The gospels are infinitely more fun to read as an atheist/agnostic than when I heard their fragments as a kid believer. They come across as a Harry Potter-style adventure story with a wünderkind wizard dude as protagonist ferrying around the weird lands of Roman-occupied Judea, wowing folks with his startling deeds and his cryptic intellect, where every now and then the devil appears like the Joker skulking from out of the shadows to try to f•ck with JC - like in Luke, el diablo shows up and somehow jets him from Galilee to the top of the temple in Jerusalem and says to JC "you think you're hot shit and you think God's got your back, so jump off of this thing and have him catch you, come on, m'fer, do it!" and JC just comes back, cool as can be, with "you don't think I know that you're not supposed to test God?" but also legions of angels materialize with trumpets in shining glory at certain key moments, as if to certify the divine nature of these incidents, like in Luke when JC is baptized by J the B, the sky kind of opens and along with the angelitos we even hear a voice thundering out of the heavens to declare the portentousness of the occasion, and you also catch all of these funky details you would never catch as a kid, like a nice little bit of animal sacrifice at the temple in Luke - after JC was born, Joseph and Mary took him there and before presenting him to God, they sacrifice a couple of doves to Yahweh. Makes sense... Amazing how the church managed to extract all of the fun out of this text -- this shit is wild, as out there as the Ray Harryhausen stop motion work on Sinbad and King Kong. JC in the different gospels can be kind of a dour and dyspeptic fellow at times, but the stories themselves -- you can see the influence of the Greek myths on the four gospel writers, texts which they inevitably read in order to become literate and competent writers in Greek. Last point is a stylistic one: the gospel writers are masters of the use of the word "and." It is deployed with such mastery that it functions as a kind of fast motion pulley, yanking the reader along from weird scene to weird scene with the insistence of a heartbeat.
