My understanding is that there are always elites and masses. The educated, skeptical minority understand better how the stories work, while the masses are gullible and simplistic in taking the stories to be literally true.

But this doesn't really affect my criticism because the ancient masses had a more animistic view of so-called literal facts. History for them wasn't literal in the science-centered sense that informs later Christianity. When Christians say that Jesus's resurrection was literal and physical, they have in mind an objective sense of history which the ancient masses had no concept of. For the ancient masses, gods and spirits were everywhere, so their sense of literal truth wasn't the same as the modern one that draws on elite, ancient Greco-Roman philosophy and science.

The notion that the NT is full of history rather than myth is based on a modern dichotomy between objective and subjective truth. Most folks in the ancient world blurred that line, to say the least.