Hardly. It's not like Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John got together in a smoke-filled room and said, "Let's foist a religion on the world - a three-in-one god who sends his Son/emissary to down into the world via a virgin, and he gets strung up, dies, resurrects, and ascends bodily into heaven. We'll each write pretty much the same thing, except John can sorta go off on his own the way he likes to." No, it was about the circulation of myth and the evolution of religious practice over the course of centuries - messy and complicated, just like history.
Doug
^^^^^^ CB: Well, Cockburn seems to think that "Of course,Morison didn't allow the possibility that angels never existed or that the Gospel writers were making it up."
So, _his_ alternative explanation to the angel is that the Gospel writers made it up. So, if he thinks the Gospel writers made it up, why would _he_ use this as an example of an non-conspiracy theory ?