Finding the Shards #7
In retrospect it seems strange that no one thought to question the main story line that resulted from a merger of the four gospels, the very outline of the "life of Christ" that all Christians had in mind. But this was because no one imagined that the evangelists, as the authors of the gospels were called during the nineteenth century, had intended anything other than a biography. A biography of such an important person's life is exactly what a nineteenth-century scholar would have expected of a first-century writer. The problem was that the evangelists lived in pre-enlightenment times, which meant they were "uncritical," and they must have been a bit gullible about the causes of certain events and somewhat mistaken about many of the details. Notice that no two evangelists agreed exactly in their descriptions of the same events and that all of them had trouble keeping their histories free from the miraculous and the mythical. Thus the major issues were set. The quest of the historical Jesus would swirl around the issues of (1) miracles and (2) the fact that the four accounts did not agree in detail.