A trick of the soul

So, one of the things Derren Brown talks about in Tricks of the Mind, only getting slightly off topic, is the question of whether one can trust the biblical accounts of Jesus. This strikes me as a very interesting problem in western religion - in so far as western religion seems so very based in two things: faith, and text. One has one's text commanding one to have faith in a savior/God, but at what point can one divide having faith in that God from having faith in those who transmitted that text to you.
The Catholic church seems to have circumvented this struggle, to the best of my understanding, by putting a lot of faith in the transmitters and current authority.
But what should a Protestant do - after all, the Bible tells one to trust in Christ, not in thousands of years of human transmission and translation, and no matter how we may investigate and hope for certainty within that process, it is a human process, unless one resorts to a theory of supernatural intervention in transmission and translation, which has its own problems. This becomes especially problematic on issues which regard one limited section of the larger text which may have been changed or misinterpreted only in a small way, but which leads to a far different conclusion.

What should one do, I wonder. Let us also remember that the point of this excercize is to see, not if one can grow more and more certain of conclusions or of some historical chain of information, but to see if one can, even theoretically, remove a faith which is imbued in a historical person or God which may be supernatural from a faith in historical texts which may not be.