[N]arrative-critical insights are achieved precisely by setting aside the conventional diachronic questions which bind textual meaning to origination, focusing instead on synchronic questions about relationships immanent within the text itself. It is arguable, and indeed plausible, that the narrative-critical perspective represents a long overdue liberation of the gospels from captivity to source-critical hypotheses. [But t]he limitation of the synchronic, narrative-critical perspective is that the Jesus of whom it speaks is no more than the protagonist in a narrative. Were someone to succeed in showing that no “historical Jesus” ever existed, narrative criticism could continue regardless. Nothing would have to be changed. The presumed flesh-and-blood individual known as “Jesus of Nazareth” might prove to be a figment of the early Christian imagination, but he would remain the protagonist of the gospel narrative. This reduction of Jesus to a figure immanent within the text is integral to narrative-critical method, and it helps to establish the point that the “real,” historically- and theologically-significant Jesus cannot be detached from the process of reception that reaches its telos in the canonical gospel narratives. By restoring the integrity of these narratives, a narrative-critical perspective helps to make that point. But it cannot make that point on its own, insofar as it is confined within a synchronic frame of reference. The process of event and reception is inescapably diachronic. For that reason, a diachronic account of the reception process (so far as this is accessible to us) may serve to clarify the relationship between the flesh-and-blood Jesus of Nazareth and the figure embodied in the texts, providing a way out of the conventional and fatal dichotomy between a “Jesus of history” and a “Christ of faith.” Reception occurs in large part through the active shaping of what is received in the work of interpretation.

— Francis Watson, Gospel Writing: A Canonical Perspective, 157