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But the gospels are not like modern biographies. They are stories meant for a particular audience and meant to present Jesus in a particular way. They're preaching and telling stories about Jesus. That's what the Gospels are.

The gospels are not biographies in the modern sense of the word. Rather, they are stories told in such a way as to evoke a certain image of Jesus for a particular audience. They're trying to convey a message about Jesus, about his significance to the audience and thus we we have to think of them as a kind of preaching, as well as story telling. That's what the gospel, The Good News, is really all about. , and scholars think Paul likely dictated epistles through a secretary or amanuensis.

Pope Benedict XVI, in his book, Jesus of Nazareth, readily and gratefully acknowledges that, thanks to historical-critical scholarship, we know much more, today, about the different literary genres of the Bible; about the ways in which a Gospel writer's intent affected his portrait of Jesus; about the theological struggles within early Christianity that shaped a particular Christian community's memory of its Lord. The difficulty, according to Benedict XVI, is that, "amidst all the knowledge gained in the biblical dissecting room, the Jesus of the Gospels has tended to disappear, to be replaced by a given scholar's reconstruction from the bits and pieces left on the dissecting room floor." And that makes what Benedict calls "intimate friendship with Jesus" much more difficult, not just for scholars, but for everyone.


 * "He [i.e. Porphyry Atr. 6] also presents Zoroaster as the founder of the mysteries, a pious development that does violence to the facts, but which gives the cult a respectable ancestry among the ancient sages ." -- Dillon, John, "The Platonizing of Mithra", Journal of Mithraic Studies, 2.1 (1977): 79-85, at p. 80.
 * "the only fact that matters in this connection [i.e. genesis] is that the Mithraists believed their cult to come from Persia, specifically from the most famous Magus [i.e. Pseudo-Zoroaster]. It is this claim that is important, not the reality, which [due to lack of evidence] is not recoverable." -- Gordon, Richard L. (1975) "Franz Cumont and the Doctrines of Mithraism", Mithraic Studies (1975: Manchester), pp I.215-248, at p. 247.
 * "The Mithraists, who were manifestly not Persians in any ethnic sense, thought of themselves as cultic “Persians.” Moreover, whatever moderns might think, the ancient Roman Mithraists themselves were convinced that their cult was founded by none other than Zoroaster [i.e. Pseudo-Zoroaster], who “dedicated to Mithras, the creator and father of all, a cave in the mountains bordering Persia,” an idyllic setting “abounding in flowers and springs of water” (Porphyry, On the Cave of the Nymphs 6)." -- Beck, Roger. "Mithraism". Encyclopedia Iranica, 2002, para. 2.

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