“Write what you know.”

That is the first advice every creative writing teacher gives to their students. Don’t write about high‑tech science fiction if you grew up in a fishing village. Don’t write about urban drug/gang culture if your experience is a farm in South Iowa. When you write about your environs and the types of people you know, that’s when you write reality. You are reproducing authentic images, conveying motives and emotions you’ve witnessed first-hand that lie behind the characters on the page.

Jesus would have flunked Creative Writing 101. Not just because we do not have any evidence of anything Jesus ever actually wrote down. But because he broke that first rule of writing. Jesus was raised in a small, rural area, Galilee. But Jesus’ family was not shepherds or farmers, they w…