
bible' points is regarding jesus genealogy. i found a
nice objective analysis here:

http://answering-islam.org.uk/BibleCom/mt1-1.html

i find that proposal #4 is very reasonable

I don't find it reasonable at all to think that an omnipotent omniscient god would include in his perfect revelation a pair of genealogies that are so prima-facie contradictory that they appear to be the mistakes of fallible mortals. It makes no sense that such a god would try to fool us that way. An omniscient god would have known perfectly well that this would be taken as evidence against the authenticity of his revelation. (A non-benevolent supernatural being might very well try to fool us this way, but Christians don't ever seem to face this possibility.)