is compressed. Instead of taking a thousand years or more for spoken stories to give way to writing and then to widely revered status, the process takes about a century for Christians. The earliest followers of Jesus didn’t immediately write their stories, apparently because they expected Jesus to return soon. They urgently spread his teachings in person, by speaking. The first New Testament books were probably not written by Jesus’ disciples, but by missionary-minded, circuit-preaching Paul. Scholars
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