The absence of fictitious material

One other factor that argues strongly for the authenticity of the New Testament picture of Jesus is the total lack of fanciful material, or what is commonly called "myth" (using "myth" in the sense of fable or legend). Such content appears in some of the other Gospels that began to surface towards the end of the first century, and which the church rightly rejected. Many who work in the field of ancient literature have commented on this.

Archibald Rutledge has written:

For more than 30 years it was my chief business in life to study and try to teach literature. To anyone earnestly so engaged there naturally comes a certain ability to distinguish the genuine from the spurious, the authentic from the invented. Every time I read the Gospels I am pressed more deeply with the conviction that the narratives concerning Christ do not belong to the realms of fancy, tradition or folklore...The incidents are such that they could never have been invented; and their effect on the world for 2,000 years has been such as no inventions could have produced. These stories possess that patent transparent validity that belongs only to truth.

C. S. Lewis, who was professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at the University of Cambridge, wrote of his conversion to Christianity in his autobiography, Surprised by Joy:

I was by now too experienced in literary criticism to regard the Gospels as myths. They had not the mythical taste...nothing else in all literature was just like this...And no person was like the Person it depicted; as real, as recognisable, through all the depths of time, as Plato's Socrates or Boswell's Johnson, yet also numinous, lit by a light from beyond the world, a god. But if a god-we are no longer polytheists-then not a god, but God. Here and here only in all time the myth must have become fact; the Word, flesh; God, Man.