Relates; John’s response says much that I would have said.

I probably wouldn’t frame it quite this way, preferring to look at all these as forms of story, accepting that by capturing an account we are also expressing the process of seeing or hearing or remembering as well as the event. And I have also had it in mind to try to avoid the modern exclusions, where the truth of the scientist is somehow truer that the truth of the poet.

Even the idea of ‘eye-witness’ accounts is probably misleading, as if this implied objectivity. But in the context of this thread, arising from John’s thread on Genesis and True Myth, there have been some who even approach the creation stories as if they described a witnessed event rather than reflections or revelation upon the event. I suspect that much in scripture that reads as an account is anything but a witnesses account but is a narrative, and frequently an interpreted, probably communal narrative memory.

The same would hold true, I suppose, of even NT accounts. We can assume that Jesus might have told the disciples of how he came to embrace is role, but were there really witnesses to his time in the wilderness? Of course, there were, if your name is Jim Crace and you are writing Quarantine.