Atheists, is it fair to say that the people who wrote the Bible truly believed what they were writing?

For example in the bible, it says that the first people to find out that Jesus had been resurrected was a group of women. If you were making this up why would anyone say that it was a group of women, since back then women were not respected. If they were making a story like this up why can't they have said that it was a group of men so that the story would be more respected and probably have attracted more people?