Chapter 3 "Long, Long Ago and Far, Far Away?" Fictional Gospels?

It is easy to claim that the Gospel accounts are simply fictional stories about the man called Jesus that present him as a god-man. But there are some major problems with this claim. Here are some to consider. Some of these will be expanded on later in our summary of this book.

1. The Gospels pass the standard tests of ancient documents for historical reliability.
2. Why would the authors create a new fictional story of Jesus, when Rome was torturing and killing followers of Christ?
3. If Christians had believed for decades in the Jesus Paul presented which lived "long ago", why would they accept this new view of Jesus?
4. Since the supposed fictional stories included people who were still alive, wouldn't it have been easy to expose the deception? (It is interesting that there are no records in which opponents of Christianity in ancient times ever disputed the accuracy of the accounts of Jesus.)
5. We must remember that the primary means of communication at that time was oral. Studies show that in orally-dominate cultures writing was used to faithfully express established oral information. The idea that the authors of the Gospels would create fictional accounts of such an important subject ignores their cultural context. 
6. Studies have also shown that in oral cultures those who recited information orally for their communities were allowed some flexibility in how they presented the material but were not allowed to alter the facts. It seems very improbable that those writing the Gospels could have overturned the established oral information about Jesus.

The theory we are looking at is that Paul, who wrote 20 years after the life of Jesus, was presenting ideas about an ancient savior-deity. This became the redeemer worshiped by early Christians, who was fictionalized 20 years later in the Gospels and presented as being Jesus of Nazareth. We can see now that the second part of the theory has big problems. Next time we will look at the first part of the theory as it relates to Paul.