As their titles imply, the Gospels are not detached reports but were written to serve proselytizing religious needs. By analogy, they are more like oil paintings than photographs. Legendary and apologetic (defensive) motifs, and the various preoccupations of the communities for which they were first produced, can readily be discerned as influences upon their narratives. Historical scholarship at present has insufficient tools to eliminate subjective judgments about the probability of many details (upon which there will always be disagreement), but the most persuasive scholarly consensus accepts the substance of the Gospel tradition as a veracious kind of picture.

A prominent uncertainty is the matter of chronology. Matthew places the birth of Jesus at least two years before Herod the Great's death late in 5 BC or early in 4 BC. Luke connects Jesus' birth with a Roman census that, according to Josephus, occurred in AD 6–7 and caused a revolt against the governor Quirinius. Luke could be right about the census and wrong about the governor. The crucifixion under Pontius Pilate, prefect of Judaea (AD 26–36), was probably about the year 29–30, but again certainty is impossible.

Apart from its success, the supremacy of the Gentile mission within the church was ensured by the effects on Jewish Christianity of the fall of Jerusalem (70 CE) and Hadrian's exclusion of all Jews from the city (135 CE). Jewish Christianity declined and became the faith of a very small group without links to either synagogue or Gentile church. Some bore the title Ebonites, “the poor” (compare Matthew 5:3). Among them some did not accept the tradition that Jesus was born of a virgin. In the theology of Paul, the human achievement of Jesus was important because his obedient fidelity to his vocation gave moral and redemptive value to his self-sacrifice. A different emphasis appears in the Gospel According to John, written (according to 2nd-century tradition) at Ephesus. John's Gospel partly reflects local disputes, not only between the church and the Hellenized synagogue but also between orthodox Christianity and deviationist Gnostic groups in Asia Minor. John's special individuality lies in his view of the relation between the historical events of the tradition and the Christian community's present experience of redemption. The history is treated symbolically to provide a vehicle for faith. Because it is less attached to the contingent events of a particular man's life, John's conception of the preexistent Logos becoming incarnate (made flesh) in Jesus made intelligible to the Hellenistic world the universal significance of Jesus. In antiquity, divine presence had to be understood as either inspiration or incarnation.

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