Do you blindly follow scholarship?
If you believe in a religion then you blindly follow ancient myths with zero evidence to support them and huge amounts of evidence they are borrowed myths.
Individual Investigation has so much more value than Institutional Indoctrination.
Actually it's the exact opposite. This is a demonstrable fact. It's why we have peer-review. Any writer with funds can do "research", compose a book and pay for it to be published. It's done all the time. But if you care about what is true you can then read a real historian pointing out endless mistakes. A historian in any area has to be fluent on all languages used with source material, understand how to vette all sources and to go from Masters to PhD understands all this in the greatest possible detail. Then when they write a paper or book it has to pass review by all other experts. This system is set up so we can get the most reliable system possible.
Will new facts present themselves, yes. But this is by farthe best path to what is true.
To say "blindly following scholarship" just shows a disregard for the intense work scholars have to go through and shows a disregard for the best attempt at finding truth. So it isn't important to you. No one has to care about truth.
But scholars DO individual investigation once they get a PhD. But now they can read source material and have studies how to vette sources and then the work is reviewed for errors. If you want to stick to rank amateurs who search google for facts then have at it.
The writer of G-Mark was a partial witness and his deposition includes the memoirs of Cephas who also wrote about his greatest moments himself, in letters.
Sounds like something one would say after "individual investigation".
But actual historians like Sanders say - "The Gospel of Mark is anonymous."
It's also written exactly like a myth. Edwards says it in a nice way - "The hypothesis of Marcan priority continues to be held by the majority of scholars today, and there is a new recognition of the author as an artist and theologian using a range of literary devices to convey his conception of Jesus as the authoritative yet suffering Son of God.
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The literary devices, ring structure, triadic inversions, verbatim lines from the OT, and so on are what he used. Mark was clearly creating a Hellenistic savior demigod myth for Judaism, this was happening to all religions in the region.
