If all Jewish stories were fictions, and known to be fictions (in the normal, popular sense of ‘fictions’), the whole worldview would collapse upon itself. If someone in, say AD 75 were to tell a Jew a fiction (in the same sense) and to claim that in this very story the long hope of Israel had finally been fulfilled, the response would have been not just that he was a liar, but that he had not understood what the Jewish worldview was all about. . .If, then, the gospels are deliberately telling how the story of Israel reached its climax in the story of Jesus, they are either intending to refer to historical events, or they are saying that creational monotheism was wrong after all, and that the Platonist world of abstract ideas, divorced from space and time--which epitomized the paganism against which the Jews had struggled--had been the true world all along.