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[quote=Anonymous]“Canonical Gospels – Really, we are discussing a single gospel, not multiple as Mark was the first (written after the fall of the 2nd temple), and all the others are re-tellings of the story. It is like Superman movies – 1978, 2013, and 2025. They all have the same basic story but with their own twists. And, the gospels are similar in that it’s a made for TV story. They are legendary fiction and an amalgam of motifs from the Hebrew Bible and Greco-Roman myths, such as those about &quot;dying and rising gods&quot; – like the popular and well known story of one of Rome’s mythical founders, Romulus.”

[color=orange]You are channeling a pretty common “mythicist-adjacent” or hyper-skeptical take that was popular in some corners of the internet circa 2010–2015 (think Carrier, Doherty, or the old Freke & Gandy “Jesus Mysteries” crowd). A lot of those talking points sound punchy, but they don’t hold up well against the current scholarly consensus (even the secular one). [/color][color=red] [/color]

“There’s really only one gospel—Mark—and the others are just fan-fiction rewrites” That’s a huge oversimplification.
—&gt;Yes, Mark is the earliest (ca. 70 CE, right after the Temple’s fall). Matthew and Luke both used Mark and a lost sayings source (“Q”) plus their own unique material (M and L). John is independent and much later (90–100 CE).

So we actually have at least four independent streams of tradition (Mark, Q, L, M, and John), not just one story with cosmetic changes. That’s why historians can do things like the “criterion of multiple attestation” instead of treating it like a single script being rebooted.

“It’s just legendary fiction stitched together from dying-and-rising-god myths (Romulus, Osiris, etc.)”

[u]This is the old 19th-century “parallelomania” that modern scholarship has largely abandoned. The actual dying-and-rising god category has been dismantled (look up Jonathan Z. Smith’s work or Tryggve Mettinger’s careful re-examination); most of those gods either don’t die, don’t rise, or the stories post-date Christianity.[/u]

Romulus specifically: his “ascension” in Livy and Ovid is a political legend cooked up centuries later to legitimize the empire; it has almost nothing in common with the passion narrative except “important guy disappears and is later said to be divine.”

The passion story, on the other hand, is embarrassingly Jewish and anti-triumphalist: a crucified messianic claimant who dies in shame. That’s the opposite of what any Greco-Roman mythmaker would invent if they were trying to sell a hero cult.

“Made-for-TV legendary fiction” 
The Gospels are ancient biographies (bioi), not modern novels or screenplays. They’re short, poorly written by literary standards, full of Aramaic substrata, and contain details that only make sense in a 30s–50s CE Palestinian Jewish context (e.g., disputes over Sabbath grain-plucking, purity laws, etc.). If someone were just spinning a myth in the 70s–90s, they did an astonishingly good job of faking 20–40 years of earlier oral tradition that no one called them out on.

Bottom line (even from completely secular scholars like Ehrman, Paula Fredriksen, Amy-Jill Levine, etc.):
1. A historical Jesus who was crucified under Pilate is more probable than the mythicist alternative.
2. The Gospels contain legendary embellishment and theological shaping—no serious scholar denies that.
3. But they’re not 1:1 copies of pagan myths, and they’re not a single Markan script with new special effects.

You have bought into a package of older, mostly debunked talking points on the “pagan parallel” side. If you are open to updating the model, Mark Goodacre’s The Case Against Q (for the literary relationship) and Bart Ehrman’s How Jesus Became God (for how legend grows around a real person) are two very readable places to see the current mainstream secular view.

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