Questioning can be a very good and fruitful experience when it comes to faith. Faith, however, needs an honest chance and must be represented fairly; you desire to do this, which is a very good thing.
Here are (hopefully) some answers to some of your questions.
The Bible wasn’t compiled the Rome; the Emperor convened a synod or conference so that a formal canon could be hashed out. The Emperor was tired of dealing with different people who all claimed to have Gospels that held authority. So while the Emperor called the first councils during the the 4th century, he did not decide what made up the Bible; the Christian bishops and churches did. And the way they decided what books were to be included in the canon was not a matter of which books they happened to like; they were explicit that the only books allowed were ones that were either clearly written by an apostle or a direct disciple of an apostle. There are some masterful works, such as the Didache and the Letter of Pope Clement to the Corinthians, which are totally orthodox but were not included in the Bible because they could not be traced back to the apostles. The bishops who compiled the Bible were incredibly concerned with preserving the truth as handed down by the apostles of Jesus - they did not pick certain selections according to their whims. That is a myth that has no support in history.
The thing about prayer to saints is something that I was confronted with when I was thinking about converting to Catholicism from Protestantism. Here’s the thing: would you not have any problem asking your family and friends to pray for you? In Church everyone asks that the members of the community pray for them. Catholics believe that a man or woman can pray to a saint (since you can’t talk to them because they’re dead) and ASK them to pray for you. It’s just like asking your family to pray for you, only the saint is in heaven in the presence of God. Catholics don’t worship saints - saints are like friends who pray with and for them.
One thing that seems to bother you, understandably, is that there seem to be many correlations between Christ’s life and the lives of some other mythical figures in ancient history. But if you look closely, they aren’t as similar as they appear. And even if they are, you assume that Christianity just accumulated all these mythic dimensions over time - that the New Testament developed mythical layers and the real, historical Jesus was thrown out of the picture by fanciful imaginations. But the Gospels are not written like myths - in fact, they are nothing at all like myths. C.S. Lewis, who was the leading authority on medieval English literature and mythology during his life, said that the last thing the Gospels are is mythology.
Also, there is a really great problem in believing that the Gospels are fabrications of the real life of Jesus. The earliest Gospel, Mark, was written around 60-70 AD. That means it was written still within one generation of Jesus’ life; there would still be plenty of people in Palestine who knew him and remembered him. How on earth then could Mark have made up so many details of Jesus’ life so close to the events they describe? Every single historical event that has been turned into myth (such as the myths about Alexander the great, that he was a demigod) has taken hundreds of years for the mythic dimensions to develop. They simply don’t happen in 30 years. And even if someone tried to make up a lot of elements of Jesus’ life, they would have to answer to all the people that were still alive who knew Jesus and his teachings, and would certainly know whether or not he rose from the dead.
Imagine a person, a friend, that you admire very much was just unjustly put to death. Now imagine thirty years later some person comes along and starts saying that your friend never really died but was resurrected. How on earth could you believe it! If this is what happened to Jesus, people from all over Palestine would have rebuked the superstitions and could have possibly even produced the grave which held his body. But no such thing happened anywhere, ever.
One last thing. People believe that a man called Socrates existed based on less than a dozen manuscripts of Plato’s writings (and the copies we have of the writings are from over 1000 years from the events which they describe. We don’t even come close to having the original copies.) But historians will quickly say that Socrates was a historical person and was most likely accurately portrayed by Plato.
Now the New Testament has over 5,000 surviving manuscripts, the earliest being from around AD 150. The Gospels are the most well represented and attested texts in ancient history.
Check out this link: it may help to restore your faith in the Bible’s transmission over time.
carm.org/evidence/textualevidence.htm
