Jesus Taught Story Telling
July 1, 2025
by William P. Meyers

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The Gospels are Parables, not non-fiction

If you are raised in a Christian household (as I was), or learn about Jesus of Nazareth from a missionary, you are told the gospel truth. That is, you are told that what is said about the life of Jesus in the New Testament gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) is literally true. Even though they include the idea that Jesus told stories, which were parables, which are meant to teach some lesson, rather than be literally true. One well-known parable is the Parable of the Sower, which appears in three of the four gospels, for instance Matthew 13:1-23.

Actually, many more gospels were written, but by the time of the Council of Nicea, in 325 A.D., orthodox priests (the ones who won out over their opponents) had decided which ones were real, and branded all the others as faked or heretical. The same is true for other elements of the New Testament: there were plenty of alleged letters written by the Apostles (Jesus's first followers) floating around, but only a few were chosen as authentic.

The moment a person does anything analytic, even as simple as comparing the four gospels, problems arise with the gospel truth narative. Following the advent of critical scholarship in the modern era, we now have long lists of academic texts describing those problems. Here I want to get to the central problem: who was Jesus, was he God, or Christ, or just some wandering Jew from Nazareth?

I believe, based on my examination of the early texts and my listening to analysis of those texts by academic scholars, that Jesus was a professional storyteller. More than that, he taught his apostles and disciples to make up and tell stories, so that they could support themselves.

Many of those stories were parables. The story of the life of Jesus, as told in the orthodox gospels and many other early Christian texts, was also turned into a parable. The story of Jesus, after he died and the reality was forgotten, was developed into a parable that would awe the listeners and encourage them to feed, clothe, shelter, and perhaps give a bit of coin to the story teller. This developed, fairly rapidly, into a religion, including the early version of the religion we read of in Acts of the Apostles, as well as the closer-to-the truth stories of the Jewish Christian sects like the Ebionites.

One of the first things to note about the gospels is that they record no instance of Jesus engaging in reading or writing. That does not prove the real, historical Jesus could not read or write, but it shows no emphasis was put upon it by his disciples. Now obviously the books of the New Testament were written down, including the gospels, but there is no evidence they were written down until long after Jesus died. Although attributed to four apostles, the gospels were first written in Greek. Most academic Christian scholars believe they were attributed to apostles to make them more believable.

Did Jesus die by crucifixion? That might be literally true, or it might be a parable. Neither the Romans (who ruled the area at that time) nor the Jews (the traditional rulers) made a record of his life or death. That crucifixion story was almost certainly made up when the non-Jewish Christians were fighting for control of the narrative with the Jewish Christians. It accomplishes the need to make Jews and Roman authorities look bad. However, the Roman part is undermined by the story of Jesus saying, to the Jews, to pay their taxes to the Romans. This bit of story making likely occurred when, in the later half of the first century, most Christians were in Greek speaking communities, which spanned the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea.

Did Jesus rise from the dead? If so, why did the story need to include the part about him being assumed into heaven? And why did they not edit the part about Jesus returning in his glory before the then-current generation died? Note that it would not be surprising if Jesus told rising from the dead stories to his followers. Many gods in the region, for instance the Greek god Hercules and the Egyptian god Osiris, were said to have risen from the dead.

It is too bad we don't know which of the twelve apostles simply repeated stories Jesus had told, and which began to embellish his stories or make up new ones. Jesus did not likely make up the miracle stories, those would have been made up by the apostles. The stories of the apostles themselves (Peter, James, etc.) performing miracles would have been made up by their story-telling students, after the teachers themselves had died.

The problem for the early church was that as the movement grew, more and more story tellers emerged, more and more stories were told, and the stories drifted apart. Those groups of storytellers with the largest followings have been grouped into camps, and scholars have documented the divergences within the known camps. Many of the stories have been lost, but quite a few survived in some form, even if excluded from those canonized by the Roman Catholic Church.

In some cases, though the actual stories are lost, fragments remain, often quotations by other storytellers who blasted them as being heretical. So among the Jewish Christian gospel stories we have the Gospel of the Ebionites, the Gospel of the Hebrews, and the Gospel of the Nazarenes. Among the Gnostic Gospels (too many to relate in full): Secret Book of James, Gospel of Mary, Dialog of the Saviour, Gospel of Judas, the Coptic Apocalypse of Paul, and the Secret Gospel of Mark.

In addition to the now-orthodox Acts of the Apostles, there were a bunch of other Acts: of Andrew, Barnabas, Peter, Pilate, Timothy, etc. There were the Epistles of the Apostolic Fathers (notably Ignatius) and others. There were a swarm of Apocalypses. Don't forget Didache and the Ethiopian and Coptic texts, which in places differ substantially from the orthodox (western Christian) texts.

Did you know Charles Darwin trained to become an Anglican cleric? His father, Doctor Darwin, was going to buy him a position as a minister (that was how it was done back then), but while they were waiting he was offered the position of science guy on the Beagle expedition. I now wonder if his leap to the discovery of evolution through natural selection was influenced by the work being done then (mid 1800s), mostly by clerics, on the relationships of various biblical texts and apocrypha.

Because what Jesus set in motion was the evolution of a story telling system. Those who told the best stories gained the most followers, and when the Emperor Constantine united the Christians and cast out heretics (supporters of different story lines), all that was consolidated into Dogma. The bishop of Rome told a good story: that the Apostle Peter was the head of the Church, and [despite a total lack of evidence to back up this story], left Jerusalem, and became Bishop of Rome, and hence the first Pope, who everyone had to bow down to from that time forward.

Fortunately Jesus the Storyteller, from his seat in Heaven, eventually looked down and decided that Roman Catholic Dogma had stopped people from telling good stories in his name. So he inspired story tellers like Luther, Calvin, and Joseph Smith to tell new stories to delight the masses and gather tithes with.

I hope scholars, secular and religious alike, keep working at sorting out which were the earliest Jesus stories and which were created later. I think the stories should also be judged in and of themselves: if someone made up a better Jesus story in 225 A.D. than Jesus told himself, so what? A good story is a good story.