Did unjustified Jesus-biography in AD 30-70 struggle to form, circulate, stick?

• E. P. Sanders: “Some tendencies which have been thought to have been generally operative among transmitters of the early Christian tradition have been shown not to have been so common. Thus we have seen that the material did not necessarily grow in overall length.” Even the tendency to use direct discourse for indirect, which was uniform in the post-canonical material which we studied, was not uniform in the Synoptics themselves. For this reason, dogmatic statements that a certain characteristic proves a certain passage to be earlier than another are never justified.” [The Tendencies of the Synoptic Tradition (SNTSMS, 9; Cambridge, 1969), 272-4.]
• Craig Blomberg: “E. P. Sanders, in one of the earliest studies to use computer technology to gather data relevant to biblical studies, analysed in detail the Gospel traditions that have been preserved in textual variants, the early church Fathers and New Testament apocrypha, and demonstrated that no consistent trends exist concerning the lengthening or shortening, preservation or distortion of the tradition. If anything, other shorter studies have demonstrated a slight tendency for detailed material to become abbreviated, condensed, more stereotyped and less vivid as the stories of Jesus were continually retold in the Gentile world, all precisely the opposite of what the first form critics alleged! Certainly, this is the trend that is observable if one compares parallel passages in Mark and Luke, and to a lesser extent in Mark and Matthew. These phenomena led a group of Scandinavian scholars to propose a very different approach to the history of the oral tradition behind the Gospels.” [The Historical Reliability of the Gospels 2nd ed. (IVP, 2014), 54.]
• Henry Cadbury: “[t]he place, the person, the time, in so far as they are not bound up with the point of the incident, tend to disappear,” [The Making of Luke-Acts (Macmillan, 1927). 34.]

• Martin Hengel: “Dibelius distinguished between the short anecdotal Paradigmata and the Novelle, a developed narrative tale. The first he considered to be more historically reliable than the latter. As a rule, however, Matthew changes Mark’s ‘tales’ through abrupt abridgement into Paradigma.” [“Eye-witness memory and the writing of the Gospels” in The Written Gospel, ed Bockmuehl & Hagner (Cambridge, 2005), 85.]