Sharon,
I think you must know about the criteria of authenticity used by the Jesus Seminar and others to analyze the texts in an effort to uncover Historic Jesus out of an accretion of later legend. But I don't think most people know about this, so perhaps they don't understand what I'm arguing against.
Here's a short and easy explanation:
https://readingacts.com/2014/09/17/the-words-of-jesus-and-the-crite...
The basic idea here is that there are certain kinds of things that can show a passage is authentic or inauthentic. For example, an argument from embarrassment says a particular passage must be authentic because later Christians would not include something that was embarrassing for them.
My argument is that this type of analysis is a dead end. You can't use it to get out of the box it creates. I agree with the author of the blog post I'm linking -- "In the end, these tests are still matters of faith, and pretending that they are objective is a sham."
