‘Deciphering the Gospels Proves Jesus Never Existed’: Chapter 10, part 5

‘Deciphering the Gospels’, by R. G. Price, argues the case for Jesus mythicism, which is the view that Jesus never existed on earth in any real form but was an entirely mythical figure in the same way as Hercules or Dionysus. (The author is not the same person as Robert Price, also a Jesus mythicist author.) I’m an atheist who holds the opposing (and mainstream) view that Christianity started with a human Jesus. In other words, the Jesus referred to as the founder of Christianity was originally a 1st-century human being, about whom a later mythology grew up, whose followers became the original group that would mutate over time into Christianity. I’m therefore reviewing Price’s book to discuss his arguments and my reasons for disagreeing.

The first post in this book review is here. Links to the posts on all subsequent chapters can be found at the end of that post.

 

Chapter 10: Non-Christian Accounts Of Jesus

This post follows on from the previous post, which discussed the line ‘brother of Jesus called Christ’ in Josephus, and I thus recommend reading that post first. This one addresses Price’s attempts to explain this line away.

Although Price doesn’t reference them, the suggestions he makes are for the most part not originally his; nearly all of what he writes was in Earl Doherty’s ‘The Jesus Puzzle’ from the late ’90s, and has been further publicised by Richard Carrier in his books and in a journal article. Anyway, here they are.

As per my last post, at the end of the passage Josephus mentions a Jesus identified as ‘Jesus ben Damneus’ (Jesus son of Damneus), who is elected high priest after Ananus is deposed. This is far less of a coincidence than it might at first seem; the name translated here as ‘Jesus’ originated as the extremely common Jewish name ‘Yeshua’ or ‘Yeshu’. Price points out that Josephus himself mentions something like fourteen different people with Iesus as a first name.

However, Price’s (well, Doherty’s) argument is that the mention of a second Jesus in this passage isn’t a coincidence, but another reference to the same Jesus. According to this theory, the Jesus referred to as the brother of the executed James was actually Jesus ben Damneus, who was mentioned twice in the passage, first as an identifier for the James who was executed and then as the next high priest. As for the ‘called Christ’ part of the phrase, Price suggests that this could have ended up in there in any of the three following ways:

  • As part of Josephus’s original text. In this proposed scenario, Josephus initially refers to Jesus ben Damneus as ‘Jesus called Christ’ and then a few lines later as ‘Jesus ben Damneus’, without bothering to clarify that these two mentions of apparently different Jesuses were in fact different ways of referring to the same person.
  • As a marginal note from a Christian reader. In this proposed scenario, the original line about Jesus and James simply read ‘brother of Jesus, James by name’. A Christian reader then mistakenly thought that this referred to the Jesus and James of Christian stories and accordingly scribbled the words ‘called Christ’ into the margin next to Jesus’s name. Since marginal notes were how people indicated to scribes that a correction needed to be made when recopying, a later scribe took it as such and added the words ‘called Christ’ to the main text.
  • As a later mistake by the Christian writer Origen. This scenario is similar to the last, but in this theory the mistake came about because of a citation Origen made of Josephus’s ‘Antiquitities’ as referring to the ‘brother of Jesus called Christ’. According to this theory, Origen was misremembering and quoting this line from another Christian writer but wrongly attributing it to Josephus, following which a Christian who had read this in Origen and noticed it wasn’t in Josephus assumed this was an error in their own copy of Josephus and added ‘called Christ’ in the margin of the text to indicate that it should be there.  The words then got copied into the text as above.

The first major problem with all of these scenarios is that they all require Josephus to use identifiers in a confusing way that would have been completely atypical for him.

‘Identifier’, here, refers to anything used as the equivalent of our use of surnames; something that specifies to which of many possible people of the same first name the text was referring. The formulation ‘ben ____’, meaning ‘son of ____’ was the most common, although it was also possible to identify someone by their place of origin or – as seems to be the case for the mention of Jesus here – by a note that they were ‘called’ such-and-such.

Josephus (as was normal for his time) regularly used identifiers of this sort. Apparently his practice in so doing was just what common sense would suggest:

  • He would use them for the first mention of a person’s name, thus letting the readers know which Jesus or James or Alexander or whoever was being talked about.
  • Following that, when he made further references to that person within the same passage, he would simply use the person’s first name.
  • The exception to this was when, having done the above he brought up someone else with the same first name (whom he would again initially refer to with the first name and another identifier and then by first name only, as above), and, having discussed that person, went back to talking about the person with the same first name that he’d been talking about earlier in the passage. On doing this, he would give the person’s name with identifier again in order to make it clear that this was the previous person named [Firstname] rather than the second person, referring to them as the ‘forementioned’ [Firstname] [Identifier].

All of this information comes from the second part of this post on the History for Atheists blog, where it’s illustrated with examples for anyone who wants to get a clearer idea.

The first major problem with Price’s suggestions, therefore, is that they involve scenarios that don’t fit Josephus’s typical use of identifiers at all. Price’s second and third suggestions both require Josephus to have initially identified whichever Jesus this was by only his extremely common first name, giving the identifier only on the second mention. As for Price’s first suggestion, this would require Josephus to have taken the even odder step of identifying the same person by two different identifiers without clarifying that he was doing so. And, unsurprisingly, it seems that neither of these options fits with how Josephus actually did use identifiers. As Tim O’Neill puts it in the above-cited post:

Nowhere in any of his works that I can find does Josephus refer to someone by their name alone when introducing them to his narrative for the first time (e.g. “Jesus”) and then refer to them by their name and an appellation a few sentences later (e.g. “Jesus, son of Damneus”). This is for the very obvious reason that it would be highly confusing to do so.

Jesus Mythicism 2: “James, the Brother of the Lord”

Price does suggest explanations:

Why wouldn’t Josephus put the “son of” identifier in the first reference instead of after the fact? Well, for the very reason that “brother of Jesus, who was called Christ, whose name was James,” seems odd—because it’s a double qualifier and a cumbersome sentence. In addition, the strong point of the passage is the naming of Jesus as the high priest, thus Josephus uses the formality of identifying Jesus by his father when he states that he was named the high priest.

But if this James was indeed the brother of Jesus ben Damneus, then, unless he was actually a maternal half-brother, he would have been the son of Damneus himself, and could easily and without the extra subclause have been identified correctly as ‘James ben Damneus’. Again, Price thinks he has an answer to this:

Why didn’t he identify James by his father instead? Because if James is related to Jesus son of Damneus, then this is implied, and Jesus is the more important figure—he is the one who becomes high priest.

So, Price is, in effect, hypothesising a situation in which Josephus simultaneously wanted to avoid cumbersome sentences and to identify someone in an inherently more cumbersome way, and was prepared to use this atypically botched identifier in order to manage these two contradictory aims. As usual, we’re expected to accept Price’s explanation instead of considering the rather more obvious explanation that Josephus did indeed write ‘brother of Jesus called Christ’.

It’s worth noting, here, that Price makes no attempt to back this up by referencing any potentially similar passages in Josephus’s work. (This is in stark contrast to the ‘History for Atheists’ post I quoted above, in which O’Neill quotes multiple examples to illustrate and back up his statements both about the way Josephus uses identifiers and about his use of the term ‘called’.) Did Josephus normally try to avoid lengthy multi-clause sentences? Did he have a habit of using identifiers at ‘the strong point of the passage’ even if that wasn’t the first time that the name had been introduced? Are there other places where he identifies people by the most important figure connected to them even where this makes a sentence more cumbersome rather than less? If Price can show examples of these points elsewhere in Josephus’s work, that would be good backup for his theories here. Conversely, if there are no such examples, that gives Price a problem. But we’re left not knowing, because he doesn’t address it at all. That’s the behaviour of someone who isn’t trying to find the explanation that best fits the actual evidence, but the explanation that best fits his own theory.

Anyway… having looked at the general problem with Price’s attempted explanations, let’s look at what Price thinks about the various ways in which ‘called Christ’ might have made its way into the text.

 

Price’s first hypothesis: Josephus himself used the phrase

This section is, by the way, the only part of Price’s suggestions regarding this phrase that doesn’t seem to have originated with Doherty or Carrier. Price does in fairness consider this the least likely of his suggested explanations, but he still thought it plausible enough to include, so let’s look at it. Why would Josephus have identified Jesus ben Damneus as ‘Jesus called Christ’?

Price assures us that it is ‘actually quite possible’ that Josephus would have referred to Jesus ben Damneus in this way:

“Christ” is just a transliteration of the Greek word Christos, which is a translation of the Hebrew Mashiah, which simply means anointed, or one who is anointed. Jewish kings and high priests were called anointed ones, and this is used many times in the Hebrew scriptures.

Now, this much is completely correct. The reason that the term the Messiah became used for the Davidian king prophecied in Jewish scriptures was because Jewish kings were ceremonially anointed as part of their coronation ceremony and thus ‘anointed one’ became a term used for ‘king’, in much the same way that ‘His Majesty’ might be used today. Hence, when discussing the unnamed Davidian descendant who was king in the Jewish prophecies of an amazing future, Jews started talking about him as ‘the anointed one’, which in Hebrew is ‘Mashiach’ (hard ‘ch’ sound on the end as in the Scottish ‘loch’) and in Greek is ‘Kristos’. The former became anglicised to ‘Messiah’ and the latter to ‘Christ’. But ‘anointed one’ could still be used as a general term for ‘king’, because the kings were literally anointed. And at some point anointing with oil also became a part of the induction ceremony for priests, so any priest could be referred to as ‘anointed’ and the term would be technically correct.

However, the problem with Price’s theory is that it would make no sense to use ‘anointed’ as an identifier. After all, the entire point of identifiers is to identify the person of whom the author is speaking, out of many other possible people with that first name. Using a term that could be used just as easily of any high priest would be no help at all for this. It would be as if I mentioned, say, King Henry of England, and, instead of using a numeral to specify which I meant of many possible King Henrys, I instead referred to him as ‘King Henry, called His Majesty’; it would be completely useless.

On top of this, it also completely contradicts Price’s above attempt at explaining why Josephus would have made such a peculiar botch of using an identifier. Price, you will recall, claims Josephus was just trying to avoid ‘a cumbersome sentence’ by not identifying this James as simply ‘James ben Damneus’ (as would have been the obvious way to identify him if this James had in fact been the brother of Jesus ben Damneus). But the Greek for ‘called Christ’ here is ‘tou legomenos Kristos’… which is, of course, longer and more cumbersome than ‘ben Damneus’. So, going with this scenario would leave Price without any sort of explanation of why Josephus would use identifiers in this way.

To be fair, even though he seems to have glossed over all these glaring difficulties, Price at least isn’t arguing too strongly for this particular hypothesis:

All in all, though, this was probably not the case

Ya think?

Price does also briefly throw in a couple of other theories at this point, so I’ll take a moment to address them, but they both make so little sense that he seems here to have been using a ‘throw anything you can at the wall and hope something sticks’ approach.

This passage could simply be saying that Jesus son of Damneus was considered a great person, or an already holy person

…..no, it couldn’t, because the term wasn’t used as a general synonym for ‘great’ or ‘holy’.

This could also simply be using a description of Jesus son of Damneus that he
was later called. This event supposedly happened around 62 CE, which is
getting very close to the First Jewish-Roman War, and this is a term that was even more heavily used in relation to “war priests,” or high priests during a time of war, or priests who, in the Jewish tradition, actually acted as generals.

Citation needed, please.

Jesus son of Damneus was not a high priest during the war,

…so in fact this also won’t stand up as a theory even if Price does give a citation for his claim about war priests being referred to as ‘anointed’.

but Jesus son of Sapphas was the son of a high priest and a general in the war; it could be talking about him.

Why would the son of a high priest be referred to as ‘anointed’ when he wasn’t the one who’d been anointed? And how are we supposed to account for Josephus identifying James by his brother rather than his son in this scenario, when Price’s argument elsewhere is that Josephus is deliberately trying to identify James by the most important person to whom he’s connected? If James was the brother of Jesus son of Sapphas the high priest, then he’d be the son of this high priest himself, and by both common sense and Price’s own argument we’d expect Josephus to refer to him as ‘James ben Sapphas’. Again, this doesn’t stand up at all.

Anyway, this is about all Price has to say on this particular hypothesis, so let us set it behind us and move on to the next.

 

Price’s second hypothesis: that ‘called Christ’ was a later accidental interpolation

To recap: In this theory, Josephus is still referring to Jesus ben Damneus both times, but identifies him as such only the second time, using just his first name the first time. Following this:

A Christian reading the work may have seen the names Jesus and James together and jumped to the conclusion that this was “Jesus Christ” and then made a note saying so. A later scribe would have then just incorporated it, assuming it to be true, in order to clarify the passage.

There are two problems with this (apart from the problem with the identifier use which we already discussed). The first leads us back to a point we encountered while discussing Paul: why would a Christian be making that assumption if not for the fact that their Jesus was already believed to have an earthly brother called James, and why would Christians believe that Jesus had an earthly brother called James if Jesus himself was thought to be an entirely heavenly being with no previous earthly existence?

The second problem is that it’s unlikely both theologically and practically that this hypothetical Christian reader would put the word ‘called’ in this hypothetical note. Theologically, there is the obvious fact that people who believed that Jesus was Christ (i.e. the Messiah) were unlikely to refer to him as called Christ, but simply as Christ (or possibly Lord, or Saviour, or similar). Practically, the Greek term for ‘called’ used here – ‘tou legomenos’ – is a long word to add when it’s an unnecessary extra in a marginal note.

In short, this hypothesis is also pretty implausible.

 

Price’s third hypothesis: Origen made the mistake

In this part of the hypothesis, Price is still going with the theory that Josephus’s line originally read ‘brother of Jesus, James by name’ and that the ‘called Christ’ phrase was a later addition. However, in this theory the phrase originates with Origen.

Origen was a theologian writing in the first half of the third century who, at three different points in his writing, cited Josephus’s ‘Antiquities’ as containing a mention of the death of Jesus’s brother James, in each case using wording very similar to the phrase that we have in Josephus:

James the brother of Jesus who is called Christ

Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, Book 10 chapter 17

 

James the Just, who was a brother of Jesus (called Christ)

Against Celsus, Book 1 chapter 47

 

James the Just, the brother of Jesus who was called Christ

Against Celsus, Book 2 chapter 13

 

At first sight this looks like evidence for the phrase being authentic to Josephus. However, Price points out that we have a reason to doubt this; one of the things that Origen also says about this Josephan mention is clearly incorrect. On each of the above occasions when Origen cites Josephus, he also claims that Josephus attributed the fall of the Temple as being punishment for James’s execution… despite the fact that Josephus says nothing of the sort. Here are fuller versions of each of the passages above:

Flavius Josephus, who wrote the ​”​ Antiquities of the Jews ​”​ in twenty books, when wishing to exhibit the cause why the people suffered so great misfortunes that even the temple was razed to the ground, said, that these things happened to them in accordance with the wrath of God in consequence of the things which they had dared to do against James the brother of Jesus who is called Christ. And the wonderful thing is, that, though he did not accept Jesus as Christ, he yet gave testimony that the righteousness of James was so great; and he says that the people thought that they had suffered these things because of James.

Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, Book 10 chapter 3

Now this writer, although not believing in Jesus as the Christ, in seeking after the cause of the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple, whereas he ought to have said that the conspiracy against Jesus was the cause of these calamities befalling the people, since they put to death Christ, who was a prophet, says nevertheless— being, although against his will, not far from the truth— that these disasters happened to the Jews as a punishment for the death of James the Just, who was a brother of Jesus (called Christ),— the Jews having put him to death, although he was a man most distinguished for his justice.

Against Celsus, Book 1 chapter 47

 

… for the siege began in the reign of Nero, and lasted till the government of Vespasian, whose son Titus destroyed Jerusalem, on account, as Josephus says, of James the Just, the brother of Jesus who was called Christ, but in reality, as the truth makes clear, on account of Jesus Christ the Son of God.

Against Celsus, Book 2 chapter 13

 

Price’s argument on the matter (or at least the unattributed argument Price uses here, which, again, seems to have originated with Earl Doherty) is as follows:

  • Josephus clearly does not say what Origen claims here that he said.
  • Therefore, Origen must have been confusing his sources and in fact citing a different writer rather than Josephus.
  • Therefore, Origen’s attribution of the line ‘brother of Jesus called Christ’ to Josephus is also incorrect.
  • Therefore, Josephus’s manuscript didn’t originally contain this line.
  • The ‘called Christ’ part of the line was probably added to Josephus by a scribe who’d also read Origen and therefore well-meaningly made a correction of the Josephan passage in accordance with what he believed it was supposed to say according to Origen.

The first point of this, at any rate, is clearly correct, so it’s worth thinking about whether the rest of it stands up. If Origen really was citing the Josephan passage, why did he claim that Josephus had said something that Josephus hadn’t?

One explanation I’ve seen for this is that Origen was simply reading things into the text that aren’t there and making assumptions about what Josephus was trying to say. While that’s certainly a possibility to consider and I’m not going to rule it out, the line ‘yet gave testimony that the righteousness of James was so great; and he says that the people thought that they had suffered these things because of James’ is specific enough that it has the ring of an indirect quote. On balance, I think that line does go better with the idea that Origen was unintentionally quoting someone other than Josephus.

However, Price’s explanation is also a bad fit for the observed facts.

Firstly, Origen makes this reference to Josephus three different times in two different works, using very similar wording each time. That’s an unlikely degree of consistency for someone who was thinking of the wrong writer in the first place.

Secondly, the phrase ‘called Christ’ was a rare one for a Christian writer to use, for the obvious reason that Christians believe that Jesus was Christ and so wouldn’t tend to refer to him as ‘called’ Christ. As far as I know, the only record we have of it being used spontaneously by an early Christian writer is Matthew 1:16; the handful of other examples we have in Christian writings all seem to be quotes from non-Christians. That in itself doesn’t prove the phrase came from Josephus, but does suggest that Origen almost certainly got the phrase either directly from a non-Christian writer or from a Christian writer who was himself quoting a non-Christian writer.

And finally, of course, Price’s explanation still gives us the problem of having to suppose very atypical identifier use from Josephus.

With all that in mind, this is my personal theory on the matter. It’s fair to point out here that I’m not a historian (and don’t play one on TV…), so, if anyone with actual familiarity with the works of Origen and/or ancient documents generally is reading this and spots any obvious flaw in my reasoning, please let me know.

What I suspect is that an earlier Christian author whose work has since been lost did indeed cite the ‘brother of Jesus called Christ’ line from Josephus, but also added his own opinion about the righteousness of James and the popular belief that his death was the cause of the fall of Jerusalem/the destruction of the temple, and inadvertently wrote all this in such a way that it looked as though this opinion was also being attributed to Josephus. (Given that it was the norm in those days to use indirect quoting rather than direct quotes with quote marks, this seems something that could plausibly happen.) Origen then used this unknown writer as his source rather than using Josephus directly. This resulted in Origen correctly reporting the Josephus quote, but then incorrectly attributing the writer’s follow-up lines to Josephus as well.

That is of course speculation, and for all I know someone who has a better idea of what they’re talking about will come up with some obvious argument against it that didn’t occur to me. However, it strikes me as at least being a more plausible explanation than the string of oddities required by Price’s theory.

 

So, where does this leave us?

While Price assures us blithely that there are many possible alternative explanations for the appearance of this phrase in Josephus, he’s overlooked the small issue of whether these explanations are at all likely. No matter how hard Price tries to explain this line away, we’re still left with the most likely reason for the line ‘brother of Jesus called Christ’ showing up in Josephus’s work being because Josephus himself wrote it.

 

 

‘Deciphering the Gospels Proves Jesus Never Existed’: Chapter 10, part 4

‘Deciphering the Gospels’, by R. G. Price, argues the case for Jesus mythicism, which is the view that Jesus never existed on earth in any real form but was an entirely mythical figure in the same way as Hercules or Dionysus. (The author is not the same person as Robert Price, also a Jesus mythicist author.) I’m an atheist who holds the opposing (and mainstream) view that Christianity started with a human Jesus. In other words, the Jesus referred to as the founder of Christianity was originally a 1st-century human being, about whom a later mythology grew up, whose followers became the original group that would mutate over time into Christianity. I’m therefore reviewing Price’s book to discuss his arguments and my reasons for disagreeing.

The first post in this book review is here. Links to the posts on all subsequent chapters can be found at the end of that post.

 

Chapter 10: Non-Christian Accounts Of Jesus

On to the other possible reference to Jesus discussed by Price; the passing mention of ‘Jesus called Christ’ in Book 20 of Josephus’s ‘Antiquities’. I had intended to cover this in a single post, but it got ridiculously long, so I’ve split it into three. This post focuses on general discussion/explanation of the quote, the next will discuss the various theories Price gives us as to how that line might have ended up in Josephus’s work, and the last one will discuss why Price doesn’t want to go for the most obvious explanation (namely, that Josephus actually wrote the line and was referring to Jesus).

In the context of the mythicism debate, the first two things to say about this quote are that it’s a) one of two quotes in Josephus mentioning Jesus, and b) not the one that’s known to have been tampered with. This is worth mentioning because commenters in mythicist debates do sometimes confuse the two (usually because their total knowledge of the subject comes from having skimmed the occasional podcast or post) and say something about ‘the Josephus mention’ clearly being a forgery. I think the little band of commenters I’ve got here actually do know the subject matter better than that, but in case anyone new turns up I’ll start out with a clarification of the basics:

  • The first Josephan mention of Jesus is a short paragraph in ‘Antiquities’ Book 18 generally known as the ‘Testimonium Flavium’, which is clearly at least partly forged and possibly entirely so. It is thus not much use for this debate. I’ve discussed this briefly here.
  • This post is going to discuss the second mention, which is also in ‘Antiquities’ but in Book 20. Unlike the first quote, this one is accepted by almost everyone in the scholarly world as genuine, for the simple reason that in this case there’s no apparent reason why a forger would go to the bother of inserting it.

Having got that out of the way, let’s take a look at the passage itself:

And now Caesar, upon hearing the death of Festus, sent Albinus into Judea, as procurator. But the king deprived Joseph of the high priesthood, and bestowed the succession to that dignity on the son of Ananus, who was also himself called Ananus. Now the report goes that this eldest Ananus proved a most fortunate man; for he had five sons who had all performed the office of a high priest to God, and who had himself enjoyed that dignity a long time formerly, which had never happened to any other of our high priests. But this younger Ananus, who, as we have told you already, took the high priesthood, was a bold man in his temper, and very insolent; he was also of the sect of the Sadducees, who are very rigid in judging offenders, above all the rest of the Jews, as we have already observed; when, therefore, Ananus was of this disposition, he thought he had now a proper opportunity [to exercise his authority]. Festus was now dead, and Albinus was but upon the road; so he assembled the sanhedrim of judges, and brought before them the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ, whose name was James, and some others, [or, some of his companions]; and when he had formed an accusation against them as breakers of the law, he delivered them to be stoned: but as for those who seemed the most equitable of the citizens, and such as were the most uneasy at the breach of the laws, they disliked what was done; they also sent to the king [Agrippa], desiring him to send to Ananus that he should act so no more, for that what he had already done was not to be justified; nay, some of them went also to meet Albinus, as he was upon his journey from Alexandria, and informed him that it was not lawful for Ananus to assemble a sanhedrim without his consent. Whereupon Albinus complied with what they said, and wrote in anger to Ananus, and threatened that he would bring him to punishment for what he had done; on which king Agrippa took the high priesthood from him, when he had ruled but three months, and made Jesus, the son of Damneus, high priest.

Josephus, Antiquities 20, chapter 9

So… a newly elected high priest by the name of Ananus decides to go for a power play before the newly elected procurator gets there, and arranges to have some people sentenced and executed without getting official permission first. This backfires on him when some people are rightfully concerned about this and speak out against it, resulting in Ananus getting kicked out as high priest and replaced by someone else, coincidentally also called Jesus but identified as ‘Jesus, son of Damneus’. And it so happens that, in the midst of this juicy anecdote, Josephus mentions that one of the people executed was ‘the brother of Jesus called Christ’. In other words, Josephus knows of a Jesus who was called Christ. Yes; now you come to mention it, we think we might have heard of that guy as well.

 

Why would Josephus bother mentioning this?

Why would Josephus bother telling us that one of the people executed was this particular Jesus’s brother? On this we can only speculate, but there is one obvious possible answer: it’s plausible that, by this point, this tiny but spreading cult was well enough known that Josephus would expect many of his readers to have heard about this pesky group of troublemakers that had been started by someone by the name of Jesus whose followers referred to him as Christ. If so, then this reference would clue people in to the reason why Ananus put James and co. up for execution; because they were among the followers of this Jesus called Christ.

Price doesn’t accept that this could have been the case:

In addition, since this is something that is occurring around 60 CE, it would seem quite odd to identify James by his association to a person whom the Jews had supposedly killed as a criminal some thirty years prior to the event, and sixty years prior to this writing.

Christians argue that this was done because Jesus Christ was so well known that it makes the passage make sense, but as we have seen, no one prior to Josephus had even written about Jesus Christ aside from some Christians, so it certainly does not seem that he was well known at all.

Price seems here to again be falling into the trap of assuming that the small proportion of writings that have been copied often enough over the intervening two millennia to be preserved for us to read actually equate to the amount of information that was available at the time. In reality, of course, information would also have been passed on by word of mouth and by writings such as letters that nobody thought to copy and preserve over the centuries.

It’s worth noting here that Price himself has made a claim earlier in this same chapter that requires us to believe that people were hearing about Jesus and his followers in other ways; if you recall, Price was quite happy to assure us that claims about this ‘Christ’ being executed under Pilate ‘would have been common knowledge by 109’. Well, if so, then that leaves us with the possibility that this same piece of information would have been at least somewhat known by the mid-90s CE when Josephus was writing this, thus making it plausible that Josephus might have expected many of his readership to have heard of this group who referred to their leader as ‘Christ’ and followed this Christ’s brother as a temporary replacement leader.

It’s also worth revisiting this comment of Price’s from Chapter 5:

Furthermore, if Jesus had been executed by the Jews during the reign of Pilate due to being a seditious rabble rouser, then wouldn’t followers of his that continued worshiping him in the years after his death have been seen by Jewish leaders as criminals or threats?

Why, yes. Yes, they probably would. And, more to the point, they would have been seen by Romans as criminals or threats, meaning that people would have remained aware of his followers and we can expect that there would have been at least some talk in elite Roman circles about this troublemaking group. I can’t see it being that big a topic of conversation, but it seems the sort of thing likely to get the occasional passing mention, in a ‘those pesky Christians, what are they up to now? <eyeroll>’ sort of way. That is exactly what we’d expect to happen, by Price’s own argument as well as by common sense. And so, once again, it makes absolute sense that Josephus might have expected his readers to be aware enough of this group that they would pick up on his passing reference to them.

 

Is it even helpful to the debate?

This wasn’t in fact a point made by Price, who’s focusing on attempts to claim that Josephus never said this in the first place, but as it’s a point I’ve sometimes seen raised in other mythicist discussions I’ll address it for completeness:

Josephus wasn’t even born at the time that Jesus supposedly died, so he cannot possibly have ever met him or have first-hand knowledge of him. Which is, by the way, completely normal for historian authors and is not normally considered an issue for dismissing everything they have to say on a subject. However, this is Jesus mythicism, and so now and again a Reddit commenter or the like will start in with the claim that as Josephus never actually met Jesus he can’t provide any evidence of his existence.

Now, I know I keep citing Tim O’Neill, but he made a really good point about this: Josephus was around for this whole incident with Albinus and the unlawful execution. We know from his own autobiography that he would have been a young man living in Jerusalem at the time (the early 60s CE) and that he was from a priestly family, meaning his own social group would have been rocked by this incident and it would have been a major topic of conversation at the time. And while this wouldn’t have told him anything whatsoever directly about Jesus, who was decades dead by then, it would have put him in a good position to know whether this James was in fact being referred to at the time as ‘the brother of Jesus called Christ’.

In other words, Josephus is another good witness (along with Paul, who actually mentions meeting James) to the fact that James, a human on earth, was known as Jesus’s brother. And, as previously discussed, humans aren’t generally referred to as the brothers of mythical beings who had only a heavenly existence; the term ‘brother’ when applied to a human being, whether literally or metaphorically, normally means that the brother was also human. Josephus’s single passing comment tells us that a real human man was referred to as this Jesus’s brother, and thus gives us yet another piece of solid evidence that Jesus was also a real human.

Which, of course, is not at all what Price wants to think, and so he tries hard to give other possible explanations for this quote. The next post will discuss those.

‘Deciphering the Gospels Proves Jesus Never Existed’: Chapter 10, part 3

‘Deciphering the Gospels’, by R. G. Price, argues the case for Jesus mythicism, which is the view that Jesus never existed on earth in any real form but was an entirely mythical figure in the same way as Hercules or Dionysus. (The author is not the same person as Robert Price, also a Jesus mythicist author.) I’m an atheist who holds the opposing (and mainstream) view that Christianity started with a human Jesus. In other words, the Jesus referred to as the founder of Christianity was originally a 1st-century human being, about whom a later mythology grew up, whose followers became the original group that would mutate over time into Christianity. I’m therefore reviewing Price’s book to discuss his arguments and my reasons for disagreeing.

The first post in this book review is here. Links to the posts on all subsequent chapters can be found at the end of that post.

 

Chapter 10: Non-Christian Accounts Of Jesus

So far, we’ve discussed why we wouldn’t expect Jesus to show up in any accounts by his contemporaries regardless of whether or not he existed, and why some of the apparent mentions of Jesus in slightly later works are also not much help in establishing whether he existed. That leaves two passages that need addressing; the mention in Tacitus’s ‘Annals’ (44:28 at that link, as part of a short passage about Christians themselves being persecuted), and Josephus’s mention of ‘the brother of Jesus called Christ’ in Antiquities 20. Both of these, although brief, do provide good evidence for Jesus’s existence, and both are, of course, dismissed by Price.

Price discusses the Tacitus passage first of the two, so I will also go for that order and will discuss Tacitus’s mention in this post and the Josephus line in a separate post.

 

Background

First, a disclaimer: I haven’t read Tacitus or studied the classics for myself, unless you count my Latin O-level. (Don’t. It really isn’t worth counting in this context. Or in almost any context, for that matter.) My information on this comes primarily from this post on the History for Atheists blog, which is written by Tim O’Neill, a skeptical blogger with a history degree and a relevant Master’s degree, according to his ‘About’ page. I’ve checked the references in the post for myself and also read what other online information I could find about Tacitus’s writing. If anyone with better background knowledge of Tacitus than me (which, by the way, I would bet actual money does not include Price) wants to put forward an argument for disputing any of the points made here, I’m willing to take it on board.

Anyway, here’s what I have learned:

Tacitus was a Roman politician who wrote several very well-known and well-respected historical works, and who apparently had a useful commitment to letting his readers know when the information he was passing on was something he’d effectively heard only through rumour and couldn’t validate; he would qualify these claims with a phrase such as ‘it is said’ or ‘in popular report’. Tim O’Neill, as well as giving several references himself to examples of this, also cites Mendell’s book ‘Tacitus: The Man And His Work’ here:

Mendell goes on to note 30 separate instances in the Annals where Tacitus is careful to substantiate a statement or distance himself from a claim or report about which he was less than certain (Mendell, p. 205).

O’Neill, Jesus Mythicism 1: The Tacitus Reference To Jesus (link as above)

However, Tacitus – as was normal for historians of his time – usually didn’t give us references for where he got other pieces of information. There are some exceptions; for example, in 15.74 he mentions having found a particular point ‘in the records of the Senate’, and in 3.3 he mentions checking ‘the historians and the government journals’ regarding the question of whether Germanicus’s mother attended his funeral (which apparently he could find no record of her doing even though he found records of Germanicus’s other relatives being there, so it’s an interesting example of giving evidence for a negative). In 11.27, acknowledging that the story he has just told seems unbelievable, he takes pains to assure us that he has not embroidered the story and that ‘all that I record shall be the oral or written evidence of my seniors’. We also have a surviving letter from Pliny the Younger that states up front that it was written in reply to Tacitus’s request of him for information on the death of his uncle Pliny the Elder, so this is an external example of Tacitus checking with a reliable source. We don’t, however, get references for the vast majority of points he makes (which, once again, was normal for historians of the time).

What all this seems to add up to – and, again, I’m quite happy for anyone with better knowledge of Tacitus’s works to chime in if they feel they can support a different viewpoint – is a picture of a writer who aimed for scrupulosity both in checking his facts with sources that he considered to be reliable and in alerting his readers when he was instead reporting points he couldn’t verify, but who for the most part didn’t tell us what his sources were whenever he did consider them reliable. From that, it seems fair to conclude that, where Tacitus gives us information that he doesn’t qualify with any version of ‘it is said’ or ‘in popular report’, it is likely that he got it from a source that he himself considered trustworthy.

With all this in mind, here is the passage in question:

But neither human help, nor imperial munificence, nor all the modes of placating Heaven, could stifle scandal or dispel the belief that the fire had taken place by order. Therefore, to scotch the rumour, Nero substituted as culprits, and punished with the utmost refinements of cruelty, a class of men, loathed for their vices,​ whom the crowd styled Christians.​ Christus, the founder of the name, had undergone the death penalty in the reign of Tiberius, by sentence of the procurator Pontius Pilatus,​ and the pernicious superstition was checked for a moment, only to break out once more, not merely in Judaea, the home of the disease, but in the capital itself, where all things horrible or shameful in the world collect and find a vogue.

Annals, Book 15, chapter 44

So, what do we learn here? As of some point around 115 – 120 CE (it’s not clear exactly when the Annals were written or published, but that’s the estimate I found), Tacitus believed that someone known as Christus had been sentenced by Pontius Pilate during Tiberius’s reign and executed, having first founded a very unpopular group in Judea, known as Christians, whose beliefs then spread to Rome. And, since he doesn’t add any qualifiers about this being ‘said’ or ‘reported’, he probably got this information from a source that he thought to be reliable.

(As to what that source might have been, Tim O’Neill hypothesises that Tacitus spoke to a Hellenised Jew, quite possibly Josephus. From what I can see, this is plausible, though of course unprovable. Either way, we still have the important point that Tacitus apparently felt his source for this information, whoever or whatever it was, to be reliable.)

Price’s view

Price first gets into a brief digression querying why Nero would have been persecuting Christians in the first place or whether this group of Christians was ‘even the same group of Christians as those who were believers in Jesus Christ’ (as opposed to… some other group also following someone called Christ who was crucified by Pilate?). Having done that, he tells us that the passage is ‘not an independent witness to the existence of Jesus’.

Indeed, Tacitus is clearly relaying information that originally came from Christians themselves…. New Testament scholar John P. Meier acknowledges that here Tacitus is only passing on information gleaned from Christians

Now, going back to O’Neill’s post for a minute, O’Neill makes a really good point about this common mythicist dismissal of the Tacitean passage; it is clear from the passage that Tacitus despised Christians. O’Neill brings this up to point out that they would, therefore, hardly have fitted Tacitus’s idea of a source reliable enough that he didn’t feel the need to qualify it, but the point made me realise something else: Tacitus wouldn’t have been having conversations with Christians about their beliefs in the first place. It would be the equivalent of you or me deliberately striking up a conversation with a Jehovah’s Witness or a Mormon about their teachings. So we can quite reasonably dismiss any idea that Tacitus got his information directly from Christians.

However, Price is more likely to have meant that Tacitus’s information came indirectly from Christians (as in, snippets of information about Christian belief could by then have percolated through society to the point where they were also widely known amongst non-Christians).

The information that he is passing on would have been common knowledge by 109 CE

And it’s very interesting that Price thinks this, because it causes yet more problems for his theory.

One obvious problem here is that this, again, wouldn’t fit with Tacitus’s penchant for clarifying when the information he passed on was just what was ‘said’ or ‘reported’; since he doesn’t add that clarification here, it seems unlikely that this is something he absorbed in a general ‘everyone knows that’ sense. It doesn’t quite rule it out – after all, even skeptics can slip up on skepticism sometimes – but it does make it unlikely. But there’s another big problem, and that’s the timeline Price has just given himself.

Price’s theory, to recap, is that the original Christians (proto-Christians?) believed that the Messiah had already lived, been executed, and been resurrected in heaven only, where he could be uncorrupted by the material world. At some point after the Jewish-Roman War, Mark wrote a fictional story, intended only as an allegorical message, about this Jesus living an earthly life as a preacher and being crucified on earth rather than in heaven. This fictional story – somehow – convinced so many people that multiple other people wrote expanded versions of the story without noticing that the person they were writing about had never existed. Eventually things reached a point where the entire group believed so completely in this earthly Jesus who’d never lived that the original belief in a heavenly Jesus was completely obliterated.

Now, Price has never explained just how a single allegorical story could not only so drastically mislead so many people but reach the point of ultimately overriding the group’s existing beliefs about Jesus so thoroughly that the original beliefs vanished without trace. He’s never explained why the supposed belief in a completely heavenly Jesus of the original church leaders could be so thoroughly suppressed that it didn’t survive in our literature even as a heresy to be refuted. He’s never explained why so many people in a group who were supposedly being taught by their leaders that their Jesus existed only in heaven would read one story and believe that this was the truth and that their own leaders were wrong. He’s never explained how the subsequent gospel authors – including Luke, the one who Price agrees was trying to at least do some kind of historical research into his writing – never noticed that they were writing about a man who never lived on earth. So that’s already a gaping hole in his theory.

But he also, now, has his problem compounded by the timeline by which all this would have had to happen. He’s set up a hypothesis in which the story of this fictitious person’s fictitious earthly execution under Pilate is, less than fifty years later, so widely believed by even non-Christians that the skeptical Tacitus passed the information on absolutely unquestioned. That would mean this sea change would have to have happened over less than a human lifetime. There would have still been people alive in the Christian church who remembered being taught a completely different version of Jesus’s story as children. How, exactly, does Price think the new belief would have taken over the group so completely that the previous one vanished like that and, instead, even widespread numbers of non-Christians had heard about this execution under Pilate that in fact never happened?

Of course, there’s a much simpler theory for how Tacitus could have come to believe that Jesus was executed under Pilate: Jesus actually was a person whose execution was ordered by Pilate, this information was passed on when people had disapproving conversatoins about those troublemaking Christians, the Christians themselves couldn’t refute this as it had in fact actually happened, and thus it was that at some time by or before the early second century this information was widely known enough that someone Tacitus trusted as a reliable source could have been aware of it and passed it on to Tacitus at some point. So, yet again, we have a situation where Jesus-historicity explains the evidence much better than Jesus-mythicism. If Price still wants to argue that the claim about Jesus being executed under Pilate could have become public ‘knowledge’ by the early second century despite never (under his theory) having happened, then it’s on him to come up with a plausible explanation.

‘Deciphering the Gospels Proves Jesus Never Existed’: Chapter 10, part 2

‘Deciphering the Gospels’, by R. G. Price, argues the case for Jesus mythicism, which is the view that Jesus never existed on earth in any real form but was an entirely mythical figure in the same way as Hercules or Dionysus. (The author is not the same person as Robert Price, also a Jesus mythicist author.) I’m an atheist who holds the opposing (and mainstream) view that Christianity started with a human Jesus. In other words, the Jesus referred to as the founder of Christianity was originally a 1st-century human being, about whom a later mythology grew up, whose followers became the original group that would mutate over time into Christianity. I’m therefore reviewing Price’s book to discuss his arguments and my reasons for disagreeing.

The first post in this book review is here. Links to the posts on all subsequent chapters can be found at the end of that post.

 

Chapter 10: Non-Christian Accounts Of Jesus

Price goes on to address the five passages from the end of the first/early second century that are generally cited by Christians as being early evidence for Jesus. In chronological order of when they were written, these are:

Price, of course, dismisses all these references for various reasons. Just to make a change, I agree with him about some of them. In this post, I’m therefore going to go through the three references that I agree are little or no help in determining whether Jesus existed, and explain why I agree with Price that these three should be dismissed as evidence in this particular debate.

 

The Testimonium Flavium

The Testimonium Flavium, a short passage in Josephus’s ‘Antiquities’ describing Jesus, would have been excellent evidence except for one major problem: Several of the lines in it were quite clearly added to the manuscript by an over-enthusiastic Christian scribe at some later date, and this, unfortunately, raises the question of whether any of the passage originated with Josephus or whether it was all the work of the unknown forger.

There has been considerable scholarly debate on this question over the centuries, with no definite consensus to this day. Based on comparisons of the more plausible parts of the passage with Josephus’s style and analysis of slightly different manuscript traditions, the majority of scholars have concluded that at least some of the passage originated with Josephus. (And, no, these aren’t just Christian scholars grasping at straws, but also include Jewish and non-religious scholars.) However, the view that the whole passage is a Christian interpolation is by no means a fringe view; it’s held by a sizeable minority of scholars, including some eminent ones in the field. Blogger Tim O’Neill has a readable summary of the arguments, but the tl;dr is that we simply don’t know either way.

You will be unsurprised to hear that mythicists are firm supporters of the argument that the whole passage is an interpolation (and that this is what Price argues). In fact, mythicists will often extend this to claiming that Josephus’s other mention of Jesus must also be an interpolation, and quite possibly to any passages in any document that seem to support historicity. The more clearly Christian-interpolated lines in the TF are Jesus scholarship’s Piltdown Man; an obvious fake that has long since been recognised as such but is used by a fringe group with an agenda to cast discredit on the whole field.

I’m not arguing quite the same position as Price on this one. He, of course, is arguing that the whole passage is a fake, whereas my position is that it’s more likely to be partly real but that we can’t know either way. However, for purposes of the mythicism argument it comes to the same thing; there is too much doubt about the authenticity of this passage to use it as evidence for Jesus’s existence.

I do, however, think there are two important takeaways from the debate over the TF, before we move on:

Firstly, ‘can’t know either way’ cuts both ways. While there’s too much doubt over even the partial authenticity of this passage to use it as evidence for the Jesus-historicist side, there’s also too much doubt over the claim of complete forgery for us to be able to say that Josephus didn’t mention Jesus here. And that, of course, causes further problems for the already poor argument that historians mysteriously never mentioned Jesus. Josephus, unlike the other historians held up for candidates of same, actually is a good contender for someone who might well have mentioned a historical Jesus, in that he does write about various other rabbis and Jews with anti-Roman followings. And, lo and behold, we have a situation where he might indeed have mentioned a historical Jesus; we just don’t know whether he did or not. So, while this Schroedinger’s Mention isn’t enough for active evidence for the historicist side, it does put an extra nail in the coffin of the ‘historians didn’t mention Jesus!’ mythicist argument.

And, secondly, the forged lines in the passage give us a test case as to how the world of biblical and NT scholarship actually does react to an obvious forgery about Jesus (as we know at least some of the lines in the TF to be, whatever your position on partial authenticity). I raise this because I’ve noticed that mythicists sometimes seem to fall into the habit of not only dismissing pro-historicist evidence as possible interpolation, but also dismissing scholarly consensus of the authenticity of such passages with a ‘well, they would, wouldn’t they?’ attitude in which it’s assumed that the only reason relevant scholarship don’t think these passages are interpolations is because scholarship in this area is too Christian-dominated to consider the possibility. This therefore becomes a good excuse for dismissing any passages that are awkward for mythicists to explain away. (Yes, yes, #notallmythicists, but it’s certainly an attitude I’ve seen.)

That being so, I think it’s instructive to note the actual reaction of Jesus-related scholarship to a genuinely obvious interpolation: Everyone in the field accepts that the more obviously Christian lines in the passage are interpolated, and, although the ‘total interpolation’ position is the minority view, it’s still a respected view that has its place in scholarship rather than being dismissed. And, hence, the belief of some mythicists that it’s only bias that prevents experts as recognising any other mythicist-inconveniencing passages as interpolations doesn’t really stand up.

One final point: In anticipation of commenters about to unleash C&P’d arguments about how the total-interpolation position clearly must be the correct one (cough db cough), I’ll say here and now that I’m not particularly interested in arguing the merits of either partial authenticity vs. total interpolation or ‘we can’t know either way’ vs. ‘obviously totally interpolated’. What I do believe is that random people C&P-ing internet arguments they like the look of aren’t the most authoritative sources for a controversy on which actual scholars of the topic can’t reach a consensus. So, for those genning up to give their opinions on this particular subject; well, go right ahead if that’s what you enjoy, just be aware I’ll probably ignore you.

 

Pliny the Younger

I agree with Price on this one; this letter is clearly about Christians rather than about Jesus. While Pliny’s comment that the Christians ‘sing a hymn to Christ as to a god’ (emphasis mine) does seem to imply that the Christians in question also described their Christ as something other than a god (i.e., an earthly person), that is a really slender thread on which to hang any argument. So, while I find this letter fascinating as a non-Christian’s view of Christianity back when it was a rather odd new cult rather than the most famous religion in the Western and possibly the entire world, I don’t think it has anything of substance to offer this particular debate.

 

Suetonius

Finally, this passage is another one that can be quickly disposed of in this argument. The passage in question only tells us that someone called Chrestus was thought to have instigated Jewish riots. While it’s natural that Christians would assume this to be a misspelling of ‘Christus’, the fact is that ‘Chrestus’ was also a first name in the Roman Empire, and that there is nothing in the passage to indicate that this ‘Chrestus’ was Jesus rather than someone with the name Chrestus. Rather the contrary, considering that whoever this Chrestus was he was apparently in a position to be able to be accused of instigating riots almost twenty years after Jesus would have died, which doesn’t prove he wasn’t Jesus (after all, people are still supposedly being instigated to do stuff by Jesus two millennia later) but does mean Suetonius is rather unlikely to have been talking about Jesus. So, again, I agree with Price here; this gives us no helpful evidence regarding Jesus’s historicity, and can be discarded from the debate.

 

Which leaves…

… the Tacitus reference and the Josephus ‘brother of Jesus called Christ’ mention, which Price covers in that order and which I will therefore also cover in that order. So, the next post on this chapter (which might or might not be the actual next post depending on whether I decide to do a ‘Walking Disaster’ post in between) will be on the reference in Tacitus, and the one after that (ditto) will be on the Josephus Antiquities 20 reference. See you then.

‘Deciphering The Gospels Means Jesus Never Existed’: Chapter 10, part 1

‘Deciphering the Gospels’, by R. G. Price, argues the case for Jesus mythicism, which is the view that Jesus never existed on earth in any real form but was an entirely mythical figure in the same way as Hercules or Dionysus. (The author is not the same person as Robert Price, also a Jesus mythicist author.) I’m an atheist who holds the opposing (and mainstream) view that Jesus was originally a human being of the 1st century about whom a later mythology grew up. I’m therefore reviewing Price’s book to discuss his arguments and my reasons for disagreeing.

The first post in this book review is here. Links to the posts on all subsequent chapters can be found at the end of that post.

 

Chapter 10: Non-Christian Accounts Of Jesus

First off, a small detail that is driving me nuts; I have corrected the capitalisation in the above chapter heading, but Price wrote it as ‘Non-christian Accounts Of Jesus’. ‘Christ’ is a proper noun and thus that, and words deriving from it, should be capitalised. Every time I open up the menu with the chapter list, that ‘Non-christian’ niggles at me and eats into my deeply pedantic soul. R.G., if you take nothing else on board from this entire critique, fer cry yi yi PLEASE at least get the grammar in the chapter headings correct in further editions.

[Edited to add: On this one, Price is blameless. It was the editor’s fault. Consider that plea to be redirected to the editor, or at least the proofreader.]

Thank you. I feel better now.

In this chapter, Price goes along with a very common misconception among people who know little or nothing about ancient history; the idea that we could expect Jesus to have been mentioned in numerous surviving written works of the time, and therefore there’s something mysterious about the paucity of such mentions (a mystery which, you guessed it, can only be solved by assuming Jesus didn’t exist).

The overwhelming lack of commentary about Jesus in the historical sources
of his supposed time has troubled Christian scholars from the very beginning.

That might very well be true; after all, this lack of mention certainly should be a problem for Christian scholars. According to their beliefs, Jesus was God Incarnate, working dazzling miracles, arriving on earth to be the sole saviour of all humanity, rising from the dead and appearing to hundreds in his magically risen form, impacting upon the world like a thunderclap. The fact that none of this gets mentioned in any of the non-Christian sources of the time does indeed raise some major questions as to the validity of those claims. (Which, by the way, is a good anti-apologetic argument that mythicists tend to overlook and weaken in their insistence on focusing on claims that Jesus didn’t exist at all. The lack of surviving mentions in non-Christian sources actually is good evidence against the Christian claims about Jesus.)

However, the debate here is not over that Jesus. It’s over whether the Jesus in whom the movement originally believed was a real person who walked the earth a couple of millennia ago and had a following prior to being executed. And, as people who actually know their ancient history will tell you, such a Jesus wouldn’t be someone likely to get mentioned in contemporary works. He would have been one of many apocalyptic preachers and faith-healers of the time, and the many surviving works we have from authors of the time typically don’t bother mentioning people in those categories.

(One other important factor to bear in mind, of course, is that most things written at the time haven’t survived. The material typically used for paper at the time – papyrus – crumbles to dust after a few centuries, so the physical documents written at that time are long since dust on the winds. The writings we still have are the ones that someone at the time took the trouble to copy and then recopy over the centuries. The overlap between ‘writer important enough to have works copied and preserved in such a way’ and ‘writer who wanted to spend time recording the doings of some minor-league troublemaking Jewish preacher’ is, in practice, negligible.)

There are at least a couple of mentions of Jesus in the late 1st/early 2nd century, which we’ll get to in later posts. Before getting to those, however, Price first focuses on writers whose lifetime overlapped with Jesus’s estimated lifetime. (That specific requirement is one that tends to come up a lot among mythicists. It seems to be a combination of vague assumptions: a) that information that doesn’t come from a personal eyewitness is somehow useless, and b) that any author who lived in Jesus’s time would surely have not only heard about him but also introduced it into their written work, however irrelevant.)

Anyway, Price gives us a list of

[…] some of the primary persons who lived during the supposed lifetime of Jesus, whose works we do have and who we could reasonably expect would have mentioned Jesus had he existed… All of these people lived during roughly the same time that Jesus supposedly lived and are prime candidates for being potential witnesses to, and documenters of, the existence of Jesus.

Let’s start out by looking at that ‘prime candidates for being potential witnesses’ claim.

First off, realistically, none of the authors whose works have survived to the modern day are ‘prime candidates’ for having seen Jesus. From the scanty information we have, it seems Jesus spent most of his life in the backwater region of Galilee followed by less than a week in Jerusalem (already a large city with tens of thousands of people) during an unspecified year. We simply cannot pinpoint any supposed movements of either Jesus or of authors of the time with remotely the accuracy needed to pick out ‘prime candidates’ for having seen this one particular person at any particular time.

And, secondly, even allowing for that, Price seems to be stretching the definition of ‘prime candidates’ astonishingly. His list includes:

  • Pliny the Elder, who was in fact born in North Italy in 23 CE and grew up there. Yes, his lifespan technically overlapped with that of Jesus, but at the time Jesus would have been executed Pliny was a child growing up hundreds of miles away. How is he a ‘prime candidate’ for having witnessed a rabbi in Galilee or Jerusalem?
  • Velleius Paterculus, a former soldier who published a political and military history. We know nothing about his whereabouts in the later years of his life, and this includes the years that Jesus might have been preaching.
  • Valerius Maximus: we know almost nothing of his life, and so can’t say where in the Roman Empire he was living at any given time.
  • Seneca the Younger: born in Spain, lived in Rome. I can find nothing to say that he ever visited Galilee or Jerusalem.

Price does marginally better with the example of Justus of Tiberias, in that he did at least come from Galilee. The problem here is that – as even Price points out – he was probably born only after Jesus supposedly died, making him another very unlikely candidate for having seen Jesus. (By the way, Justus also doesn’t fit the ‘works we do have’ criterion; he’s known to have written at least two books, but neither of them have survived, so that’s another inaccuracy from Price.) And, while Philo of Alexandria probably did visit Jerusalem once in his life, the odds that that happened to be during the tiny window of time that Jesus was there are very low indeed. Price’s description of these people as ‘prime candidates’ for supposedly having witnessed Jesus is an unfortunate illustration of his stretching of facts and lack of critical thought on the matter.

Then, there’s the matter of what these writers wrote. Bear in mind again, here, that Price is saying that we would expect these authors to have written about Jesus:

  • Justus of Tiberias, the author Price lists as second only to Philo of Alexandria as a candidate for someone who ‘should’ have mentioned Jesus in his work, wrote a history of the Jewish War (which took place decades after Jesus’s death) and an apparently brief history of Jewish kings. Price glosses over this last by simply describing it as ‘a well-preserved history of the region’, but the mention we have of it, in Photius’s Bibliotheca, does specify that it was a history of kings. In other words, hardly the kind of work that bothers to mention itinerant rabbis.
  • Pliny the Elder’s most famous work, the one for which he is mainly known, was a book on natural history. According to the Britannica article about him, he is also known to have written works on ‘grammar, a biography of Pomponius Secundus, a history of Rome, a study of the Roman campaigns in Germany, and a book on hurling the lance’. That’s a laudably broad bibliography, but it’s hard to see how ‘rural rabbis’ or ‘Messianic wannabes’ would make it into any of those works as a subtopic.
  • Seneca the Younger wrote about Stoic philosophy, which has nothing to do with alleged teachings of Jesus.
  • And Velleius Paterculus wrote a Roman history that, according to Price’s own description, ‘covers history up to 14 CE’. I leave as an exercise for the reader why this might not have mentioned a rabbi whose best-known activities seem to have occurred in the early years of the 30s CE.

Valerius Maximus’s work seems potentially more promising at first sight, since the title translates as ‘Memorable Deeds and Sayings’, which at least might have covered deeds and/or sayings attributed to a rabbi. However, let’s look at what Valerius himself has to say in his opening lines, with emphasis mine:

I have resolved to collect together the deeds and sayings of most note, and most worthy to be remembered, of the most eminent persons both among the Romans and other nations, taken out of the most approved authors, where they lie scattered so widely, that makes them hard to be known; to save the trouble of a tedious search, for those who are willing to follow their examples. Yet I have not been over-desirous to comprehend everything. For who in a small volume is able to set down the deeds of many ages?

So, Valerius is looking for deeds and sayings of the people he’d consider ‘the most eminent persons’; in other words, not a Jewish preacher from a rural backwater. He’s looking for them in ‘the most approved authors’. Even if there had been any chance of him counting the anonymous authors of a strange religious cult in that category (which, let’s face it, there wasn’t), Valerius published his book in 30 CE, many years before the gospels would even be written; and, even on the small off-chance that Valerius might have lived in a part of the empire in which he’d have happened to hear about a Galilean preacher via word of mouth, that wouldn’t have interested someone who was specifically looking for sayings and deeds already thought worthy of recording by ‘approved authors’. And Valerius himself points out that he’s got no chance of covering every possible interesting deed or saying in this book and he’s not even going to try to do so. The result, not surprisingly, is a book that doesn’t seem to mention any rabbis, as far as I could see from skimming through the religion section.

That leaves Philo of Alexandria, who is Price’s top pick for Person Who Should Have Mentioned Jesus; ‘If Philo had known about Jesus, he surely would have written something about him’ Price insists with his usual seamless transition from might-have-happened to must-have-happened. And here he is, at least, dealing with a might-have-happened; he’s not as totally off base as he was when he was insisting that mentions of Jesus surely ‘should’ have been included in a very brief book about kings or in a work of natural history or in a history that covered a time period ending almost two decades before Jesus did anything even vaguely notable. Philo was a Jew writing about religious ideas and the occasional event of interest, he was an adult at the time Jesus was actively preaching, he did go to Jerusalem at one point, and so it’s not totally out of the question that he might have a) heard of Jesus and b) thought he was worth mentioning in one of his works. It’s just a massive exaggeration to declare this to be a definite.

Price’s certainty is, you might be unsurprised to hear, based on some fairly spurious reasoning. He declares that the gospel authors might well have used Philo’s writings, as though that somehow means that the reverse would have been true. He makes much of the fact that Philo writes about Pontius Pilate, as though this would have somehow meant Philo could have known (or cared) what the most famous scene of Pilate’s life would retrospectively, generations later, turn out to be. He claims that Philo personally lent money to Herod Agrippa I, the king of the Jewish population of Judea a decade after the time Jesus was supposedly executed; apart from the bizarrely tenuous nature of the attempted implication that this somehow makes it a certainty that Philo would have a) heard of and b) written about Jesus, this claim doesn’t even seem to be correct, since it was actually Philo’s brother who lent the money. Price seems to have misread his source article on that point.

All of this is piled on top of a description of Philo that’s downright skewed to start off with; Price describes him as a ‘historian’ who ‘reported on events throughout the Mediterranean world’ and that he ‘traveled throughout the Roman Empire’. In fact, nearly all of Philo’s works are commentaries on either the Torah or philosophy, his few historical accounts are about matters that were directly relevant to his life, and we only know of one trip that he made to Rome and one probable trip, of unknown date, to Jerusalem. So Price is considerably exaggerating some aspects of Philo’s known life story to make him sound more likely to have encountered/written about Jesus.

Stripping all of that away… was Philo someone who wrote about a comprehensive list of contemporary rabbis? This was difficult for me to answer as I’ve read almost none of his works and don’t realistically have the time to read through them, but I thought of a handy way to check. I downloaded the Kindle version of Philo’s complete works, which is quite cheap to do, and did a wordsearch on it for three names of rabbis who were particularly well known in the rabbinical world in that period of Judaism: Hillel, Shammai, and Gamaliel.

While Hillel’s name at first seemed to pop up several times, I rapidly ascertained that these mentions were in the modern-day commentary included with the book, not in anything Philo himself had written. As for Shammai and Gamaliel, I couldn’t find any mention of either name (even trying the alternative spelling of ‘Gamliel’, which I gather was sometimes used). So, if those search results were correct, Philo didn’t mention any of the three rabbis who were most famous in that time period. It seems extremely unlikely that an author of that time who actually was interested in citing rabbis contemporary to him wouldn’t mention any of those three. Therefore, even without having read Philo’s extensive body of work, I feel comfortable in deducing that Philo was not, in fact, someone who cited rabbis of his time.

If I’m wrong and Price is in fact aware of numerous such rabbis cited by Philo whom he simply neglected to mention in his list of Reasons Why Philo Would Definitely Have Written About Jesus, then I’m happy for him to give me the citations. But, from what I can currently see, it looks as though Philo simply wasn’t particularly interested in naming/citing particular rabbis, even those who were considerably more well-known in their time than Jesus was. So, unfortunately for Price’s argument, even his top candidate for Person Who Surely Would Have Mentioned Jesus seems, in practice, to be yet another person who wasn’t actually likely to have mentioned Jesus.

In future posts: a couple of other people who I agree probably also did not say anything helpful about Jesus… and a couple who did.

Walking Disaster, Chapter 21

This is a chapter-by-chapter review of problematic romance novel ‘Walking Disaster’ by Jamie McGuire. Posts in the series will all be linked back to the initial post, here.

This was initially a companion series to the magnificent Jenny Trout‘s review of the original novel, ‘Beautiful Disaster’. Jenny has since stopped her review, not wanting to give McGuire any further publicity in the wake of her attempts to run for office.

 

Content warning: Fighting, refusal to listen to concerns, breakup, refusal to accept breakup.

Chapter Twenty-One: Slow Death

Unfortunately, I think it a reasonable assumption that this will not in fact refer to Travis’s fate. Oh, well. At least we seem to have found our way to actual plot, after all that tiresome circling around on ‘I must have Abby but will never be worthy, whinge, whinge, drink, drink, shag, shag, misogyny, misogyny’. To recap where we’re up to: Travis is going to be fighting a very unpleasant fighter whom he’s sure he can nevertheless beat, and Abby is going to fulfil a bargain by having dinner with her ex-boyfriend, who is giving indications of wanting to shed the ‘ex’ part of that. So, The Drama all set up.

Yikes; I was reading through some old posts and realised that now I’m forgetting the puppy. Who the hell is taking care of the puppy while this foursome are off in Vegas, McGuire? Enquiring minds want to know. (Updated: He was with Brazil, apparently. At least McGuire remembered him this time.)

Anyway… chapter opens with Trav, America, and Shep in the waiting room prior to the fight, which is apparently going to be a cage fight, which is a new experience for Travis. Abby is off having dinner with Jesse as planned, and Trav is fretting about this as expected. Shep points out that he needs to get his mind off that and onto the problem of beating Brock McMann. Travis tells us that Brock is known for doing ‘blatantly illegal shit just out of sight of the ref’ and has been ‘banned from the UFC for sucker punches’. Also, apparently Travis has to win this fight, not just take part, in order for Benny to consider Mick’s debt paid; missed that detail when I was reading the last chapter. Shep advises him on strategy; play it safe and let Brock attack first.

Abby turns up at the last minute (as in, Brock and Travis are actually both in the cage ready to start) and she and Trav kiss through the cage bars. Not sure it’s the best of ideas to take your mind off the fighter in the cage with you who’s known for doing blatantly illegal shit, but maybe the ref was watching. Anyway, it’s all good, all’s right with Trav’s world now that Abby’s here, and he’s all set to go win this for her. He’s also still on a roll with the badass lines:

I leaned over to whisper in Brock’s ear. “I just want you to know I’m a big fan, even though you’re kind of a prick and a cheat. So don’t take it personally when you get KTFO’d tonight.”

Which apparently confuses the hell out of Brock. Anyway, the start bell rings and Travis immediately ignores Shepley’s advice and lets all his aggression out in punching ninety shades of hell out of Brock, and it works. It also feels very therapeutic:

I felt no pain, only the sheer pleasure of unleashing every negative emotion that had weighed me down for so long. I remembered how relaxing it felt to beat the hell out of Benny’s men.

Trav’s been doing the underground fights for over a year now. Why are these particular fights being framed as some kind of life-changing catharsis for Trav all of a sudden?

Win or lose, I looked forward to what kind of person I would be after this fight.

Maybe someone with better grammar? Probably not.

Trav and Brock get pulled apart as the round’s over. Second round, same as the first. Third round, they’re both getting tired but Travis manages to elbow Brock in the nose hard enough to knock him out, so he’s won. Cheers, wild applause, Abby gives him a victory kiss, great scenes for the eventual movie.

Benny wants to talk to Trav, so Abby reluctantly agrees to meet him outside in ten minutes. Benny, of course, wants to offer Trav a job; he’ll pay him $150,000 per fight for one fight a month, plus first-class tickets there and back if Trav wants to stay in college during this time. Trav shows some sense for once in his life and says he’s got to discuss it with Abby first. Abby ‘wasn’t receptive at all’, which I thought at first just meant she didn’t say much on the trip back but now suspect means she told him ‘no’ loud and clear and McGuire didn’t bother including the conversation.

(Yup. Just checked with ‘Beautiful’, and Abby was in fact emphatic, detailed, and consistent in telling Travis that a) it was a terrible idea to get involved in working for a mobster and b) she wanted absolutely no part of it, yes, including the money. Travis, of course, just kept brushing right past that with ‘but moneeeyyyyyy’. Portraying Travis here as not only disagreeing but ignoring and dismissing that whole conversation as just Abby not being ‘receptive’… that’s not nearly as good a look for Travis as McGuire seems to think.)

They get home. Abby is giving Toto a bath because he stinks from being in Brazil’s apartment over the weekend. Travis tells Abby that he wants to do the fights, and when she still says ‘No’:

“You’re not listening. I’m gonna do it. You’ll see in a few months that it was the right decision.”

Travis is disregarding Abby’s very clearly stated wishes and not only expecting her to put up with it, but blithely assuming that she will of course come round to his superior way of thinking. Just in case any of my readers were not already clear on this… behaving this way is really not a good idea. (For that matter, nor is signing on to work for the Mafia.)

We have another round of Abby making it completely clear that she wants nothing to do with Benny, any money earned from him, or that world, and Travis brushing this aside and telling her that she’ll see, it’s all going to be OK. Abby asks the obvious:

“Why did you even ask me, Travis? You were going to work for Benny no matter what I said.”

Travis tells her he wants her support, but it’s too much money to turn down. And Abby, in a quietly glorious moment, develops some actual common sense and a spine:

She paused for a long time, her shoulders fell, and then nodded. “Okay, then. You’ve made your decision.”

Well, granted, it’s odd that her shoulders were nodding. Other than that, however, this is a great way to respond to someone who’s determined to go their own way regardless of how hard you try to talk them out of it; accept you’re not going to change their mind and that the time’s come to get the hell out of Dodge, then from that point forward don’t bother with further arguing or ultimatums. Especially when you already know that they’d react very badly to knowing you plan to leave.

Travis, being Travis, completely fails to realise what Abby means and thinks everything’s now A-OK, so he goes happily out to make a sandwich and is unfazed by Abby walking past him and out the door with suitcase in hand, which, y’know, some people might have considered a subtle clue. He does run after her to ask what she’s doing, but because he has the approximate IQ of a pile of rocks he easily accepts her explanation that she’s just off to do laundry at the dorm. He doesn’t twig until he sees her crying as she drives off, whereupon, of course, he freaks out.

He sprints after the car yelling, realises he cannot actually outrun a car, and so leaps on his bike and races round to the dormitories, where he manages to trick someone into letting him in. He knocks on Abby’s door demanding that she talk to him, refuses to believe Kara when she says Abby’s not here and she hasn’t seen her for days, and barges in to see whether Abby’s hiding in a cupboard somewhere, which she is not. (Poor Kara!)

Then he sits outside the door sending off a barrage of texts running the gamut from begging her to talk about this to telling her she’s being unreasonable to apologising for saying that and going back to begging. All with textspeak ‘u’ instead of ‘you’, which I realise is a long way from being the most objectionable part of the situation but which happens to be one of my bugbears. I mean, seriously, we have text suggestion software now; no excuse.

Trav spends the whole night this way. Even he recognises he’s acting stupidly.

The fact that security had never showed to escort me out was amazing in itself

Lampshading! I really wish either Abby or Kara had called security; that would have been a better message both for Travis in-book and for readers.

Trav goes home, and Shep tells him Abby probably isn’t going to be in class today. Yes, probably not, since by my count it’s Sunday. Oh, well, we all know by now that McGuire can’t keep track of her own timeline. Speaking of which, it is mentioned that it’s winter and bitterly cold, so since we haven’t had any mention of Christmas it’s probably meant to be December. McGuire, I’m keeping an eye on you to see whether you screw that one up too.

Shep and America both try to tell Travis that Abby’s done with him, but Travis doesn’t want to hear it. He heads to class (which is happening, so I guess we lost a day somewhere, again) but Abby isn’t there. He stands up mid-lecture and kicks over her empty desk and then his, with a scream of ‘GODDAMMIT!’ Dare I hope that the lecturer will direct him to some therapy? For the moment, the lecturer just makes it clear he’s got to leave. Trav storms out and encounters Megan strolling up the corridor. She promptly tries to flirt with him and tell him she knew it would never work out with ‘the nun’, because McGuire apparently felt it had been too many chapters since she portrayed A Woman Who Is Not Abby as being awful. Also, she’s there to add to the angst factor:

“We’re the same, Travis; not good for anybody.”

…said no actual person ever. Anyway, Travis tells her to go away (I paraphrase) and walks off himself. Chapter ends. Well, at least quite a bit happened this time. It feels as though someone tilted the book and all the plot ran down to one end of it.

Walking Disaster, Chapter 20

(Oh, bother! It looks as though I might have managed to post this while it was still in draft stage and needed tidying up. My apologies to anyone who read the slightly mangled version. This one will, I hope, be at least marginally better.)

This is a chapter-by-chapter review of problematic romance novel ‘Walking Disaster’ by Jamie McGuire. Posts in the series will all be linked back to the initial post, here.

This was initially a companion series to the magnificent Jenny Trout‘s review of the original novel, ‘Beautiful Disaster’. Jenny has since stopped her review, not wanting to give McGuire any further publicity in the wake of her attempts to run for office.

 

Chapter Twenty: You Win Some, You Lose Some

EDITED AGAIN because I forgot the content warning: Physical violence with fights. Gambling. Casual racism.

The four of them pack and fly out to Vegas with Abby hardly saying a word the whole way. America checks them into the hotel ‘flashing her fake ID, as if she had done it a thousand times before’, which makes Travis realise she’d probably done precisely that and this is probably where they got the fake IDs in the first place. Which raises several questions:

  • The implication here is that Mick arranged the fake IDs so that Abby could win him money. Why on earth was he also paying for a fake ID for America, and why on earth were her family allowing some sleazeball to take their underage daughter off to casinos on a regular basis?
  • According to this post by Das Sporking, Vegas casinos are really strict about not letting underage people gamble, and they’re careful about checking IDs, especially if paying out on any big win. So… are we meant to believe that Mick was regularly taking his very young teenage daughter to these casinos without anyone ever at any point thinking ‘hang on, that girl looks like she might be underage; better be extra careful about checking that ID?’
  • Also, wait a minute… a couple of chapters back, one of Travis’s family mentioned that Mick gave interviews to ‘all the papers’ (implying national papers, if Travis’s family read them in another state) about his luck changing at midnight on Abby’s thirteenth birthday. So Mick made it clear in national papers that he was taking a child as young as twelve to gamble regularly (and at least once stay up past midnight doing so, during term time), and no-one from the casinos he attended regularly noticed? (Or CPS, for that matter?)
  • Now that I think about it, why on earth did multiple national papers care enough about the gambling woes of some metaphoric as well as literal loser that they were running articles about it?
  • As much as I love Das Sporking, could they make it any more difficult to find things in their archives?

Anyway, Travis checks in with Abby as to how she’s feeling and she just says she doesn’t want to be here. They go up to what turn out to be two separate rooms (one for each couple) in a very posh-sounding hotel, so, for a trip that’s meant to make money, they seem to be spending quite a bit of it up front. Travis is trying to be supportive to Abby (and for once he really does seem to be trying), but she doesn’t want to know, and doesn’t want him along when she goes to start gambling.

“If I’m going to win fourteen thousand dollars in one weekend, I have to concentrate. I don’t like who I’m going to be while I’m at those tables, and I don’t want you to see it, OK?”

I can’t get past this whole ‘win fourteen thousand dollars in one weekend’ plan. I mean, I know that if you’re good enough at poker it’s possible to make enough profit overall that you can make a passable living from it long term, and I know that occasionally you can get lucky enough to have a huge win. But, however good you are, you can’t expect to make $7000/day, because a significant part of it is always going to depend on literal luck of the draw.

Anyway, Travis actually respects what Abby says and backs off, which is almost as unlikely as winning $14,000 in a weekend. Yay, Travis! He and Shep go to check out the Strip while Abby plays. They see the Fountains of Bellagio, though Trav doesn’t know what they’re called (this has nothing to do with anything; I just think the Fountains of Bellagio are awesome and wanted to have an ‘I remember those!’ moment) and some other stuff and head back to the casino, where Trav sees Abby at one of the tables but still stays out of her way.

Before I can start liking the new and improved Travis too much, however, he sees a man holding her arm and is on the brink of charging over there with violence in mind before Shepley grabs him and points out that it’s one of the casino workers and if Travis goes off on one he’ll just get them all kicked out. Travis gets closer and hears the man tell Abby that it was good to see her again and that he’d see her tomorrow at five. It turns out that this is Abby’s former boyfriend; the one who wanted to be a youth minister, who is apparently now working at a Vegas casino instead. It seems Jesse (the former boyfriend) knows Abby is underage and is arranging to meet her tomorrow in return for letting her play till midnight without telling anyone.

Travis isn’t happy about this and Shep spells out to him that she can’t just go to another casino because they’d spot she’s underage and… apparently people here know her and let her get away with underage gambling? Despite it being highly illegal? Anyway, this brief conversation apparently takes up all the rest of the time until midnight, since next thing Trav and Shep are meeting the girls at their table.

So, it’s midnight, Jesse won’t let Abby play for any longer, and she still hasn’t won enough. Trav and Shepley offer her their winnings as well; apparently, in what was supposedly half an hour of playing blackjack to pass the time, the boys won $900 between them. Abby says that even with the money from the boys she’s still $5000 short, which would mean that in the few hours since she got here she’s won $8100 plus whatever four flights to Vegas and two rooms in a swish hotel cost. So, having made dangerous levels of alcohol abuse sound fun and sexy in this book aimed at people in their teens and twenties, McGuire is now making gambling sound like an easy way of earning money. Any other great messages you want to pass on to today’s youth, McGuire? Drug abuse is an exciting pastime, maybe?

Anyway, comes up and tells her he can’t give her any more time. Then he drops kisses on her hair and the corner of her mouth before leaving, so looks like he’s not planning for tomorrow’s dinner to be just an ‘old friends catching up’. Shep physically holds Travis back from attacking Jesse. Abby protests to Trav that she had to agree to have dinner with Jesse because the guy to whom her father owes money is Mob and is going to have her father killed if he can’t come up with the money:

‘Have you ever dealt with the Mob, Travis? I’m sorry if your feelings are hurt, but a free meal with an old friend isn’t a high price to pay to keep Mick alive.’

I’m open to correction on this one by any of the very many people who know more about the Mob than me, but would they actually kill someone for not paying off a debt on time? I would have thought it would be more along the lines of breaking some important bones and telling you you now had X further days to come up with the money before they came back to break more. Lather, rinse, repeat for as long as they think there’s any chance whatsoever of you coming up with any of the payment, which a dead debtor can’t do. Am I wrong?

Oh, well. It is fair to say that Abby would probably not be hugely comforted by the thought that her father is only in line for significant injury rather than actual death.  And I also realise that, while she would be entirely within her rights at this point to tell Mick to eff off and deal with the consequences of his own actions, that’s somewhat emotionally difficult when said consequences will involve maiming. So, yes, I can see how she actually would feel obliged to go along with Jesse’s demand for an evening out in order to keep him quiet.  I was going to say that nothing was stopping her from telling Jesse not to kiss her and/or introducing Travis as her boyfriend to make the situation clear, and then realised that actually she does still need to stay on Jesse’s good side at least until she’s collected her winnings and got out of there, since he could still blow her cover on being underage. So, since we seem to be ignoring the fact that this is all too illegal for the casino to pay out anyway, I suppose this bit of plot makes some sense.

America tells them they’ve got to get to Benny’s, and they head over there. I guess McGuire either doesn’t know or doesn’t care that you don’t get automatically handed the money as you win it; instead, you win piles of chips which you then have to cash in (with, once again, your ID getting carefully scrutinised to check for anyone who’s underage). I’m mildly amused by the image of them handing this mobster a pile of casino chips. Anyway, they walk to Benny’s house, which is nearby. The door is opened by a huge intimidating doorman. Apparently part of the intimidating aspect is his skin colour:

He was enormous – black, intimidating, and as wide as he was tall

Because apparently ‘black’ goes with ‘intimidating’ in McGuire’s mind.

Benny is also there, standing next to the doorman. Psychologically speaking, this seems like an odd choice; I would have thought his expected approach would have been to have the doorman keep them waiting with the tension building up before ushering them into the inner sanctum. Practically speaking, I can’t see how he’s supposed to be standing next to someone that huge without having to peek out from behind the doorjamb.

Anyway, Benny tells the others they need to wait outside and Travis insists he’s coming in, which Benny seems to respect. Trav makes sure he keeps himself between her and the doorman because he sees the doorman as ‘the biggest threat’. He’s not going to attack Abby randomly, Travis, and Benny’s not going to arrange any attacks at least until he gets his money.

Abby begs Benny to take the amount she’s got and give her tomorrow to get the rest. Benny correctly picks up on the fact that she’s doing this because she doesn’t think she can get the rest. They’d have done better to say ‘Here, take this now so that we’re not carrying $20,000 around Vegas at risk of any muggers’, which would have sounded more believable. Benny decides he’s going to arrange for his goons to attack Abby:

“I’m considering teaching Mick a lesson, and I’m curious just how lucky you are, kiddo.”

Travis has something to say about that:

“I hope you know, Benny, that when I take out your men, I mean no disrespect. But I’m in love with this girl, and I can’t let you hurt her.”

Nice. Gotta say, I like playing-it-cool Travis a whole lot better than gratuitously-violent Travis. Benny, by this point, is finding the whole thing amusing. He tells Travis what to expect fight-wise from each of his goons (one’s got a knife, the other’s never lost a fistfight). The goons attack, and, of course, Travis takes out both of them because he is Just That Good and apparently fighting his brothers as a child fully qualifies him to take out a best-of-the-best Mafia fighter.

Benny promptly sees an opportunity for a deal; if Travis takes Goon 2’s place in the fight he was meant to have the next day, which he’s now in no shape for, Benny will forgive Abby’s father the rest of the debt. Travis is totally up for this. They go out, meet Shep and America, and go back to the hotel where Travis showers off the blood and they get the other two caught up on events. America points out the obvious:

“This is ridiculous! Why are we helping Mick, Abby? He threw you to the wolves! I’m going to kill him!”

But Travis still wants to go ahead with the fight, having found that the one he’s just had was a superb outlet for his anger. He is, apparently, going to be fighting someone called Brock McMann, of whom both he and Shepley have heard:

“No way. No fucking way, Trav. The guy’s a maniac!”

Travis is fine with the plan as he’s doing it for Abby. Abby doesn’t want him to, but Trav retorts that he doesn’t want her going to dinner with her ex-boyfriend, so

“[…] I guess we both have to do something unpleasant to save your good-for-nothing father.”

And we’re at the end of another chapter. Nice to have some plot moving along finally, even if it did contain some pretty massive holes.

Walking Disaster, Chapter 19

This is a chapter-by-chapter review of problematic romance novel ‘Walking Disaster’ by Jamie McGuire. Posts in the series will all be linked back to the initial post, here.

This was initially a companion series to the magnificent Jenny Trout‘s review of the original novel, ‘Beautiful Disaster’. Jenny has since stopped her review, not wanting to give McGuire any further publicity in the wake of her attempts to run for office.

 

Chapter Nineteen: Daddy’s Home

Well, that sounds ominous.

Friday, the day of the date party, three days after Abby smiled about the new couch and then minutes later turned to whiskey over my tats.

That sentence took me a minute to decipher. As far as I can make out, it’s McGuire’s attempt to skip through some stuff from ‘Beautiful Disaster’ without having to go to the trouble of writing the scene, and either it hasn’t occurred to her that some of her readers won’t have read ‘Beautiful’ or she just didn’t care. The last chapter of ‘Walking Disaster’ did mention Travis buying a new couch (I forgot about his habit of having his five-minute stands on the old one and thus missed the fact that this was meant to be a New Start for the New Travis and skipped it), but I have no idea whether ‘turned to whiskey’ is meant to be some bizarre version of ‘turned to mush’ or whether it’s that she turned to drink over the stress of having Travis swear undying love to her in a gushy tattoo. Look, McGuire, if you want to write a different-POV version, write it; don’t just skip chunks when you get bored.

(five minutes later…)

Oooookaaaaay, just checked out the corresponding bit in ‘Beautiful Disaster’…

(several days later)

and have thus given myself a lot of extra stuff to type. Since the best answer to ‘Where do I start?’ seemed to be ‘By leaving this hot mess for another day; indeed, for many other days’, I went to bed.

Working through this:

1. Somewhat to my surprise, since it involves someone actually having an appropriate response, my latter explanation was correct and Abby did in fact turn to whiskey over the stress of Travis’s lovey-dovey tattoos. Not only does she recognise this is a bad idea when they’re so early in their relationship, she’s also worried over the fact he did this right after finding out who her father was and thus might be more interested in Mick Abernathy’s daughter than in Abby. Good for you, Abby!

2. Travis, unfortunately, is determined to brush Abby’s concerns aside. He also tries telling her that he was just passing by the tattoo place and decided to go in and get it done, which we flat-out know is a lie since we know from his conversation with Shepley last chapter that he planned this in advance.

3. For those curious about what the tats actually were; he got ‘Pigeon’ tattooed on his wrist (you know, the nickname he invented for Abby that she hated, so now she’s stuck with looking at it every time she sees his wrist), and ‘I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine’, (a line from the Song of Solomon in the Bible) tattooed along his ribs in Hebrew. The latter is the tattoo that he referred to in the last chapter of ‘Walking’ as ‘What I always said I would do if I met the right girl’. Uh, nice attempt at a retcon, McGuire, but I haven’t actually forgotten that back in Chapter Three he was insisting he wasn’t ever going to get that hung up on anyone, not to mention all that vile misogyny in the early chapters; I’m not buying this retcon of Trav as always having secretly been a romantic at heart. The romance in this gesture is, of course, also rather thoroughly negated by his determination to disregard Abby’s wishes or feelings in the matter, so, alas, I cannot get any warm mushy feels from it.

But alsooooo….

4. In the process of looking this up, I found that McGuire had once again left an entire chunk out of the story when writing up ‘Walking’. This involved Abby challenging Parker over the fact that he’d been trying to shit-stir between her & Travis with the openly declared intention of getting her to come back to him. Parker isn’t even embarrassed about that and just makes a slut-shamey joke about Abby clearly not being so shiny and new any more.

5. Oh, yes, and Abby and Trav are busy being the get-a-room couple in lectures, and after the showdown with Parker skip a lecture to screw in an empty lecture hall, and As Foretold By The Troutian Prophecy this is treated as all just so cuuuute and romantic.

Great. I started hoping I could get through this more quickly, and it’s taken me forever to get past the first sentence. Though I suppose that’s only because McGuire left so much stuff out, so if she’d put it all in then I’d probably have taken even longer over it, so small mercies.

Aaaaanyway, where the hell were we…

The girls were gone doing what girls do on the day of date parties

Because they’re girly girl girls whose actions all fall into the same category, obviously, because they’re giiiirrrrrrls. Travis, meanwhile, is really nervous about something and doesn’t know what, so he’s had a couple of drinks because apparently he hasn’t learned anything about maladaptive coping skills. (To be fair, he is a nineteen-year-old student so this bit’s realistic.) He’s also waiting on the steps in front of the apartment for Toto to do his business, so nice to know McGuire’s remembered Toto again. Toto produces, and Trav picks him up and goes back inside, so I guess scooping up the dog muck that has just been left right outside a (I assume) shared apartment building is not a thing Travis does. Lovely.

Travis spells out for us that he’s still anxious Without Apparent Cause:

The date party would be my first, yes, and I was going with my girlfriend for the first time, but the knot in my stomach was from something else. Something I couldn’t quite put my finger on. As if something terrible was lurking in the immediate future.

Y’know, I kind of like my foreshadowing without the anvil, but whatever.

Travis and Shepley have arranged for the apartment to be filled with bouquets for the girls, thus fitting the traditional toxic relationship pattern of making big grand romantic gestures without underlying healthy romantic patterns. As we see a few minutes later, when Travis complains again about Abby’s skirt being too short and her dress being too low-cut in the back. Though on this occasion she actually manages to persuade him to let her keep it on for the evening, so… that’s actually something.

They go to the party. Somebody called Brad Pierce notices Travis’s wrist tattoo:

“Dude, you got your girl’s name on your wrist? What in the hell possessed you to do that?” Brad said.

He doesn’t have Abby’s name on his wrist, he has the word ‘Pigeon’. Bit odd that Brad’s jumping straight to assuming it’s Abby’s name.

Travis and Abby dance. She tells him she’s hopelessly in love with him and he makes a speech that would indeed have been beautifully romantic if we hadn’t already seen all the toxicity.

After a few songs and one hostile, yet entertaining moment between Lexie and America

(sigh) All right, all right, I’ll bite… (back to copy of ‘Beautiful)

[Abby and Trav are groping each other while dancing]

“I guess we know what the appeal is,” Lexie sneered from behind us.

America spun, stomping toward Lexie on the warpath. Shepley grabbed her just in time.

“Say it again!” America said. “I dare you, bitch!”

Lexie cowered behind her boyfriend, shocked at America’s threat.

“Better get a muzzle on your date, Brad,” Travis warned.

One, thanks for that lovely bit of misogyny in the last line there. Two, anyone remember America’s ‘Vegas threw up on a flock of vultures’ sneer and how nobody seemed to object to that? But heaven forfend Lexie say that Abby and Trav’s attraction seems to be sexual. Can’t have anyone suggesting that perhaps their attraction is sexual even when they’re making it beyond obvious that it is.

Anyway, back to ‘Walking’. Trav and Abby go upstairs and out onto the balcony, where they catch Parker with his hand up a girl’s skirt. Parker gets his hand out quickly and they all do the awkward ‘so, how’ve you been?’ thing, and the girl (Amber, in case it ever comes up again) looks disgusted at meeting both of them because of course we have to establish that all other women except America are Abby’s enemies. Bleagh.

Anyway, Parker and Amber get out of there in a hurry and Abby and Travis stand there chatting, and Travis, referencing his new tattoo, says this:

“If it feels this good to have this on my arm, I can’t imagine how it’s going to feel to get a ring on your finger.”

“Travis…”

“In four, or maybe five years,” I said, inwardly cringing that I went that far.

To my genuine surprise, Abby actually responds sensibly to this.

Abby took a breath. “We need to slow down. Way, way down.”

“Don’t start this. Pidge.”

“If we keep going at this pace, I’m going to be barefoot and pregnant before I graduate. I’m not ready to move in with you, I’m not ready for a ring, and I’m certainly not ready to settle down.”

Excellent. Abby’s spotted what a bad idea it is to rush into assumptions about marriage at this point – even apart from Travis’s issues, they’re 19 and 20 and have only known each other a few months and are still in full on NRE! – and has set a clear-cut boundary about it.

So, of course Travis apologises for rushing and reassures her that he sees what she means and will back off and allow this to develop at a more sensible pace reacts like a pillock.

I gently cupped her shoulders. “This isn’t the ‘I wanna see other people’ speech, is it? Because I’m not sharing you. No fucking way.”

No, Travis, it’s the ‘You’re rushing far too fast and I’m setting some boundaries’ speech. Rather than respond to what Abby’s actually saying, you’re objecting to something she never said. This is an example of derailing. Oh, and strawmanning.

Abby insists she doesn’t want anyone else, and Travis asks her ‘What are you saying, then?’ because actually taking what she’s clearly saying at face value would obviously be too much to accept of him. Abby reiterates it, and at least Trav doesn’t try to strawman it this time, but he’s still not happy:

“It seems like we take one step forward and two steps back, Pidge.

No, Trav… you both took one step forward and then you tried to lunge about ten more steps forward without checking what she wanted and now you’re complaining because it turns out she doesn’t want to lunge forward with you.

Every time I think we’re on the same page, you put up a wall. I don’t get it … most girls are hounding their boyfriends to get serious, to talk about their feelings, to take the next step …”

“I thought we established that I’m not most girls?”

Because, as always, it’s vitally important to establish that Abby is Not Like Other Girls ™ and this is far more of a priority than questioning whether Travis is even right here. I mean, not that we have any reason to suspect that a raging misogynist whose contacts with women have consisted almost entirely of having quickies on the couch and then kicking them out might be wrong in his assumptions about what ‘most girls’ think, but I’m pretty sure there are plenty of nineteen-year-old college students of any gender who actually aren’t in a hurry to settle down permanently with one person.

Also, I’m now picturing Abby putting up a wall on a page, and thus have images of one of those 3D pop-up books.

Anyway, Trav asks where she sees this going and Abby says that when she thinks about her future she sees him, which is enough to placate him. They stand there and share a pleasant moment which is interrupted by America bursting in to warn Abby that her father now knows where she is. It seems he kept pestering Abby’s mother, who wouldn’t tell him, and he eventually got the idea of phoning America’s family, whereupon America’s father decided that he had ‘a right’ to know and told him. Many thumbs down for America’s father. Do not do this, people. If someone’s hiding from a family member there’s probably a very good reason why.

Abby panics at the idea of her father turning up. Travis promises to protect her. Abby runs out, desperate to get away from the party.

I had only heard about Mick Abernathy’s accolades as a poker player from my father. Watching Abby run like a frightened little girl made me hate any time my family wasted being in awe of him.

And thus I am actually in the rare position of approving wholeheartedly of something Travis thinks. Despite having grown up hearing about how awesome this guy is, when he sees how upset Abby is over this he does a 180o on the subject straight away. No ‘but he can’t be that bad!’, no ‘surely you should give him a chance…’ no ‘but what a cool poker player he is!’; just straight into believing and accepting Abby’s word on the matter. I honestly think this is the first time Travis has done something I actively like.

Anyway, as they’re charging out, America spots Mick Abernathy, who is described as ‘an older, slovenly man, unshaven and dirty to the point where he looked like he smelled’. He’s showing a photo to a group of people who are nodding at it, so the implication apparently is that he’s looking for Abby and they’re confirming that she was at the party.

Abby promptly changes tack on the whole trying-to-avoid-him thing and instead storms up to him to ask what he’s doing there and tell him to get out. The answer to the first question is, apparently, that he’s trying to hit her up for money. Despite that, the first thing he says to her, while looking at her dress and making disapproving noises, is “Well, well, Cookie. You can take the girl out of Vegas – ” Am I reading that wrong or did he just start out by slut-shaming the person he’s about to ask for a colossal favour?

It transpires that Mick owes $25,000 to someone called Benny, who is apparently the sort of person you really don’t want to be in debt to if you want to keep all your limbs, and he’s come to get the money from his teenage daughter, because, hey, let’s stay classy… and he can’t even manage to be polite to her or her boyfriend while he’s doing this:

Mick’s eyes rolled over me, from my face to my shoes. “Who’s this clown?”

To which Travis responds with ‘I can see, now, why a smart guy like yourself has been reduced to asking your teenage daughter for an allowance’, thus doubling the occasions so far in this book in which I have liked something he’s done. Travis, you are on a roll here; keep up the good work.

Abby admits to having $11,000, which she apparently made by betting on Travis’s fights. When? She went to one fight that we heard about. I looked back and Travis mentioned having a couple more fights in the time Abby was staying at the apartment for the bet, so she could have bet on those. Since Travis is supposedly superb at fighting, the odds on him wouldn’t give her a huge return for each sum of money she bet. To make $11,000 in three fights, wouldn’t she have had to have massive amounts of stake money to start with? Also, how much is Adam taking in entry fees in order to be able to take bets with that kind of likely payout?

Anyway, Mick reckons she’ll be able to double that in a weekend (by playing poker, I assume), and thus bail him out. Abby makes the mistake of trying to argue a rearguard action instead of just giving him a hard no:

“It’ll clean me out, Mick. I have to pay for school,” Abby said, a tinge of sadness in her voice.

“Oh, you can make it back in no time,” he said, waving his hand dismissively.

Father of the year, clearly. On the plus side, it makes a very nice change for the slimeball to be the designated slimeball rather than the designated love interest.

Travis continues his run of actual likeability by pointing out to Abby that she doesn’t have to give him anything. Mick tries some shitty guilt trip about how it’s the least Abby can do because, supposedly, he wouldn’t be in this mess if not for her:

America slapped his hand away and then shoved him. “Don’t you dare start that shit again, Mick! She didn’t make you borrow money from Benny!”

Mick glared at Abby. The light of hatred in his eyes made any connection with her as his daughter disappear. “If it weren’t for her, I woulda had my own money. You took everything from me, Abby. I have nothin’!”

Abby tells him she’ll get him the money by Sunday, but this is the last time; from now on, he’s to stay away from her. Yup, I’m sure he’ll listen to that the next time he’s got himself in too deep with the wrong people. They head to the car, and:

America sighed. “Pack your bags, boys. We’re going to Vegas.” She walked toward the Charger, and Shepley and I stood, frozen.

“Wait. What?” He looked to me. “Like Las Vegas, Vegas? As in Nevada?”

(I now want someone to say ‘As in the ‘threw up on a flock of vultures’ analogy from the first time you all went to the Red together.‘ Sadly, no-one does.)

“Looks that way,” I said, shoving my hands in my pockets.

“We’re just going to book a flight to Vegas,” Shepley said, still trying to process the situation.

“Yep.”

So, they get in the car ready to make tracks for Vegas, the implication being that Abby’s going to try to win the money playing poker. I predict that this plan will work perfectly well and make her look even sexier to Travis into the bargain, because McGuire does not care what lessons she gives young people about sensible behaviour. Wait, no; the next chapter is called ‘You Win Some, You Lose Some’, so maybe Abby’ll just lose all her money. Anyway, chapter ends.

A New Year’s Update

As people might or might not have noticed, I’ve barely been around for the past several months. I’m pleased to say that there is a positive reason for this; after almost a decade of knowing the marriage was over, and thanks to a great deal of financial and practical support from my mother, I have finally been in a practical position to leave my husband. So, we are currently separated and I hope to sort out the divorce in the coming year.

We split up over what might be called irreconcilable differences. The difference in this case was that he thought it was all right to be constantly critical of me and regularly blow up over little things, and I didn’t. As differences go, that one is pretty irreconcilable. For various practical reasons there was a huge delay between me realising that the marriage was over in all but name and actually being able to leave. This was not a good situation, but not as bad as you might be imagining, as a) I knew I would find a way to get out eventually and b) about half way through the decade of time that all this took up, I finally hit the point where things were bad enough that I was ready to get the hell out of there absolutely regardless of what it took and what the practical difficulties were and, what do you know, when I told him I was going to leave him it suddenly turned out that actually he could bring himself to make long-term changes in the way he treated me. How ’bout that. After that, the marriage was bearable enough for me to stay for the remaining years until the situation with our children was such that I was in a better position to leave.

Anyway, this August I managed it. I’m living in rented accommodation for the time being, with our younger child (now 17); my husband is still in our house with the 20-year-old. The eventual plan is to put our house on the market after quite a bit of prepatory work has been done and to buy separate places with the proceeds. There is still a tremendous amount to sort out both literally and metaphorically, but I’m ending this year in a much better place (also both literally and metaphorically) than that in which I started it, and I feel that, whatever else I have or haven’t done, I’ve accomplished the most important thing I had to do this year.

Quite open to questions if anyone has any. Either way, I wish you all an upcoming year of positive things, even in the face of all the odds.

LGBTQ+ People Are Not Going Back

This post is part of a blogging protest arranged by Julia Serano, in response to not only Republican transphobia but – horribly – Democrat enablement and caving to the bullies. More details at the link, but the short version is that 1. a trans woman has just been elected as the first transgender member of Congress, 2. a Republican Congresswoman who apparently isn’t interested in spending her time doing the actual job she was elected to do has instead devoted herself to posting unbelievable numbers of transphobic tweets and trying to bar this woman from the women’s bathrooms, and 3. most of the Democrats just seem to be… nodding their heads and OK-ing this?

(Sorry; this stuff is so freaking depressing I can’t even face looking up the names of the people concerned right now. I just want to get this post up before the deadline.)

Anyway, Serano’s suggestion is that today – Tuesday, 3rd December – as many people as possible use their blogs, podcasts, or what have you to put up a post with the above title speaking out against transphobia and homophobia. (Yes, that’s why a bunch of posts with the same title are showing up on the FTB menu right now.) Trans people, cis people, gay people, straight people. Anyone who finds this bigotry disgusting.

I’m going to have to keep this brief – even with time zones on my side, I’ve not got much time to get this up for the deadline – so please excuse the fact that this really isn’t going to be one of my most clearly written posts. I’m writing this because I have this shouldn’t-really-be-radical idea that people deserve respect and dignity and fair treatment regardless of sexuality or gender identity, and it seems that’s not going to happen without people being willing to speak out.

For my views on the whole transphobia-fuelled bathroom controversy, I refer you to the post I wrote on the topic back when Rowling came out as full-on transphobe. (I might add that in this case it’s reached a whole new level of egregiousness; the Republicans here aren’t even falling back on the hypothetical ‘but what if an abuser pretended to be a woman to get into the women’s toilets?’ but are attacking a specific person just for trying to use the bathroom while transgender and are doing so within a month of having voted a known sex abuser who has invaded women’s bathrooms for abuse purposes in as President. I mean, it really could not be more obvious that this is really all about ‘let’s point and sneer at the trans person’.

Anyway… this whole blogging action is meant to be directed at Democrat politicians who think it’s OK to back away from supporting a very vulnerable group who are facing horrendous attacks on their rights (not to mention, in many cases, physical attacks on themselves) Or, worse, not just to back away but to agree with the bigots. And I’m actually drawing a blank on what to say, because I feel that anyone who doesn’t already realise that this is a fundamentally shitty thing to do is probably not going to be convinced by anything I could say on the matter.

So, instead, I’m going to make a practical point: This isn’t even a good political strategy. The people who voted against you because of transphobia did so as part of an entire package of Libs Are Evil, and aren’t going to change their mind because you say a few transphobic things yourself. The ones who voted against you because of the economy don’t care. Politically speaking, transphobia just isn’t that much of a winner. Throwing trans people under the bus isn’t even going to get you that many voters in exchange for your souls.

I’ll leave Pastor Niemoller with the last word.