@peacefulpete: elsewhere I made the claim that Paul’s story was basically a rip-off/rewrite of an even older Greek tragedy that was well known at the time. Everything from his conversion to his death is a literal reference to that Greek story. Much like the Jesus stories as well as most of the (apocryphal) stories about the apostles later life. I find it thus extremely unlikely that the people referenced were ‘real’ in the sense that they actually experienced those things. They may have been figures that existed, but they were made into ‘superheroes’.
So too many Bible stories are rewrites and references to older stories. The Bible wasn’t written in one go and most writers did not know of other books, so they are different versions of the same story that later were (poorly) rewritten into some kind of single story. Much like today you have stuff written like the Captain America, X-Men and Superman stories. Someone has been writing those stories since early 1900s, but they’re not the same writers and as time goes on they reboot them, they rewrite the characters to fit modern times, they have different timelines and universes, and people also make knock-offs and fan-fiction.
We’ve done this for 100 years now, let’s say the distributor wants to make all the official and fan-fiction and derivatives into a single authoritative book on the characters, they’ll have to pick what they want from the stories, the book will never be fully coherent, it will have to be written by multiple authors that need to coordinate etc. You will have your super-hero Bible but a committee (let’s call it a council) will have to get together and agree on what goes in the final version. And all the superhero stories have literal references to prior stories, the ubermensch (Superman) and scientifically enhanced beings were a popular trope and like characters can be found in literature back in Victorian times, the Marvel and other writers took sometimes very strong inspiration from those stories.