Gospels Like Teen Spirit

In previous articles I've opined that Christianity was originally conceptual, not literal. However, in this post I'm going to highlight something that points to Jesus being an actual living person.

Gospel Biographies

There are multiple gospels - that is, accounts of the life of Jesus. The gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Along with many other apocryphal texts. People will often highlight the contradictions found in some of these accounts, citing them as evidence that the stories were all made up. I would argue that they suggest the opposite though.

To give a modern example: let's say there's a very popular rockstar. In fact, let's use Kurt Cobain. Music fans are interested in his life, so there's an appetite for biographies about him. A Nirvana fan may buy one biography, by one writer - read it, stick it on their shelf - then later, buy another biography. This time by a different writer. Naturally, this second biography may contain information that wasn't in the first, or omit information that was. There may even be accounts from one book that contradict the other. Perhaps leaning into different perspectives, rumours and interviews with people who knew the singer. It could also be that one writer is just more dishonest and sensationalist than the other. More interested in sales and publicity than actual truth.

Either way, both these books get put on the shelf once read. The reader - our Nirvana fan - may prefer one book over the other, but they don't throw the other one away, or seek to edit the two to smooth out any contradictions. They just keep them. They like Kurt Cobain, so they want to read about him and devour as much as possible. Even the books that don't paint a wholly positive picture. They may end up with five or six different biographies sat on their bookshelf. Each slightly different to the other.

Looking at the gospels it seems it was similar with Jesus. People wanted to read about him. So, like music fans, they devoured and collected all the biographical accounts available. Consequently, we've ended up with a ragtag body of texts, from numerous writers and sources.

If the stories were all "made up" by a single source or authority, this likely wouldn't be the case. They would be internally consistent. Without contradiction and disagreement.

Of course, this doesn't prove that therefore these stories were true, and that there definitely was a single living Jesus figure. However, it does imply that there was indeed a market for accounts of the life of the man. It was only later that church councils tried to hammer this organic library into an official and accepted corpus. Giving sanction to some texts and excluding others.