But that means that the meaning of our own lives can only be determined by the people who come after us and tell their stories about us. If our own lives are to have meaning they must surely primarily have the meaning that we ourselves attribute to them.

No, it’s the other way round - I think. The broad point that I wish to make is that it is perfectly possible to account for the ultimate significance of Jesus’ death and resurrection for us today by telling a historical narrative about the existence the people of God – and that conversely, we are not restricted to existential, synchronic, or mythical narratives in order to define what it means to be Christian.

So to address your point, the meaning of my life is determined not by people who come after me but by events in my past and in the past of my culture: I am who I am to a large extent because of the girl friends I had, because of the exams I passed or failed, because of the sexual revolution of the 60s, because of the Second World War, because of the Reformation, because of the Magna Carta, and so on. That is not a narrative that I simply attribute to myself in order to make sense of my life - it is much more internal than that; it is something that I have absorbed culturally.

I think that might explain what you took to be a contradiction in what I was saying.

As Christians we ought to have shed that if we took “Take up his cross daily and follow me” seriously.

The issue here is that Jesus meant this more or less literally. We can only really mean it metaphorically. That is a significant shift in application, and it should be reflected in our reading of the New Testament narrative.

I think I agree with your penultimate paragraph about extrapolating from history. I suppose my concern is that our theology has too easily collapsed the tension between the ‘myth’ and the historical ‘narrative’. I think that we are too firmly trapped in the traditional mythical paradigm to grasp the power of the historical narrative. There is a need to break out of that paradigm and allow our imaginations to re-engage with the stark historical narrative before we start constructing new communicable myths out of which to build community.