I am struggling with how to comment on this post. By that, I mean, where do I start? But, don’t get me wrong, welcome to the rabbit hole. It looks like you have taken the red pill 
For starters, I would fall into the camp of “if Jesus said it, that settles it for me” after all, he is the way, the truth, and the life, the great I AM, he was before Abraham, he is the Alpha and Omega, end of the discussion, yes? Or does it depend on whether Jesus gave history or a Holy Spirit breathed eternal truths to live by? From what I have read about the 400 years that bracket year zero (the birth of Jesus), tho’clock no 6 o’clock news or its equivalent, and as far as I can gather, they (the historians/writers) of that era were not obsessed with first-person interviews or factually accurate written work as we would expect in the 21st century, after all, we live in a world that is in complete agreement about history both past and particularly current events. 
So how are we to read and understand Scripture today? According to Dr. Tim Mackie and others, the best place to start is with the Hebrew bible, which we call the Old Testament. (In casdon’t are wondering, you don’t need to read and write Hebrew.)
Quick sidebar the Hebrew Bible is called the Tanakh. Even though it contains all of the books of our OT, they are in a different order see the attached file. Take a few minutes to compare the differences and the similarities. Pay attention to the divisions of the OT, which typically has four, The Pentateuch, history, poetry, and prophets (major and minor), and compare that to the Tanakh, which has three divisions, Torah (the Law), prophets (former and latter), and the writings. Note which books are our of place and that there is no division or category called “history” (I wonder why) in our OT.
Smoke this over for a while and consider that there were no bound books (codex) as we know them until the Ancient Romans means that Jesus and his contempories all read from the scrolls that were sown together not randomly but with the guidance and direction of God through the Holy Spirit. This point is key to understanding how God has communicated his message to the world over the 1500 + years of Tanahk. There is ample scholarship to support the idea that the Scriptures are a work of the Holy Spirits in the history of man. We can see this at the seams of the scrolls. A quote from Mackie, “Here’s why these scrolls are so important: they actually preserve for us the technology of scroll making in the very period of the pre-Christian movement and of what the Bible would’ve looked like in Jesus’ synagogue.”
This is getting a little to long, I will stop here and wait on comments. And yes @alison I will get around to Jonah.
Tanakh v OT.pdf (758.6 KB)