Mark’s account is the least embellished.  It’s simpler, and shows us a Jesus who is human (albeit with extraordinary abilities–that he tells people they could have as well if they had enough faith).  The later gospels are further along in the conversation, and have more bells and whistles, responding to different currents in the growing Christian community.  Mark is much less concerned with showing us a divine Jesus.  He think of Jesus as a man chosen by God for special qualities to perform a great task.  He doesn’t care where Jesus was born, and he doesn’t worry overmuch about Jesus being baptized by John.  God can choose anyone to be Messiah, and Jesus is God’s pick.  

I think objective is the wrong word to use in this context.  Mark has just as much of an agenda as the others.  It’s not written as a straight history, and almost nobody in this era even tried to write straight histories.  

But do you think historians don’t have agendas other than telling us the facts?  Thucydides has an agenda.  Modern historians have them too.  They also have a methodology, professional standards, and peer review to keep them in line.  

You can’t ask for professional standards from people who aren’t getting paid, which clearly none of the gospel authors were.  They did it for love (and in Matthew and John’s case, sometimes hate).  They are writing religious accounts.  They aren’t really trained as theologians either.  They’re proselytizers.  They have heard the word, and they want to pass it along.  But in transmitting it, they change it.  And that’s pretty much unavoidable.  Even if you’re trying to avoid it.  Which they weren’t.  

John is the least objective where Jews are concerned, though Matthew gives him a run for his money.  

They each have a different vision of who Jesus is.

But think about people you know.  Do you have exactly the same image of a given friend as some other mutual acquaintance does?

None of them met Jesus, in all probability.  But even if all of them did, it wouldn’t mean they’d see the same person, draw the same conclusions.  

Objectivity is an ideal.  It’s never a reality.  Not with humans.  

But do we subtract points for asserting historical events that we can be pretty sure never happened?  Like a census that uproots most of the Roman Empire, or the slaughter of an entire town’s children in reaction to three guys showing up out of nowhere?  

I think for the most part, the things in the gospels that are confirmed by history are there in all four of them.  But if a gospel is clearly adding on whole new layers of narrative for doctrinal purposes, then we have to consider it less objective.  Stories tend to grow with the telling.  

So the earliest gospel would be the least adorned, the closest to the truth, if still far from what we’d call objective or accurate.

This is why people fight over which came first, I would think–or over which was written by an eyewitness (as Bauckham argues that John’s gospel was written by a very elderly John the disciple, oddly referring to himself in the first person as the beloved of Christ).  The gospel that comes closest to one’s internal image of Jesus will be seen as the one that comes closest to reality.  I think all the synoptics give us some important insights into him.  But John’s gospel, mainly just the pericopae adulterae–that John didn’t put in there.  

The objective answer is that some of them did, some of them didn’t, and you do know that these questions exist for ancient history in general, right?  

You can’t ever go to just one source with any subject in history.  Not ever.  History is about balancing out all the information you have, sifting through it, comparing and contrasting, going for context.  Not “This is the best source, so this is what I believe.”

The reason so many have problems understanding this is that very few people have seriously studied history–reading books isn’t enough.  You need to understand the problem all historans face.  PEOPLE LIE.  And even when they’re honest, they’re all seeing different realities.  There is objective reality, but we interpret it emotionally.  And that’s what makes us human.  That’s probably the only reason any of us care what happened before we were born.  But we want simple answers.  And they don’t exist.  

Jesus was born (we’re assuming in the normal fashion).  He was very poor, but had an exceptional mind.  He had some kind of reilgious awakening.  He was baptized by John, who was probably his mentor.  He preached an unconventional form of Judaism, and believed God was coming to transform the world in the near future.  He developed a reputation as a faith healer (some question this).  He was open to gentiles, but not primarily interested in them.  He made enemies among the Jewish authorities.  He came to Jerusalem, and created enough of a stir to attract the attention of the Romans.  He may have been betrayed by one of his followers.  He was crucified.  His disciples came to believe he’d appeared to them in the flesh.  They founded a new religion which attracted few Jews, but many gentiles.  The Kingdom Jesus promised in the lifetimes of those who heard him has yet to occur.  But we’d be living in a different world if he had never been born, or if he had never been crucified.  

It’s a crazy story.   But how many crazy stories have we seen happen in our own lifetimes?  Objective reality is stranger than any fiction.  

That is objective reality.  

Right–in that film, everybody is an eyewitness, and nobody tells the whole truth–they tell the story they want to believe.  They’re mythologizing what was, in fact, a fairly sordid story of greed and lust and murder.  But nobody is making up the entire story out of nothing. 

If nothing interesting ever happened in real life, there wouldn’t be any stories.  We improve upon what really did happen.  We bend it to our purposes.  No doubt in my mind there really was a King Arthur.  But the stories we have are too far from the source to learn much about the real events that inspired them.  That’s true of most mythical figures.  But not of Jesus.  Because they started writing about him within a single human lifetime of his death.  And even so, the myth-making is very far along, but not so far that you can’t see the outlines of the real story.  And that story is not what most Christians would wish it to be.  But it’s not sordid.  And it’s not about greed or lust.  (Except for that story about how John the Baptist died–and that gets dramatized a lot, doesn’t it?)