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No it is not faith that determines the reliability or credibility of the witnesses, it is ability to judge character from their writing and what is written about them. It's a judgment call, and either you have good judgment or you don't.
But it's not just character, is it ? There are issues of bias and sources. Now we know that the author of Luke was not a witness, and although we have no good idea of who wrote Mark and Matthew the evidence we do have suggests that neither of them were witnesses either. And John seems to be so influenced by theology that even if the primary author was a witness - and we don't know that - then it's questionable whether that Gospel is even as reliable as Mark.
None of the Gospels identify their sources as historians of the time did. All of them are strongly biased.
Then we have the author of Matthew's credulity, and the places where he takes small portions of OT scriptures out of context. We also have the disagreements between the Gospels of Luke and Matthew - some quite striking. Clearly by the time of writing there were conflicting views in the early church.
Add in the usual flaws of ancient writing and we really can't trust the Gospels to be accurate and reliable. The character of the authors - which we can only infer from the writing - isn't really an issue.
But actually reading the Gospels and setting them in the context of the time and the other evidence that we have isn't really what you had in mind, is it ?
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