There were not wanting thousands of enemies, able and willing, to expose such a forgery.
The aspect and character of the gospel narrative are totally unlike those of mythologies.

Hear the verdict of one who confessedly stands at the head of the roll of oriental historians: "In no single respect--if we except the fact that it is miraculous--has that story a mythical character.

It is a single story, told without variations; whereas myths are fluctuating and multiform: it is blended inextricably with the civil history of the times, which it everywhere reports with extraordinary accuracy; whereas myths distort or supersede civil history: it is full of prosaic detail, which myths studiously eschew: it abounds with practical instruction of the simplest and purest kind; whereas myths teach by allegory.

Even in its miraculous element it stands to some extent in contrast with all mythologies, where the marvelous has ever a predominant character of grotesqueness which is absent from New Testament miracles.

(This Strauss himself admits, _Leben Jesu_, 1-67.) Simple earnestness, fidelity, painstaking accuracy, pure love of truth, are the most patent characteristics of the New Testament writers, who evidently deal with facts, not with fancies, and are employed in relating a history, not in developing an idea.