can be clearly ascertained. To be sure, the early church recounted the accounts of Jesus and his message as testimonies to its faith, and the Gospels are, to be sure, not biographies in the sense of the Greek biographies (that much we have learned). Nevertheless, there have been gross exaggerations here. It is not as though everything in the Gospels is colored and shaped by the faith of the church and the evangelists. Paul wrote earlier than all four evangelists, and he was the great theologian in