re: #494 engineer cat

I’m not talking about historical events (which I brought up as an analogy), but about sayings. Again, it is quite possible that historical Jesus existed - as a Jewish prophet and teacher, who was executed for some reason or another (rebellion, heresy), and yet that many, if not most sayings ascribed to him were not ever uttered by him, including the significant stuff like the sermon on the mount.

My point is that the author of the sayings does not yet amount to the historical Jesus, and in fact there might have been numerous authors among the number of Jesus’ disciples, and of disciples’ disciples. Then we would have a “collective Jesus” responsible for the bulk of the moral teaching in the gospels, so your approach of “the author is the Jesus” would fail in such an event, since there would be no single author.