project required that I review, in great detail, the various and sundry tradition histories that scholars had offered for each and every saying and pericope in the First Gospel. The overwhelming impression I came away with, after pondering so many competing and contradictory traditionhistories, was that, much more often than not, the historical truth will forever escape us. Scholars had been trying to know the unknowable, and they had again and again confused an imaginative construct with the past