Table of Contents

Gospel (GSPL) — History vs. Heritage

What this is

Gospel is one production line within NONFICTION (formerly SOURCE, renamed 2026-08-04; formerly GSPL before that, renamed 2026-08-02 once the universe's scope proved broader than the Gospels alone; registered in dbo.Universe, slug nonfiction, alongside GLMZ, SCRY, and FICTION) — a real, DB-backed universe using the same Nodes/Beats/BeatNodes schema, sharing the prose-generation pipeline. It differs from GLMZ/SCRY/FICTION only in subject matter (the real world, not an invented one) and in an added craft discipline: every factual claim in finished prose must be citation-grounded — see ../NONFICTION.md for the Universe-layer craft rules this enforces (the DCM hierarchy's tier-2 layer, same role GLMZ.md/SCRY.md play for their universes).

The research documents in this directory (this file's Topics/campaign sections below) are the grounding material Gospel prose is written from — the same role a NodeBible or entity doc plays for fiction — not the finished, reader-facing deliverable. A finished Gospel beat is prose, citation-numbered per docs/NONFICTION.md §1a; the Scriptural-Claim/Spectrum/Gap-Table documents here are the research substrate underneath it.

The subject: a topic-by-topic reexamination of the Abrahamic scriptural record against the independent historical, archaeological, and documentary record — asking, for any given claim, "scripture says X; what does the non-scriptural evidence actually show?"

The mission statement (the George Washington test)

A biography of George Washington that never mentions his dentures were carved from hippopotamus ivory and human/animal teeth (not wood — that part's also a myth) isn't lying, but it's telling heritage, not history. Heritage is the version of the past a community keeps because it's useful to believe; history is what the surviving evidence actually supports, including the unflattering, the uncertain, and the frankly unknown parts.

Gospel's purpose is not to debunk scripture and not to prove it. It is to supply the missing context required to read scripture accurately — as an ancient text produced by real communities with real interests, describing (and sometimes inventing, compressing, or retrojecting) claims about real places and people who left an independent evidentiary trail of their own, or didn't.

Method: the spectrum, not a verdict

Every topic document lays out a spectrum from the scriptural claim to the most skeptical academic position, with every serious position in between — not a single adjudicated conclusion. Concretely:

  1. The Scriptural Claim — what the text(s) actually say, cited precisely (book:chapter:verse), including internal disagreements between passages/books before any outside source is consulted.
  2. The Spectrum of Scholarship — named positions across the range:
    • Traditional/confessional — the claim taken at or near face value, per mainstream denominational scholarship.
    • Mainstream historical-critical — the position held by the working majority of non-devotional biblical historians and archaeologists (regardless of their personal faith or lack of it) — this is the academy's actual center of gravity, not a "middle ground" invented for balance.
    • Minimalist / skeptical — named schools and scholars who doubt more of the traditional claim than the mainstream does, with their actual evidentiary basis (not caricatured).
    • Fringe positions (on either end) are labeled as fringe when they are fringe. "Spectrum" does not mean false balance between a consensus and a discredited outlier.
  3. The Independent Record — what non-scriptural evidence exists: archaeology, epigraphy, contemporary non-Christian/non-Jewish sources, administrative and diplomatic records, material culture. Dated and sourced.
  4. The Gap Table — the load-bearing section. Three columns: Attested (multiple independent sources or physical evidence), Assumed (plausible, widely repeated, but resting on scripture alone or on inference), and Legendary Accretion (later tradition, often centuries later, added for a traceable theological or political reason — the "dentures" category).
  5. Open Questions — what genuinely isn't known, stated as such rather than papered over.
  6. Sources — bibliography in APA 7th-edition format, with a bias toward citing primary evidence and naming real scholars/schools rather than anonymous "some historians say." Scripture and other ancient primary texts with universally recognized numbering (chapter:verse, book.chapter.section) are cited in-line by that numbering rather than as reference-list entries, per standard APA practice for classical/religious works; modern editions, translations, and secondary scholarship get full reference-list entries. Do not invent a page range, publisher, or year for a citation that has not been verified — an unverified but plausible-looking citation is a worse failure mode for this project than a gap flagged as unverified, since the entire point of the Gap Table is to be honest about what is and isn't actually known.

Template: _TEMPLATE.md.

Topics

Topic File Status
Canaan — where the borders actually were canaan-borders.md Drafted
The Twelve Apostles — who they were besides "a follower of Jesus" twelve-apostles.md Drafted
Pontius Pilate — before and after his four chapters pontius-pilate.md Drafted
The genealogies of Jesus — two family trees that don't match genealogies-of-jesus.md Drafted
The nativity chronology — virgin birth, Bethlehem, Herod, the census, the star, the massacre nativity-chronology.md Drafted

The New Testament Claims Campaign

The topics above were the initial examples. The standing goal is now every verse of the New Testament, in canonical order — checkable claims get full topic-doc treatment, theological/ moral content gets explicitly flagged as out-of-method rather than silently skipped. This is tracked as its own campaign, since it spans many future sessions: see nt-claims/README.md for the method, the per-book status table, and the chapter-by-chapter ledgers (Matthew's is drafted for chapters 1–2; the rest of Matthew and all 26 remaining books are queued).

Backlog (Old Testament and cross-cutting topics, not yet drafted)

Candidates raised by the same method, outside the NT campaign above:

  • The Exodus route and the size of "600,000 men on foot" (Egyptian records vs. the biblical count)
  • David and Solomon's kingdom — the Tel Dan Stele vs. "united monarchy" maximalism/minimalism
  • The Shroud of Turin and other relic-authenticity cases as a class
  • The Council of Nicaea — what it actually decided vs. what popular claims say it decided
  • The Dead Sea Scrolls and how much they do/don't corroborate the Hebrew Bible's transmission

A note on scope and neutrality

This track deliberately does not adjudicate theological truth claims (whether God acted in history is not a historical question any evidence can settle). It restricts itself to questions evidence can speak to: did this place have this border, did this person leave a documentary trace, does the archaeological layer match the narrative's claimed date. Readers of any faith position or none should be able to use these documents, because they report the state of the evidence rather than argue a conclusion about belief.