Well, if you subscribe to the ideas of Earl Doherty and ???Ebon Musings,??? the gospels weren???t made up from whole cloth: they were based on a version of events in which Jesus was a personification of a Platonic logos, an agent of the perfect deity to interact with an imperfect material realm, who took the sins of the world upon himself and cleansed them by dying by crucifixion, to be subsequent