Walking Disaster, Chapter 22

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: Stalkery behaviour, non-consensual kissing, alcohol being encouraged as a coping mechanism.

Chapter Twenty-Two: Not Good For Anybody

The title is a callback to Megan’s comment to Trav at the end of the last chapter. I’m going to hazard a guess that the ratio of ‘angst over this’ vs. ‘try to do something constructive about it’ will be extremely high. Speaking of which: no, there is no mention of anyone having a word with Trav after his not-so-little outburst in the lecture, either to tell him off or to ask him whether he needs help.

Abby spends the next week staying out of Trav’s way, to the extent of missing her classes, which sounds like it sucks for her. America and Trav both decide it’s best if America stays out of this, so she spends her time in the dorm until Friday, when Shep tells Trav America is coming over and he is not allowed to bug her about Abby. He also advises Trav to eat something and take a shower, so it seems the breakup was even enough to hit ‘pause’ on the Incessant Showering.

We find out that Trav’s door still doesn’t close properly after he kicked it off his hinges and repaired it, so that keeps reminding him of the time Abby left him but came back to him, which I bother mentioning only because this sentence ends ‘…she came back to me not long after, leading to our first time’ despite the fact that she left and came back after their first time. Seriously, why can McGuire not keep track of basic stuff about her own plot?

Anyway, America comes round and when Travis is on his way back from the bathroom, having actually had the shower Shep advised him to have, he hears America’s phone go with Abby’s ringtone and starts eavesdropping. America offers to pick Abby up and take her somewhere for dinner and Trav seizes on the idea of going to the cafeteria to see whether Abby’s going to get dinner there. FFS, I am out of ways in which to say that stalking your ex is a terrible idea. It just… it’s a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad idea, all right?

Travis hangs around outside the cafeteria and, yup, Abby turns up and Travis emerges from the darkness where he was lurking. So, Abby is faced with her violent ex suddenly turning up late at night. Holy rape alarms, Batman, do not do that to people.

“Jesus, Travis! You scared the hell out of me!”

“If you would answer your phone when I call I wouldn’t have to sneak around in the dark.”

No, Travis, having things turn out the way you didn’t want does not somehow compel you to be an inconsiderate dick to the woman you’re claiming you love.

Abby tells him she’s going to get something to eat and will call him later, and he insists that they ‘have to talk’. And, although I would have loved to see her telling him ‘No, Travis, we really don’t’ and walking off… other than that, I was astonished to find myself really liking the way Abby handles things over the next couple of pages. She does stay and talk to him (and I suppose that’s understandable; he’s made it bloody clear he’ll keep stalking her), but she’s clear about not wanting him back. It doesn’t matter that he tells her he’s told Benny no, that he begs her, that he starts crying. She sticks to her guns.

A couple of gems:

“We are dysfunctional, Travis. I think you’re just obsessed with the thought of owning me rather than anything else.”

“That’s not true. I love you more than my life, Pigeon.”

“That’s what I meant. That’s crazy talk.”

I know, ablist insult… but great call-out otherwise.

“Okay . . . so what exactly is the order for you? Is it money, me, your life . . . or is there something that comes before money?”

Niiiiice.

It is also worth noting this response from Travis:

“I realise what I’ve done, okay? I see where you’d think that, but if I’d known that you were gonna leave me, I would have never . . . I just wanted to take care of you.”

Yes, if Travis had had the sense to realise he was pushing it far enough for Abby to leave over it, he wouldn’t have pushed that far. But what this shows us is that he was willing to override and brush aside her concerns and wishes as long as he believed he wasn’t going to lose her over it. And that means that he was fine with doing something he knew she really didn’t want as long as it didn’t have an impact on him.

Travis, having started crying, tries forcibly holding and kissing Abby because of course he’s back to his old playbook of trying to force something on her that she doesn’t want. She won’t go along with it:

Abby kept her mouth taut, but her body was lifeless. If I let her go, she would have fallen. “Kiss me!” I pleaded. “Please, Pigeon! I told him no!”

This is called sexual assault, Travis.

Abby pushes him away and shouts at him to let her go, and he grabs her wrist as she’s trying to walk away and keeps begging her on bended knee (literally). Abby pulls her hand away and walks off. YAY, ABBY.

Travis eventually manages to get himself up off the floor and back to his motorbike.

My mother’s words echoed in my ear. Abby was the girl I had to fight for, and I went down fighting. None of it was ever going to be enough.

If only his mother’s advice had instead been to treat the woman he wanted with enough respect to take her opinions seriously, he’d have been so much better off right now.

Trav’s brother Trenton pulls up and gets Trav to come with him for a drink instead of trying to drive his bike when he’s in that state. We find out that someone heard Trav hassling Abby and called Shep who called Trenton. Trenton proceeds to get Trav thoroughly drunk, but then does at least get him back to his apartment and onto the couch when he passes out drunk, so that’s… something? Trav wakes up and Shep tells him to get himself showered because they’re going out to get a new door for his room, then they’re going to study for Finals and get a takeaway. Can someone from the US tell me whether a college would have Finals at the end of the winter term? I’m used to them being a summer thing, but I don’t think even McGuire would make quite such a glaring mistake, so I’m guessing this is a US thing.

(We also get another time marker; it’s coming up to Thanksgiving. Since we know we’ve had Hallowe’en, that must make it November. I’d have called that autumn, but there’s legit wiggle room for opinion on that one, so for once Maguire has managed two timeline markers in a row that are actually consistent with each other.)

The days go by. Shep keeps studying with Trav to distract him. It’s an interesting, and probably realistic, contrast to the way that female friendships get portrayed in novels as involving a lot of emotional venting and verbal sympathising; Shep and Trenton are being there for Trav in their own ways, but those ways don’t involve Trav talking about how he’s feeling or the other two encouraging him to do so. The reason I noticed this is because, last year, my sister wrote a really thought-provoking book covering this subject. What she points out is that men actually are not socialised to talk about/vent about their feelings in the way that women are, and this is a very significant disadvantage to them. In one blog post she described it as ‘like some kind of soul compromising bargain from a Greek myth’ in which men get the power in society, but at the cost of something as fundamental as simple human connection. So, for once, the flaw here isn’t actually in Maguire’s writing; she’s accurately representing a flaw in society.

Anyway, Trav is avoiding telling the rest of his family about the breakup (and has got Trenton to promise not to tell them till after Thanksgiving), which gives him a problem; they’re expecting Abby to come for Thanksgiving and help Trav cook a turkey. Initially I assumed that this was something that had already been mentioned and that I’d blanked from my mind out of sheer lack of interest, but, on comparing the account in ‘Beautiful’, I realised that he’d asked her on the plane back from Vegas and she’d agreed at the time (and this had then been left out of ‘Walking’ because it was part of the conversation in which Travis was blatantly refusing to listen to Abby about not working for the Mob, and Maguire apparently didn’t want to repeat that conversation from Trav’s POV).

This raises the question of when he told his family about the plan, since Abby split up with him later that same evening before he’d had any chance to see them, but I suppose he could have texted them from the arrivals lounge in the airport, so at least this one time McGuire gets plausible deniability on screwing up the timeline. Anyway, for whatever reason, Trav’s family doesn’t know what’s happened. And he wants to keep it that way at least temporarily, as he can’t face the prospect of his dad giving him a hard time over how badly he screwed things up. So, they’re still expecting Abby to turn up with Trav.

You guessed it; Trav wants to persuade Abby to come for Thanksgiving and not tell anyone about the breakup. (He’ll tell them afterwards! Honest!) So, he meets her outside class the day before Thanksgiving and pours on the emotional manipulation:

“[…] Thomas is flying in, and Tyler took off work. Everyone’s looking forward to seeing you… We haven’t had all of us there for Thanksgiving in years. They all made an effort to be there, since I promised them a real meal. We haven’t had a woman in the kitchen since Mom died and . . .”

“That’s not sexist or anything.”

“That’s not what I meant, Pidge, c’mon. […]”

And yet, Travis, it’s still what you said. Somehow we still have a situation where the grown-up parent in the family hasn’t been able to figure out a Thanksgiving meal in all these years, and nor have the various offspring who are now grown men themselves, but they’re all expecting their 18-year-old guest to cook a massive meal for them. I’m sure it’s a total coincidence that they’re all male and Abby’s female.

Anyway, Abby begrudgingly agrees, though she does have the sense to make him promise first ‘that this isn’t some stunt to try and get back together’. It’s not clear why she does agree, other than Because Plot; I checked ‘Beautiful’, and, once again, we get Abby’s description of what’s happening but little in the way of internal reaction. Does she feel bad for Travis? For his family? Is she secretly tempted to spend one more day with him? Is she torn between that and worrying about whether this’ll just give him fresh encouragement and make it all the more difficult to get rid of him again? Any of these would be plausible, but we don’t get to find out.

She and Travis then somehow get themselves into a wires-crossed situation. She says she’ll have to get the turkey into the oven by 6 am (really? I have managed to get through my life to date without ever actually cooking a turkey, and I do know that they take several hours, but surely they don’t take that long) and that’ll mean him picking her up at 5. Travis eagerly offers to take her round the same night so that she can stay overnight. She makes it clear that that’s a hard no… and he still somehow manages to misunderstand when she says ‘See you at 5’ and turn up to pick her up at 5 pm that same day. It doesn’t even seem to be a ‘misunderstanding’, or at least not the way McGuire wrote it; he genuinely does not seem to have realised what she meant.

Anyway, you can probably guess where this one is going. Trav is reluctantly about to tell his father that they won’t be round till the next morning after all, and Abby gives in and goes along with him ready to stay overnight. I assume this is going to be an ‘only one bed’ scenario. Siiiggggghhhh. Anyway, chapter ends there.

 

 

 

 

‘Deciphering the Gospels Proves Jesus Never Existed’: Chapter 10, part 6

‘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

While this is the sixth (and last) post addressing this chapter, it’s the third of three posts on the specific topic of Josephus’s mention of ‘Jesus called Christ’ in the middle of an incident related in Antiquities 20. I’d recommend reading all three posts in sequence, so, if you haven’t already done so, the first on the ‘Jesus called Christ’ topic is here and the second is here.

In wrapping up and summarising the previous post, I pointed out that by far the most likely reason why Josephus’s works contain the mention of ‘Jesus called Christ’ is because this is indeed what Josephus wrote, and that the various alternative explanations that Price tries to give are, for one reason or another, highly unlikely. That being so, why is Price so reluctant to accept this phrase as being genuine to Josephus?

Of course, the obvious reason is that if Price can’t find a way to explain that phrase away it puts a huge hole in his theory. I don’t think it’s entirely unreasonable to theorise that perhaps that’s his main reason for trying so hard to believe in improbable alternative explanations. However, for completeness, I’m going to go through the reasons he’s actually stated and give my responses.

Nothing in this chapter or the passage has any relationship to “Jesus Christ,”

… you mean, apart from the literal relationship that the passage states that one of the people mentioned has to Jesus called Christ? The James mentioned is being identified by his relationship with his brother, Jesus called Christ. What part of that does Price feel doesn’t have any relationship to Jesus called Christ?

and the use of “Christ” as an identifier is quite odd, for Josephus never explains what this term means.’

Price seems to be completely misunderstanding identifiers. Identifiers were the equivalent of our use of surnames; they were ways of specifying which of many possible people of a given first name was the one to which the speaker or writer was referring. As such, writers would no more expect to have to explain the backstory of identifiers than we would expect to explain the meanings of people’s surnames when we introduce them. (Hands up; anyone here found it strange that in my many mentions of Price, it at no time even occured to me to explain that the surname ‘Price’ derives from ‘ap Rhys’? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?) In fact, we see this elsewhere even in Josephus, when at the end of the first chapter of Antiquities 20 he refers to ‘Joseph called Cabi’ without ever explaining what ‘Cabi’ means or why the Joseph in question was called this.

One argument against this being authentic is that Josephus doesn’t use the term Christos anywhere else, so it does not appear likely that this is original.

Why? Phrases can be quite identifiable (such as ‘called Christ’ appearing almost nowhere in Christian literature other than quotes from non-Christians, meaning that the use of that particular phrase indicates a strong likelihood of a non-Christian author). However, the most likely reason why Josephus wouldn’t use the word Kristos anywhere else is because no-one else at the time was well-known as being called Kristos and so the need never came up. (To go back to the previous example: Joseph also never elsewhere uses the term Cabi, but I don’t believe this has led anyone to conclude that his mention of ‘Joseph called Cabi’ is an interpolation.)

There are also no other examples in the works of Josephus of identifying someone in the manner that is used here if “who was called Christ” were talking about a different person from Jesus son of Damneus (i.e., mentioning the person being related first, and then the subject after, with an explanation of who the person being related is in between).

Since there are also apparently no examples in Josephus’s works of using identifiers in the bizarre way Price is trying to claim (either using an identifier only on the second mention of someone rather than the first, or using two different identifiers for the same person without clarifying that they refer to the same person), the ‘Josephus never does this elsewhere!’ argument doesn’t hold up the way Price wants it to. It did, however, make me realise another thing that Price doesn’t seem to have considered; that the argument that a Christian scribe changed the line here also works perfectly well for explaining how a sentence that did originally contain the phrase ‘Jesus called Christ’ could have ended up in the form we had today.

Let’s hypothesise, for example, that Josephus’s original text did have this mention, but written with the more expected ordering of ‘and brought before them James, the brother of Jesus called Christ, and some others’. A Christian scribe copying this, his mind on the importance of Jesus, then unthinkingly changes the order to put Jesus first: ‘the brother of Jesus called Christ, James by name’. Hey presto; a scenario that solves the problem of why Josephus would put Jesus’s before James’s, does so without requiring us to hypothesise that Josephus did something more unlikely, and does so using an mechanism (change made by a Christian scribe) that Price himself thinks could easily have happened.

Or, alternatively, the suggestion of a marginal note. Maybe Josephus only knew that one of the executed people was the brother of that strange rabbi who started a cult years back, and thus the line he originally wrote was ‘and brought before them the brother of Jesus called Christ, and some others’, and then, some years down the line, a Christian scribe (or even a non-Christian scribe who happened to know the story) added ‘James by name’ as a marginal note that another scribe later copied into the text. Since Price is happy with the idea that a marginal note could have been copied into the text, why not hypothesise that it was copied into a text that originally included the ‘brother of Jesus called Christ’ line?

Price, of course, is not going to want to consider either of those possible suggestions, because he’s only interested in explanations that let him conclude that Josephus wasn’t talking about Jesus the founder of Christianity. He wants to be able to explain this line away and go on with claiming that no historians of the time ever mentioned Jesus so that he can further claim that this supports mythicism. But, unfortunately for Price’s argument, the evidence does still point to this being an original line from Josephus that most likely referred to the person that Price is trying to claim never existed.

The other arguments against this being original deal with the structure of the sentence, the subject matter of the passage, the fact that even if Jesus Christ existed he would be an odd person for Josephus to use as an identifier for someone else, especially by brotherhood, and the fact that if this were talking about “James the Just” (which it almost certainly isn’t for reasons we shall see), then this James himself would have been more famous than Jesus at this point in time, so this association would have made no sense, as James himself, according to Christian legend, was a community leader and well-known person, though there is no reference to him in the non-Christian literature (unless this is a reference to him).

I’m quoting this sentence in its entirety because I cannot resist pointing out the irony of arguing that Josephus wouldn’t have used a cumbersome sentence. Yes, clearly we can work from the assumption that writers would avoid using cumbersome sentences… oh, wait. Anyway, let’s break it down:

The other arguments against this being original deal with the structure of the sentence,

As above.

the subject matter of the passage,

I think this is another attempt on Price’s part to claim that Jesus had nothing to do with the subject of the passage apart from, y’know, the fact that he was apparently the brother of the main person executed and very plausibly the indirect reason why this group was in trouble in the first place. If so, it’s about as logical as asking why the second Jesus was identified as Jesus ben Damneus when Damneus had nothing to do with the passage. Jesus’s name is being used as an identifier of one of the people who is involved in the subject matter of the passage, and this was a normal way for people of that time to write.

the fact that even if Jesus Christ existed he would be an odd person for Josephus to use as an identifier for someone else, especially by brotherhood,

Why?

and the fact that if this were talking about “James the Just” (which it almost certainly isn’t for reasons we shall see), then this James himself would have been more famous than Jesus at this point in time, so this association would have made no sense, as James himself, according to Christian legend, was a community leader and well-known person, though there is no reference to him in the non-Christian literature (unless this is a reference to him).

James would have been known for being Jesus’s brother, and he was a community leader in the community founded by his brother. Identifying him by his brother makes perfect sense; for those of Josephus’s readers that knew of him, it would have been in the context of being Jesus’s brother.

The real question, however, is if this is James “the brother of Jesus Christ” of the Gospels, and Christians claim that the Gospels are true, then that would mean that this James would have to be in the line of David as well, and thus, if anything, it would have made more sense to qualify James by his father, Joseph, who would had to have been in the line of David, and thus would have been seen as prestigious name worth mentioning.

Oh, come on; this doesn’t even make sense from the Christian point of view. Supposedly Jesus was not only in the line of David but also the culmination of it as the awaited king; identifying James by him would have made perfect sense. It makes even less sense from the skeptic point of view, since the whole highly contradictory claim to the line of David is pretty clearly a retcon by people already convinced of Jesus’s messiahship.

Likewise, if this was “James the Just,” then why not identify him by his supposed prestigious position in society, instead of a link to being the bother [sic] of Jesus?

Because his prestigious position a) seems to have existed only within the nascent Christian movement and b) was because of being the brother of Jesus.

Anyway, that seems to exhaust Price’s attempts at explaining why he doesn’t think the phrase could be genuine. He goes on to put forth the arguments for alternative sources of the phrase that I covered in the previous post, and then to the conclusion of the whole chapter:

 

Chapter conclusion

…in which he makes one of his typical leaps from claiming something might have happened a certain way to declaring that it definitely did:

With all of this, we can see that there are certainly no solid independent attestations to the existence of Jesus Christ in the non-Christian literature. Modern scholarship recognizes that the Testimonium Flavianum is the only reasonably possible independent witness to Jesus Christ in the non-Christian literature, and there is nothing else aside from that one passage that could even claim to confirm his existence.

This is, quite frankly, absolute rubbish. Modern scholarship certainly has not discarded the Tacitean passage or the ‘called Christ’ line, and, whatever shade Price tries to throw, the idea that these passages aren’t even claims to Jesus’s existence is just plain silly. What we have is what we’d expect for someone who was a real figure with some relatively minor influence two thousand years ago; a couple of mentions by historians. I realise that’s inconvenient for Price’s theory, but, since he can’t produce anything solid by way of alternative explanations, he’s stuck with the fact that, within decades of the time Jesus is said to have lived, non-Christian historians are at least mentioning his life. Which is hard to explain under mythicism, but about what we’d expect to see from a Jesus who actually existed.