◉ Legendary Inflation: Social Memory, Narrative Selection, and the Growth of Impossible Biographies

Historical debate often collapses two questions: whether a person existed and whether later extraordinary stories about that person are reliable. This paper argues that the first answer cannot settle the second. A secure historical anchor can coexist with a heavily enlarged biography when stories become instruments of identity, persuasion, ritual, and communal memory. Alexander the Great provides a clean control case. His existence and major career are exceptionally secure, yet the composite Alexander Romance and its descendants give him divine paternity, journeys to the edges of the world, and ascent into the sky. Historicity plainly did not immunize his biography against legend. The argument combines reconstructive-memory research, social and cultural memory, oral-tradition method, and narrative analysis. These fields do not imply that memory is unconstrained invention. They show instead how stable gist can coexist with changed detail, how conversational repetition can reshape later recall, how groups select usable pasts, and how performance preserves a tradition by recomposing it. Applied cautiously to early Christian narrative, the model identifies relevant pressures: confessional use, scriptural interpretation, repeated performance, status amplification, apologetic repair, and limited external correction. Reliability-oriented scholarship rightly answers that eyewitness links, ancient biographical conventions, early tradition, and controlled transmission may preserve substantial history. Those considerations can constrain inflation, but none makes the whole portrait inherit warrant from the existence of Jesus or from literary genre alone. The conclusion is deliberately limited. The Alexander comparison does not prove direct borrowing, equal developmental speed, or the invention of a particular miracle. It establishes a defeater for automatic inheritance: once a biography is identity-bearing and extraordinary, each consequential claim requires source-level and episode-level support. The rational alternative to both devotional literalism and indiscriminate mythicism is layered judgment—retain what the evidence anchors, identify where narrative pressure is strongest, and refuse to make a real person certify an impossible biography.