Archaeologist: "Jesus" predated Jesus

[Adrian II]

This dismissal of modern scholarly understandings means that The Messiah Myth interacts largely with the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, when the most historically important Gospel is that of Mark.

Even if Mark was written first (as the reviewer has it), it does not necessarily follow that it is the 'most historically important' of Synoptic Gospels.

If Mark's Gospel were indeed 'closest in time' to a historic Jesus episode, then this proximity, in addition to the nature of the text, would certainly make this the most important Gospel. But it is precisely the historicity of that episode which remains to be proven. Or rather: shown to be plausible, since that seems to be the highest measure of proof attainable for any statement in this entire field, given the nature of the available sources. In any case, Mark's chronological proximity to what was possibly a non-event does not speak to its veracity.

An alternative view on relative importance of the Gospels might be that all four primarily or even uniquely reflect the preoccupations of the authors' own place and time, cast in the mold of the familiar Near Eastern tropes and centered on a legendary or even mythical Christ. If seen in this way, John -- being the bistro intellectual of the bunch and given to abstractions and sweeping statements -- may actually represent these concerns more eloquently than the other three. Hence John would be the most historically important.