The Gospels are myths for me. That is how I choose to take them, when considering how they should inform my present spirituality. Ofcourse, I affirm that there was a first century man named Jesus who was seemingly executed by the Romans. I'm not a "Jesus mythicist" in that pejorative sense. I'm speaking here, for myself, in terms of the terms on which I will engage the revelation of Jesus of Nazareth, whose purported words have caused so much pain to so many as much as pleasure.
I do not hold to the prejudice that a text's meaning is restricted to the author's intentions. For one, the identity of a text is not that stable, it is an intersubjective entity. It emerges in that intersubjective space constituted by at least two entities, a writer and a reader, even if it has to be the same person. Also, given the arguments for the fundamentality of individuality and the reality of fundamental individuals who are each all things, there is space to consider that the writer is always more than a human author, you are considering the any other individuals continuous with that author, including and up to those primal individuals who constitute all things. Thus, the religious reading of texts need not be restricted by a historical context, a context necessarily incomplete due to its own continuity with the always wider context mentioned earlier.
Therefore, after establishing the various ways the authors of the Gospels would have understood their message, I can take up that knowledge into mine, and not restrict it to theirs, and as a Platonist, revelation, the activity of the Gods, is mythical, and I will take the Gospels into the mythical space.
I don't mean I can systematically turn the Gospel into a myth, in such a way as to exclude other meanings. I mean I can read its main themes as concerning the constitution of a world, for myths are cosmogonic. Nor is this a "physical interpretation". I am not doing physics. That is in the background. I'm not sure I have the mind space to explain what I mean by "world", but I can hazard an explanation that sees it as "life world", where individuals (of many kinds) are organised. Physical worlds concern individuals qua physical, but life worlds in this case are much wider in their kinds of members. I think that's the best I can say.
Life worlds are fractal and nesting. In this case, Jesus establishes this world within another, the already established life worlds of late Antique Jewish and generally Mediterranean life worlds. Indeed, you can't talk about this myth without the many Gods of the peoples. It is them, through their proxies, or even them directly, that oppose Jesus. Hades is name dropped by Paul, a God and a place, which makes sense since a God is the kind of individual or entity that can also be a space, Gods "include" others, even all things, even other Gods, in their identity, all Gods being in each.
But, being a Platonist, I cannot affirm that Gods are evil. Given my commitments, that's a contradiction in terms. Divine opposition is, for the Proclean Neoplatonist, a kind of cooperation, and that is as true in this case as any other. Infact, the blue print for this vision of Christ is Dionysus, to whom YHWH has been compared before. Dionysus was dismembered. Proclus interprets this as the way we dividedly participate Dionysus qua World Soul. Similarly, Jesus is killed, and we (who live in his world) do dividedly participate his body and blood, the limit and infinity that is his pneumatic body and psychic substance. Ofcourse, it is all the Gods that oppose Jesus, but through Hades in particular, insofar as all Gods are in Hades (i.e. following Proclus, they are "Hadeic"). Indeed, Hades realm is this realm of mutability. Hades' allotment is the world qua mutable (among other things). Therefore, the "descent of Christ into Hades" is his very incarnation, and it thus makes sense that it is the crucifixion that is the crux of ascension and enthronement for John. In the mythical outline the story follows here, the ANE king is enthroned and exalted to be with the Gods. This is the King's "resurrection". But John patterns the resurrection on to the Crucifixion. Christ is raised on the Cross. In Hades' realm, he is King of Kings. This is the simultaneous death and Life of Jesus the Christ, a World Soul, dividedly participated by all beings, yet eternally alive as a whole, a whole body that is a world, himself the body of the whole that is returned to his Father who is "All in all", in the full splendor of Godhood in the presence of the many Good Gods through whom this has come about.
The difference, with the official narrative is that Hades is himself complicit in this plot. Gods qua their activity do not "know" beyond that activity, hence Hades qua Psyche, the Arche of mutability and philosophy, does not know what YHWH the Intellective Demiurge would know, but Hades qua God, qua intelligible God, is as much a God as any, and is thus "in on the plan". The work of cosmogenesis being a work of sorrow, only Gods can take on the task of such magnitude of self division and self debasement for the sake of beings.
This is a manner, or at least the beginnings of a manner, in which the Cult of Jesus is integrated into a polytheist field. Obviously I haven't covered everything, but I think it's a start.
Interesting take. I may write something on Luke 18 in this vein.