What modern critical history keeps showing is a gap between what tradition asserts and what the evidence supports. Clinging to literal birth stories, mythologized origins and the divine perfection of ancient teachers ties our understanding to political timelines that were manipulated long before we were born. The better move is to decouple historical myth from philosophical wisdom. Let go of deifying the messenger and you can discard the distortions while keeping what is useful — the Buddha’s account of suffering and its dismantling, Jesus’s insistence on empathy and the protection of the marginalized.