[Amezarak]

> Also we do know there were many competing narratives describing the life of Christ just a few hundred years after he died.

There were meaningful competing theologies, there were not meaningfully different competing narratives of the historical events.

[simiones]

Of course there are, even among the canonical gospels. The length of Jesus' ministry is uncertain (1 year in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, but 3 years in the later John). What Mary and Joseph did after his birth also conflicts among the gospels - according to Matthew, they fled to Egypt, and only returned after Herrod had died (4 BC) while according to Luke, they went to the Temple in Jerusalem to cleanse Mary, which would have happened 40 days after the birth. Some of the identities of the disciples differ between the Synoptic gospels and John (particularly, there is no Bartholomew, no Matthew, no James son of Alphaeus, and no Simon except Simon Peter). The various miracles and acts of Jesus, the exact contents of the sermon on the mount, the parables that he shared - there are many other differences between all the canonical gospels.

Of course, they all agree on a broad narrative - Jesus was born of a virgin Mother in Bethlehem, lived in Nazareth for some time, wandered for 40 days in the wild where he was tempted, then returned and was baptized by John the Baptist, collected a number of disciples while preaching in Galilee and performing various miracles, then during Passover entered Jerusalem, came into conflict with the Jewish religious authorities and/or the Roman authorities, had a last supper with his disciples, and was crucified, died, was buried in a tomb, and was resurrected.

This is about it in terms of the major plot points that are common. Major acts, such as expelling the money lenders from the Temple or the resurrection of Lazarus, are not part of the shared narrative - they either occur at different times (in John, expelling the money lenders is one of the first acts of Jesus, at the start of his ministry, not one of his last public acts at the end), or not at all (the story of Lazarus is only present in John).

I would say that there are indeed major narrative differences between the Gospels.

[pqtyw]

Well in Islam the story is different and they consider the canonical New Testament gospels not very accurate.

Then you have all the ancient texts here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel#Non-canonical_(apocryph... which were likely written very early and often conflict quite strongly with then New Testament narratives. We can assume that this is just an only very small sample of all the stories floating around.

Even the official gospels don't all match on all the details despite retelling the same story (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_source) since they are all included that would indicate a few hundred years later nobody really knew which story was true or not.

[Amezarak]

> which were likely written very early and often conflict quite strongly with then New Testament narratives.

They were not likely written very early in almost all of those cases (your own link dates every single one to well after the canonical gospels), and almost none of them have meaningful narrative differences (once again, as opposed to theological differences.)

> Even the official gospels don't all match on all the details despite retelling the same story (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_source) since they are all included that would indicate a few hundred years later nobody really knew which story was true or not.

The canonical gospels were all likely written within decades, not "hundreds of years"; and while you can argue canonization did not officially happen until much later, de facto canonization occurred very, very early. The others floated around, yes, but they were never mainstream in any sense.