‘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:
- 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.
- 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.
If Jesus had an earthly mother who was still alive, then why didn’t Paul visit her?
Um…because he was a man, following a religion founded by a man, and didn’t particularly care about the Holy Man’s mom after she’d done her motherly duties?
Did either Romans or Judeans have a tradition of reverence for famous people’s mothers, comparable to the “Mom & Apple Pie” rhetoric we Americans are raised with? It kinda sounds like Price is judging the Apostles’ actions through a Hallmark-Card-American lens.
Also, if Jesus’s early followers were trying to push a set of glorifying myths, they’d want to steer clear of the mom who might, or might not, go along with the stories. It would be pretty awkward if Mary was present at a retelling of the Virgin Birth story, and she were to pipe up and say “Well, actually, there was this really nice boy who lived next door…”
Raging Bee@1,
Christianity certainly developed a tradition of reverence for Jesus’s mother, but at least according to wikipedia:
So, Christians had several centuries in which to forget where she was buried! What’s surprising is that, AFAIK, there are no sites claiming to be her grave now, like that claiming to be the site of Jesus’s birth.
@2: According to Catholic (and Orthodox) doctrine Mary wasn’t buried. That didn’t become Catholic dogma until 1950, but the tradition goes back to the Church Fathers. Wikipedia tells me that the tradition can be traced back to the 4th Century.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assumption_of_Mary#Assumption_versus_Dormition
KG @ # 2, citing that wikithing: The popularity of Mary as an individual object of devotion, however, only began in the fifth century…
A generation or two after Theodosius made Xianism mandatory, further incentivizing outreach to those pagan peasants (words from the same root).
Every pragmatic peasant knows full well that when it comes to fertility, growth, healing, etc, you need a good strong GODDESS.
Hence the deification of the closest-to-Jesus female character in the story without a story-hook prominent flaw. Had the purported cult-leader left a Hak Ja Han, Evita Peron, or Erika Kirk, we’d have heard about as much about Mary as we have about Paul’s mother.
Pierce R. Butler @4,
Evidence for this interesting hypothesis? To either support or refute it, you’d need to know a lot more about the history of early Christianity and the Roman Empire of late antiquity than I do
KG: I, for one, consider Pierce’s hypothesis quite plausible, given that we know that Christians did indeed assimilate and merge other tribes’ deities into their own pantheon (most often as “saints”). A practice early Christians learned from the Roman Empire. Jesus had a mother, whose story was already a prominent part of Bible lore, so anyone who needed to pitch Christianity to goddess-worshipping pagans* could talk about Mary and kinda-sorta-hint that Mary is something like this or that goddess so pagans should worship her (and her son) instead.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _
* No, ancient European peoples did NOT uniformly worship a single Goddess, or have matriarchal societies. It’s a LOT more complicated than that, as Prof. Ronald Hutton laboriously shows in The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles.
another stewart: I was told by my dad that Mary was taken to Heaven body AND soul when she died. It was called “Assumption.” Grade-school-me just sort of shrugged the story off and said “whatever,” because even back then I felt it didn’t make sense.
And the more I thought about it, the less sense it made. Like, why would Mary, and no other human resident of Heaven, not even Jesus, need her body up there? How would an organic body stay alive in the immaterial realm of Heaven (and not fall through the clouds)? What would she do with it that other good Christians didn’t get to do? Would it be her old-woman body, her seasoned-mother body, or her young-pure-Messiah-worthy body?
I’m betting there’s lots of Catholic priests and school-teachers wishing they’d never had to explain that story to inquisitive kids…
KG @ # 5 – Lawdy, I think I saw that expounded somewhere in a Euro history book decades ago, but can’t point to the source now.
A DuckDuckGo search for “history of Mariolatry” yields “It began in the early Christian era, influenced by pagan beliefs…”, but everything else that came up deals with doctrines ‘n’ dogma (dogmatrines?), and my religious history shelves are blocked off at present.
I did find this from a previously-unknown-to-me site called “atheistscholar.org”:
– but most of it focuses on parallelism with paganism, not co-optation. (Note that the author, one Mary C. Taylor, quotes Robert Price, James Frazer, Earl Doherty, et al, and apparently endorses Jesus mythicism from the get-go. Taylor has another lecture/post on Mary, but this deals more with the cults of virginity and motherhood, and female role models, than the fertility goddess aspect.)
Some of us enjoy Jesus-the-zombie jokes, but apparently his momma did it too:
Pierce R. Butler, Raging Bee,
It just struck me that people who wouldn’t dream of confidently asserting some more-or-less plausible notion in any area of science on the basis of nothing more than well-it-sounds-right, are quite happy to do so when it comes to history. Aron Ra does the same thing, so you’re in exalted company, Pierce.
KG @ # 9 – Aw, c’mon. You can do better than that, can’t ya?
When all you got is “making accusations on the basis of nothing”, on what basis are your accusations made?
KG: Pierce’s claims, and mine, are based on a good deal more than “well-it-sounds-right.” As stated on this blog they’re kinda simplified, but there is considerable history showing that early Christians, like most other people at that time (including the Roman Empire in which Christianity grew), tended to blend and merge other peoples’ gods and folktales with their own, and to trade and borrow ideas from each other continually. Just for one example, there’s a broad consensus that there was a Celtic goddess Brigid, who was assimilated into the Christian pantheon as St. Bridget. And then of course there’s all the holidays and folk customs that Christians adapted and made their own.
It’s also fairly well-known that one of the Protestants’ central grievances against the Catholic Church during the Reformation, was that the Church had become to “Pagan” — as in, they had assimilated too many indigenous Pagan beliefs and were straying from the One True Path. And again, we have the famous example of Oliver Cromwell supposedly banning all manner of beloved Christmas traditions, long permitted by the Church, for that very reason.
Pierce R. Butler@10,
Where is your quote from? But that aside, you said yourself that “I think I saw that expounded somewhere in a Euro history book decades ago, but can’t point to the source now.” If that’s not evidence from your own keyboard that your #4 was based on nothing more than well-it-sounds-right, I’m not sure what would be.
Raging Bee@11,
Yes, it’s plausible, as I said. That doesn’t justify stating as fact that the 5th century “popularity of Mary as an object of individual devotion” arose as Pierce describes @4:
It’s not actually clear exactly what Pierce is suggesting. Is it a conscious decision by the Church authorities to push Mariolatry in order to pacify the pagan peasants (try saying “pacify the pagan peasants” 20 times!), multiple local initiatives by proselytisers or priests in response to local conditions, a Mariolatrous cult spreading through the Church despite the hierarchy, or what? And could it not alternatively have been a side-effect of resolving one of the numerous doctrinal disputes about the “nature of Christ”: which of these doctrinal positions make his mother more important? Or changes in which gospels were fashionable – gMatthew and gLuke make Jesus’s human ancestry, and specifically his mother, much more prominent than gMark and gJohn – affecting how churches were decorated. I stress that I don’t know which of these scenarios, or others, contributed to this 5th century change*. And nor do you or Pierce. My hunch is that the evidence isn’t there to come to a firm conclusion, but it’s clear enough where you’d look for evidence – in early Christian texts, and art (which might or might not show similarities to near-contemporary pagan art, and might show a specific pattern of spread from an initial focus, or alternatively, that images of Mary appear or greatly increase over a wide area at the same time). Whether any relevant experts have done that work, I don’t know.
*It needn’t have been monocausal. And further research might even show that the apparent 5th century change actually happened more gradually, starting in the 3rd, or whatever.
KG @ # 12: Where is your quote from?
The link preceding it (“another lecture/post…”).
… I’m not sure what would be.
Must be rough to live with such uncertainty.
Is it a conscious decision by the Church authorities to push Mariolatry…
We have little detail on such things 16 centuries ago, but I suspect the priests/missionaries in the field had, &/or took, a fair degree of latitude.
… one of the numerous doctrinal disputes about the “nature of Christ”…
I did some history-of-early-xianism book-browsing the last couple of days; haven’t found anything specific to support or undermine my suggestion so far, but am taken aback by how many such histories don’t even have “Mary” (except for the Magdalene one) in their indexes.
… changes in which gospels were fashionable – gMatthew and gLuke make Jesus’s … mother, much more prominent than gMark and gJohn…
Sfaik, the texts of all four were pretty well standardized by the 5th century. Given the rarity of rural literacy then, the missionaries must’ve introduced their choice of “good news” to nearly all listeners for the first time.
Whether any relevant experts have done that work, I don’t know.
Mary C. Taylor offers multiple examples, though in an introductory way.
… the apparent 5th century change actually happened more gradually, starting in the 3rd, or whatever.
Certainly not impossible. Again, I don’t have documentation to hand, but gather that xianism remained a primarily urban creed for the first few centuries, while the countrypeople (“pagans”, “heathens”) were allowed to go their own traditional/animist way until Teddy-O decreed everybody had to dance to the same tune. Funny how little historical attention he gets compared to Connie…
My hunch is that the evidence isn’t there to come to a firm conclusion…
First, there seems to be more available information than you’re letting on. I mentioned Hutton, and there are plenty of other experts who’ve worked on this more than any of us.
Second, we don’t really need a “firm” or very specific conclusion regarding events that happened nearly two thousand years ago and weren’t well recorded. But we do have enough evidence to show a general trend, plus several plausible causes thereof.
… the apparent 5th century change actually happened more gradually, starting in the 3rd, or whatever.
It’s quite possible that various pagan peoples started taking up Mariolatry around the 3rd century, and by the 5th Church higher-ups noticed the trend and said “Hey, this Mary angle is working, let’s lean into it by making it official doctrine!” So, as you said, quite likely multi-causal.
Pierce R. Butler, Raging Bee,
I’d say neither of you has come close to justifiying an unhedged claim such as #4. And indeed, Raging Bee if anything undermines that claim by pointing out that Hutton argues “ancient European peoples did NOT uniformly worship a single Goddess, or have matriarchal societies.”
Pierce R. Butler@13,
Mary C. Taylor aka “atheistscholar”? It is to laugh. No-one who cites Carrier as an authority deserves to be taken seriously.