These down votes are lame. I disagree with you completely, but your opinion is still valid. I think after the original author is long dead, I’d like to see new perspectives breathing new life into old fictional characters. Otherwise, are you saying we can’t make new stories about Hercules, Odysseus, Jesus, etc?
Robin Hood is another example of a set of works that had many people contributing different stories into what became the present-day collection.
Historically, a lot of works had many authors using the same character. I think that it’s a bit unfortunate that modern copyright law tends to discourage that.
H. P. Lovecraft was unusual in that he allowed other authors to make use of his characters (and settings, which are also covered by copyright), which is why his world – with Cthulhu and all that – has been widely used.
If you mean Jesus, it’s not terribly controversial that there was a historical Jesus, but there were definitely different people writing up material about Jesus, and the Bible contains self-contradictions between those stories. How closely each individual narrative hews to the historical Jesus…shrugs
For example, Christ’s birth is described differently in the different Gospels:
Only the Gospels of Matthew and Luke offer narratives regarding the birth of Jesus.[1] Both rely heavily on the Hebrew scriptures, indicating that they both regard the story as part of Israel’s salvation history, and both present the God of Israel as controlling events.[2] Both agree that Jesus was born in Bethlehem in the reign of King Herod, that his mother was named Mary and that her husband Joseph was descended from King David (although they disagree on details of the line of descent), and both deny Joseph’s biological parenthood while treating the birth, or rather the conception, as divinely effected.[3]
Beyond this, they agree on very little.[3] Joseph dominates Matthew’s and Mary dominates Luke’s, although the suggestion that one derives from Joseph and the other from Mary is no more than a pious deduction.[4] Matthew implies that Joseph already has his home in Bethlehem, while Luke states that he lived in Nazareth.[3] In Matthew the angel speaks to Joseph, while Luke has one speaking to Mary.[4] Only Luke has the stories surrounding the birth of John the Baptist, the census of Quirinius, the adoration of the shepherds and the presentation in the Temple on the eighth day; only Matthew has the wise men, the star of Bethlehem, Herod’s plot, the massacre of the innocents, and the flight into Egypt.[4] The two itineraries are quite different. According to Matthew, the Holy Family begins in Bethlehem, moves to Egypt following the birth, and settles in Nazareth, while according to Luke they begin in Nazareth, journey to Bethlehem for the birth, and immediately return to Nazareth.[2][note 1] The two accounts cannot be harmonised into a single coherent narrative or traced to the same Q source, leading scholars to classify them as “special Matthew” (or simply the M source) and “special Luke” (the L source).[2]
These down votes are lame. I disagree with you completely, but your opinion is still valid. I think after the original author is long dead, I’d like to see new perspectives breathing new life into old fictional characters. Otherwise, are you saying we can’t make new stories about Hercules, Odysseus, Jesus, etc?
Robin Hood is another example of a set of works that had many people contributing different stories into what became the present-day collection.
Historically, a lot of works had many authors using the same character. I think that it’s a bit unfortunate that modern copyright law tends to discourage that.
H. P. Lovecraft was unusual in that he allowed other authors to make use of his characters (and settings, which are also covered by copyright), which is why his world – with Cthulhu and all that – has been widely used.
I imagine saying those people are fictional characters would make some people angry.
If you mean Jesus, it’s not terribly controversial that there was a historical Jesus, but there were definitely different people writing up material about Jesus, and the Bible contains self-contradictions between those stories. How closely each individual narrative hews to the historical Jesus…shrugs
For example, Christ’s birth is described differently in the different Gospels:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nativity_of_Jesus