Reddit mentions of The Power of Parable: How Fiction by Jesus Became Fiction about Jesus

This stuff has been noticed and discussed by New Testament scholars for like 200 years. Most of them have been Christians. The conclusions of critical scholarship have not exactly been hidden. That's what's in the textbooks and the college classes, and there have been a number of popular books in the last couple of decades (Bart Ehrman is probably the best known and is an exemplar of the mainstream). A lot of lay Christians (and non-Christians for that matter) don't know about this stuff because it isn't talked about in their churches (a lot of clergy know about this stuff and have been educated in it, but don't bring it up out if pastoral concerns). For Christians who do know about it, it's met with a variety of strategies. There have been many attempts at apologetic reconciliations of these problems (almost always tortuous, ad hoc and unconvincing in a critical academic context), but others are completely fine with taking the stories as allegory or illustrative myth or as parables. For the latter approach, I'd suggest looking at Crossan's book, The Power of Parable: How Fiction by Jesus Became Fiction about Jesus . A lot of Christian commentators take the view that a story does not have to be literal history in order to convey a theological "truth." The parables of Jesus would be a good analogy. Does it matter if there was really a historical "Good Samaritan?" Christian scholars like Crossan say that even asking that question is missing the point, and that some of the stories about Jesus should be taken the same way.