‘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 11: The Mythical Cast Of Early Christian History

This chapter is about the large number of clearly fictional stories invented around members of the early church, including several stories of saints who do seem to have been invented wholesale. Most of the detail isn’t of any particular interest to me, so this chapter will hopefully be a relatively quick one to review (joins in collective huge sigh of relief after my four-month six-part marathon through the previous chapter). I’ve gone through and picked out particular points that I wanted to either refute or comment generally on, so this post might be a bit of a patchwork quilt (of… points? Possibly I should rethink that metaphor.)

The general point

Price’s implied overall message is, of course, that with the Christian church’s huge history of inventing stories it’s just a step further to believe they invented Jesus as well. The problem with that is, as ever, motive. It’s easy to see why a nascent church that did believe in an earthly Jesus would want more stories about his family members, or why they might want to invent stories about saints and martyrs who exemplified ideals of Christian living. It’s a lot harder to see why Mark would have wanted to invent an earthly version of the being his group supposedly believed to be divine, or why so many other people would have expanded on the story in the way the other gospel authors did, or, for that matter, how the original group would have started believing in a heavenly immaterial (yet supposedly crucified) Messiah in the first place.

In accordance with the prophecy…

This is a response to a tangential point that Price mentions in passing:

The driving factor behind the rapid rise of Christianity was the belief that prophecies proved the religion to be true, unlike all other religions, which had no substantiated proof.

Hold up there. Firstly, the evidence doesn’t actually support Christianity having had a rapid rise; the figures I’ve seen are more in line with annual growth of only a few per cent at best. (Or, to put it another way, the ‘rapid rise of Christianity’ actually does fall into the category of ‘imagined by the Christian church’.) Secondly, the overlap between ‘people who want to join a religious group’ and ‘people looking for substantiated proof’ tends to be pretty low even now and was likely to be even lower in the time period of which we’re talking. I don’t think that Venn diagram is quite two separate circles, but there’s not much overlap. Of course, people who already are or who want to be Christians typically like the idea that their religion can be ‘proved’ to be the truth, but that’s not the same as that factor being the original attraction.

There’s something about Mary

Price assures us, with his usual blithe certainty, that Jesus’s mother Mary never existed and was entirely fictional. While that would indeed be the natural conclusion if he actually did turn out to be correct in his firm belief that Jesus never existed, Price is in fact using different reasoning. He points to the numerous fictional stories about Mary and the lack of any solid information about her (true) and says that some of the stories about her were based on the goddess Diana (not impossible, but I’ve long since stopped regarding Price as any kind of accurate source of information, so that one could be either true or false and I’m not that interested either way). However, being Price, he also goes down a couple of lines of ‘reasoning’ that are bizarre enough to point out:

If Jesus had an earthly mother who was still alive, then why didn’t Paul visit her?

Uh, flip that around; why on earth would Paul have visited her? Not only was Paul dedicating his life to evangelism, but we’ve already established he wasn’t interested even in Jesus, let alone his family members.

Why wasn’t the early Christian community caring for Mary?

Price makes really strange assumptions. We not only have no idea whether or not they were caring for Mary, we also have no idea whether she even needed it. After all, we’re told that she has a husband and multiple other children, on top of which we don’t even know whether she even reached the point of needing care or was simply someone who remained independent and self-caring until her dying day.

Paul never says anything about taking care of the mother of the Lord or anything like this.

Paul does indeed focus throughout his letters on the topic of evangelism and the answers to theological questions, not on any individual’s pastoral care. Your point would be?

What happened to Mary when she died? Why wasn’t her grave venerated? For that matter, where is her grave? According to later legend, Mary’s body ascended into heaven removing all earthly traces of her.

Price is, of course, trying to imply here that the absence of a known grave is evidence that Mary never existed. However, he’s given himself a problem here. We also don’t know where the graves of Peter and Paul are, but we have primary source evidence that both of them existed (actual letters from Paul, one of which briefly mentions his meeting with Peter). So, unless we go full rabbit-hole conspiracy theory on the origin of Christianity, both those two existed. In fact, Price even says as much in the chapter, telling us that ‘there must have been some real person named Peter (or Simon or Cephas) that the apostle Paul really met and really knew’. In other words, we can’t deduce from the absence of a known grave that the person in question never existed.

And the biggest problem…

Near the end of the chapter, Price stumbles right over a huge flaw in his theory without even noticing. I’ll add emphasis to this quote to make it clearer:

The fabrication of early Christian history is little different from the fabrication of early Greek and Roman history, and the development of Greek and Roman mythology. Christian mythology was in fact developed by the exact same cultures that produced Greek and Roman pagan mythology. What does make the mythological development of early Christian “history” different, however, is the speed at which the mythology was officially historicized, which was likely a product of the relatively rapid communication of the times.

The rate at which the Jesus-as-historical-figure story spread is one of the huge flaws in mythicist theories that mythicists typically gloss over. Typically, the stories of mythical figures follow one of these two patterns:

1. In cases where the mythical figure supposedly lived in relatively recent times (compared to the time when the stories of this figure first arose) then stories about them are normally very limited and lacking in any biographical background. Think William Tell or Ned Ludd; they originated as stories of near-contemporary figures, but their stories both consist of variations on single anecdotes.
2. Alternatively, mythical figures who have detailed biographical accounts about them are normally said to have lived in the distant past, centuries earlier. Think King Arthur, or the Greek or Roman heroes.

So, mythical figures will normally have either a supposed very recent existence or a very detailed existence, or sometimes neither… but not both.

Over years of challenging mythicists on this point, I have yet to be given any examples in which people have come to believe in a mythical figure who combined a supposed life within the past few decades with a supposed detailed biography. Or, to turn that around the other way, in all the cases we know of in which detailed stories arise about a person who supposedly lived some time in the few decades before the stories got started, those stories were being told about a real person.

Of course, the stories themselves can be very exaggerated or entirely invented; mythic elaboration of a real person is a well-known phenomenon. But I have yet to hear any known example in which people have told supposedly-true detailed biographical stories about someone who supposedly lived in the recent past and yet the person turned out to be entirely mythical. In other words, what we have with Jesus’s story is a pattern that is normally associated with a mythicised historical figure rather than with an entirely mythical figure.

Price’s explanation that this pattern was simply ‘a product of the relatively rapid communication of the times’ doesn’t stand up to examination. After all, communication over the past couple of centuries has become phenomenally more rapid. If rapid communication was actually the explanation, we’d see this sort of pattern happening more and more often. Instead, we’re left with a situation where the Jesus story shows a pattern that would make it unique if Jesus was a mythical figure, but that fits well with the hypothesis that Jesus was a historical figure whose story was embroidered.

While that certainly isn’t conclusive in itself, it’s a point that ought to make us suspect from the start that Jesus’s story originated with a real live founder of the movement rather than an invented figure. And Price, as ever, gives us no good reason to think differently.