And second, the rejected portions of the NT may carry passages which, although they are neither the actual words of Jesus, nor literal, historical fact, are nonetheless spiritually true. Likewise, when St. Paul's epistles are dismissed, the depth of his mystical insight vanishes, too. And yet, it may well be that the authors of John's Gospel lived, told stories, celebrated liturgies and wrote accounts of Jesus that Jesus himself would have welcomed. John's is the most mystical of all the Gospels. Christian mystics throughout the ages have been nourished by John's detailed descriptions of spiritual consciousness.
Christians call that center the Holy Spirit.
It is the dynamic center of identity that formed the core of the early Christian communities. Many chroniclers of Jesus's sayings, including Davenport and Urritia, are doing us a service if they are asking Christians to detach from the literal level of the Gospel narratives. In medieval Christian theology, Gospel narratives were read on different levels, depending on the maturity of the spiritual sojourner. Stories could be read literally, analogically, anagogically, symbolically, mythically, and mystically. Any one story could be read on all levels successively or simultaneously.