These really are the standard lies. No, the New Testament books really were written by eyewitnesses (Matthew, John, Peter, Jude, James, Paul) and those who talked to eyewitnesses (Luke, Mark).

Paul said this,

(1 Corinthians 15:3-8 NIV) For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance : that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, {4} that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, {5} and that he appeared to Peter, and then to the Twelve. {6} After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. {7} Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, {8} and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born.

It's also inaccurate to say we don't know if the gospel accounts were accurately transmitted.

Here's a good place to go for the honest skeptic: https://bibleevidences.com/

A common misunderstanding of the Bible by both Christians and non-Christians alike is the mistaken notion that the Bible is a translation upon a translation upon a translation, leading some to believe that the end result is so garbled it hardly represents the original. This couldn’t be farther from the truth. Translations such as the King James version are derived from extant copies of old manuscripts such as the Greek Textus Receptus (Received Text) and the Hebrew Masoretic text, and are not translations of a text that had itself been translated from another interpretation. Often, the differences between Bibles with different translations lie only in how the scholars interpreted a word or sentence from the original language of the text source (Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek).1

So how reliable are the manuscripts that all these Bibles are translated from? The evidence is overwhelming and seldom disputed. Manuscripts prepared from different individuals spread over various parts of the Middle East and Mediterranean region agree remarkably with each other. Also, the manuscripts agree with the Septuagint, which was translated to Greek from Hebrew possibly as far back as the 3rd century BC. The Dead Sea scrolls discovered in 1947 also provided a profound testimony to the reliability of the centuries of transmission of the Bible text, as every Old Testament book found was virtually word for word with today’s Bible! (the few differences were “obvious slips of the pen or variations in spelling”2).

The scribes who were in charge of the Old Testament text dedicated their lives to preserving the text’s accuracy when they made copies. The great lengths the scribes went to guarantee the reliability of the copies is illustrated by the fact that they would count every letter and every word, and record in the margins such things as the middle letter and word of the Torah. If a single error was found, the copy was immediately destroyed. As a software engineer, I can personally vouch that the scribe’s method of protecting the text is more rigorous than the common checksuming methods used today to protect software programs from corruption3.

The New Testament manuscript evidence is even more impressive, with 24,000 known copies, 5,366 which are complete, and some that date as early as the second and third centuries. This manuscript authority greatly surpasses all other writings of antiquity, as illustrated in the following table4:

Work When
Written Earliest
Copy Time
Span No. of
copies
New Testament A.D. 40-100 A.D. 125 25 yrs 24,000
Homer (Iliad) 900 B.C. 400 B.C 500 yrs 643
Sophocles 496-406 B.C A.D. 1000 1,400 yrs 193
Aristotle 384-322 B.C. A.D. 1100 1,400 yrs 49
Caesar (Gallic Wars) 58-50 B.C. A.D. 900 1000 yrs 10

As can be seen from the table, Homer’s Iliad, the most renowned book of ancient Greece, is a very distant second to the New Testament in manuscript support, with only 643 copies. Of these copies, there are 764 disputed lines, compared to only 40 lines in the New Testament5. The New Testament even fares better than the 37 plays written by William Shakespeare in the 17th century. Every play contains various gaps in the printed text, forcing scholars in many cases to “fill in the blanks”. With the 24,000 copies of the New Testament, we can be sure that nothing has been lost. It is also very impressive to note that scholars can recreate all but 11 verses of the New Testament by simply piecing together quotations by the early church fathers of the second and third centuries!

The scholar F.F. Bruce, in The Books and the Parchments sums it up well:

There is no body of ancient literature in the world which enjoys such a wealth of good textual attestation as the New Testament6