Did events in the Bible really happen or are they all just stories written by people?

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If they did, they almost certainly did not happen in precisely the way they were described.

The first thing to realize is that humans didn’t really quite grasp the concept of history at the time the Bible was written. History is a specific kind of literature which seeks to distill a certain kind of knowledge out of events that are supposed to have actually happened. In order to do it right, you have to collect lots and lots of written source material, because direct information, talking to people that actually lived through said events, simply isn’t available. You then need to study it really carefully to come up with a narrative that has a very particular kind of truth, historical truth.

Biblical authors simply could not do this. Most of the stories in the Bible were really really old even when they were written down, before they were passed down as stories. When all you have is oral accounts, you can try to collect a whole bunch of them, and trust me they did wherever they could, but the depth is lost. You’re collecting stories as they were told in 400 BC, not as they were told in 500, 600, 700, 800 all the way up until the event happened.

Also, the nature of oral storytelling is that it has to be laser focused on the significance of the events. If you’re telling a story to a bunch of kids, and you try to keep the story strictly to the actual facts, they’re going to get really bored. You need to inject a sense of drama into the proceedings, this produces the genre of literature called myth. There’s just no way for the human mind, without the tools of writing, to keep the historical version of the story straight with the mythical version. We just didn’t have the technology.

There’s a reason most of our world religions date back to around the invention of paper, it’s not that people weren’t mystical or the ideas couldn’t have spread or anything, it’s just that when you share these ideas, they get more powerful, and using writing as a tool makes sharing really really easy.

It wasn’t until it became easy to write things down where the priests and scholars of the day were able to compare notes and come up with authoritative, canonical accounts of what actually happened, and from there distill out a magisterium, the believed truths about religion.

Until then a minor battle between long-forgotten tribes that just happened to feature a striking act of heroism got embellished over the years to the story of David and Goliath. A flood wiping out an ancient tribe or two became the Great Flood narrative which is all over the spiritual traditions of the day.

The historical truths are meaningless next to the allegorical truths, the beauty of the stories being woven and the insights about human nature they tell. Stories matter.

The New Testament complicates matters a bit, they did have the tool of writing available, but the ancient method of theology practiced by the Hebrew prophets was on the wane even back then so they needed a new way to carry on the tradition. They wrapped up the Biblical narrative with the story of Jesus and started a new chapter in the history of mankind, one dominated by material plenty and the building of the modern world. Jesus may or may not have actually existed as a historical figure, but his historicity, again, is immaterial to the story.