Well, the gospels *were *written at least a generation or two after Jesus died.
(Mark was written approx 40 years after…Matthew and Luke approx 10-20 years after that…and then John approx 60-70 years after Jesus was crucified. I think that’s roughly it.)
So I think what those people are taking about is that in the 40-70 years while the stories were passed around and passed down verbally, people would embellish along the way.
.
I’ve made the claim that the night my father died, he appeared in my room, he started with an apology for a lifetime of deliberate cruelty, we argued and talked, and at the end he gave this absolutely terrifyng scream and then just diaappeared.
I wrote a narrative about it quite some time later. It was probably a good twenty five years later that I wrote about it, although I’d certainly spoken about it to a few people, especially my old pastor when I was still Presbyterian.
I left a few things out of the narrative, and some of the conversation may have been not quite in the order in which it took place, but it happened all right.
So in my peculiar case, there was what you might call a verbal tradition, based on something I’d witnessed myself (unfortunately I didn’t have any other human witnesses, although the apostles certainly did).
Then there was a written tradition, based on my verbal tradition, abouit an event which I happened to experience on the night my father died.
So the apostles didn’t write them down straight away? So what? Richard Dawkins, arch atheist, is 74 this year, but I bet he could still remember what happened on his 21st birthday party, roughly who was there, where it was held, and whether he enjoyed it or not.
This is despite the fact his 21st birthday took place 53 years ago. And I bet he could write some sort of narrative about some of the things that were said and done at his 21st birthday party.
Now that’s regarding a trivial event like an iconic birthday.
How much more then would people remember someone who raised the dead, turned water into wine, killed a fig tree overnight by talking to it, stilled a storm, walked on water, drove out demons, confronted the Sanhedrin and Pilate, lashed the money changers, at whose death the sun stopped shining, the earthquake ripped the temple curtain in two, and then rose from the dead after being crucified?
Christ didn’t write about it because He didn’t need to. He knew precisely who He was, and He knew with absolute certainty that His “words will never die away.”
People who make the sorts of claims about myth in the Gospels just don’t want to believe - full stop. That’s all it is.
