As the gospels and other New Testament writings appeared in the late first and second centuries CE, they constructed the life of a recent Teacher. Written in Greek, they drew on classical rather than Judean traditions and were gradually severed from earlier Jewish writings. Eclipsed by the Teacher, Yahweh moved to the background as did the Jewish idea of messiah, which was loaded down with an accumulation of political and apocalyptic meanings derived from ancient Judean kingship. Messiah was replaced by the Greek title Christos; thus the linguistic connotations of Jewish kingship were replaced with new honorific meanings. Meanwhile, Greek mythology predating the New Testament era by centuries had been inherited and assimilated by the Romans, thus bringing Greek legends of classical heroes with divine parentage into the Roman arena. The Greek gods Apollo, Ares, Hermes, Poseidon, and Zeus together had spawned more than a hundred semidivine heroes, including the legendary founders of Rome: Aeneas was the son of the goddess Aphrodite (Roman: Venus), Romulus was the son of the god Ares (Roman: Mars). The deification of their descendant, the Emperor Augustus, was repeated with many subsequent emperors along with members of their families.

Once Mark's narrative of the Teacher was created, the application of supernatural birth to his person was almost inevitable, and it appeared within a few years in the gospels of Matthew and Luke. The virgin birth was a familiar narrative of aggrandizement from the gods of Greece. Dying and reviving gods and goddesses linked to fertility were present in virtually every Mediterranean sect and most had followers in Rome. Descent and return from the land of the dead were central in the Odyssey and Aeneid. Ascensions of a mortal into heaven had been reported for earlier Roman heroes. Roman readers unfamiliar with the Torah would probably overlook gospel claims of prophecy fulfilled while noticing the sage-like wisdom of the Teacher's sayings now found in the Q document and Gospel of Thomas. Their Essenic quality was akin to philosophical wisdom in Rome and Mediterranean colonies for at least a century, perhaps two. The Jews themselves were wary, as later New Testament writings indicate, but accustomed as they were to ancient lineages that conferred power through divine origins, royal bloodlines, and hallowed antiquity, the Romans easily accepted ancestries of Jesus in Matthew and Luke that fit their expectations for semidivine founders, both political and religious.