The Gospels are just campfire folklore that grew more legendary with each retelling

The "telephone game" picture of the Gospels (that stories about Jesus passed through decades of retelling and accumulated exaggeration before finally getting written down) runs into a specific kind of evidence called undesigned coincidences: small, incidental details in one Gospel that only make sense in light of a detail mentioned separately in a different Gospel, with no sign either author planned it that way. In the feeding of the 5,000, the only miracle recorded in all four Gospels, Mark alone notes the grass was green, which regional rainfall data ties to a narrow window in late spring. John alone notes the Passover was near, which independently lands in that same window and also explains why Mark describes crowds constantly "coming and going": Passover pilgrim traffic. John also says Jesus asked Philip, of all the disciples, where to buy bread, which seems like an odd choice until you notice John elsewhere says Philip was from the nearby town of Bethsaida, a detail Luke supplies for the feeding's location and John never connects to Philip directly. None of the four Gospels states the connection outright; it only surfaces when you read them together.

The reason this matters for the folklore theory is that legendary retelling drops the boring, incidental details first and keeps or inflates the dramatic ones. What survives here is the opposite pattern: the peripheral trivia (grass color, a hometown, a harvest season) is preserved with precision across independent sources, while the miracle itself isn't exaggerated beyond what all four accounts already agree on. That's the signature of careful, controlled transmission close to eyewitness memory, not multiple decades of oral drift. It also lines up with when the Gospels were written: unlike genuine folklore, which typically needs generations to develop, the Gospels were composed and circulating within the lifetime of people who could have contradicted them, and ancient biography of this exact era (Plutarch, Suetonius) shows authors writing careful, source-checked lives of recent figures, not slowly-forming legends.