0 - baseline
Let's presuppose that there is a movement somewhere, and it's been around for decades.
It is a bit like the "proverbial monkies in the cage" that get sprayed down as soon as they reach for a banana dangling from the ceiling: the monkies all get replaced and in the end there is only "oral memory", no monkey has ever been in contact with the waterhose itself.
(By the way, said "experiment" turns out to never have been an experiment in fact, but I really like the comparison)
So, there are thousands of people, a good customer base for anything, who appreciate a Jesus (and / or CHirst?) for his wisdom - but no one seems to know what exactly he was all about, it was all rather confusing, but he was a swell guy, such is for sure. Threre are people, really old farts, who claim they saw him, but if you check they all describe different persons so none of that is reliable. But the movement rpresents a lot of meat so to say, thousands, many pockets full there, and it's clearly lost its head
1 - First exploit, by Paul
Then Paul comes in, and he tries to comfort the post-70 Judeans with it, pretending it's a new religion, well established, with other groups in other countries, many other countries even. Paul knows he's lying through the back of his teeth but he grabs an opportunity when he sees one, building a pedestal for himself on top of anything, prefrably his dead mother-in-law so to say (typical win-win there).
Anyway. He can't possibly claim that he knew this Jesus, or was it Christ, but he knows his gullible audience so he fantasises that he had a vision from this dead Jesus, Christ, Jesus, Jesus Christ, whatever - they buy it, and he's in. The rest is history: more lies, and he gets questions about this Jesus or Christ seemingly rejecting circumcision and doing all kinds of non-Judaic things, so he has to defend that, come up with an excuse
Paul is fairly successful at the start but soon collapses under the enormous load of non-Judaic things: no praying, no fasting, no giving alms - this Jesus was no Christ of them for sure. They like the suffering though, typical Jewish victim stuff, love it. And dying for their sins, they absolutely love that part - but they want to know more. But Paul is just a pre-sales guy, his only ability is evangelising, he's not great with words. Screaming, lying and boasting, yes - but he's got a short breath
2 - further exploit, by Mark
Then a Mark comes in. He knows his Greek and Romans, and is a fantastic story teller. So fantastic, that he "hides" and disguises himself as some crude Palestinian hillbilly, even though he's never left Rome himself. He knows how to make a story tick, he can recite from memory Homer for hours straight, he is the Shakepeare of the nills. He digs into the texts that surrounded this Jesus character, and he tries to catch its atmosphere, addressing its themes, while painting it all in his extremely well-crafted design of chiasms and parallels and Narrative with a capital N of whihc Homer himself would be jealous. He also steals some content, carefully wrapping his own context in and around it. And he makes sure to use its main characters and assign each of them a role, even though some of them have no role whatsoever in the original content itself, so he keeps it very scarce.
At the end he makes sure this Jesus fella dies so he doesn't go against Paul in that way, but he never mentions Paul, it's best to pretend these are two independent stories
Mark has great success! His creation took some effort and lacks a nice intro and epilogue, but it sells like icecream at the height of summer - wow
But then - there is huge backlash. There are indignified reactions from the original movement; other people who now try to jump the bandwagon and make a buck out of it by "twisting it into their own choirs"; and worst or best, although the movement is largely non-Judaic, the Judeans are very upset that it is so very anti-Judean. They don't mind the Pharisee-bashing, those days are over anyway, but pissing down their food-law-throats, among others - there are limits, you know
3 - Judaic sauce, by Matthew
So Matthew comes along. He takes Marcion's gospel, one of those other people, which is quite similar to Mark and even a lot longer, and he makes up an intro and an epilogue, and for his own audience he writes a Judaic version of it all, undoing most if not all of what that Mark character screwed up on. And after all the doubt about a resurrected Jesus or not, he sets the record straight on that and even provides an excuse for the filthy rumours about said jesus not having been resurrected at all
And he wins a good portion of Judeans with all his efforts, and a good portion of the original movement as well, plus others
4 - John, the Thomas sauce
After LukeMatthew, there is a lot of protest from the original movement becuae they very well know that they have been duped, even though Luke doesn't Judas kiss Jesus, they know very well that it is the author of their text that is meant by it. So John comes in, an solves all problems that were still present: entering the kingdom as children, making the two one, the son and the father, and all that mumbo jumbo. John is the greatest poet of them all, and he really knows perfectly well how to catch the general atmosphere and wording without reusing hardly any original word.
He drops the entire kissing scene, and makes sure that it is Jesus who puts up Judas, who abuses Judas as an innocent puppet
Finally, there is rest. The movement gros and grows, and...
5 - the Institute takes over
All this happened in the 2nd century, we're now in the third I think. There's still resistance but the battle has moved from "the streets" to the scribes.
I'm not really good / experienced at this stage, but it ain't too hard. Kill the opposition, scapegoat them, refute them, bribe them, persecute them, burn their writings: we all know how many hundreds of millions have been murdered by the Church in any form, and it all has paid off. Rome highly successfully changed its military power into a religious one and all of us are still under its rule
Did Paul found the church in Corinth?
I am not sure whether that is a hilarious question, a naive one, a preposterous one or just a ridiculous one.
None of any of this was ever in any way true at the time of its writing, nor was it supposed to be
