I have answered that first comment too many times already. The fact that the New Testament deals with a particular period in the narrative does not make it irrelevant, any more than the account of the exodus was irrelevant to the identity of Old Testament Israel. We are the product of the complete story, which includes, but in my view cannot be limited to, the New Testament - because the new Testament very clearly places itself within the whole biblical story. The whole story teaches us how to live - and in any case, Jesus told the disciples that the Holy Spirit would continue to teach them, did he not?

What I mean by ‘gnostic’ is not that a viewpoint depends on special knowledge or information but that it tends towards a dualistic dissociation of theology and history so that the answer to the human problem is found in a divine intrusion into history to save people from history. I think evangelicalism has mythologized Jesus to the extent that he has too much of the gnostic redeemer figure about him.