- The student's uncle had experiences that are generally common among missionaries.
- The student's uncle claimed the experience of other missionaries as his own.
- The student attributed the experiences of other missionaries to his uncle.
- The student invented the missionary uncle for purposes of the essay.
In the debate over the existence of a historical Jesus, much time is spend arguing about parallels between stories about Jesus and the those found in the Old Testament or in pagan mythology. Sometimes, historicists like James McGrath feign puzzlement that mythicists consider the parallels significant at all:
[Thomas Thompson] points out, as he does in his book, that Jesus in the Gospels is depicted using motifs and echoes from literature about earlier royal figures. It is hard to imagine that anyone could make a claim to kingship in a Jewish context without doing so. And so it is not clear why anyone thinks that the points in Thompson's book have any bearing on the historicity of Jesus.It is hard for me to take McGrath's confusion seriously. It is of course possible that a historical Jesus existed even if his life was not the source of all the stories told about him just as it is possible that the student had a missionary uncle even if the stories about him were lifted from the internet. However if we have reason to believe that the source of the stories was not the actual life of the character, then we have less reason to think that the character in the story was an actual person than we would otherwise. Therefore, the parallels have a bearing on historicity even if they are not dispositive of historicity.