‘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 12: Conclusion and Commentary

Hooray! As you probably deduced from the title, we are actually at the final chapter. This won’t quite be the end because there’s then a list of questions from Price, but we are definitely in the home stretch here.

Price starts this chapter with telling us ‘Let’s review the case that has been presented’, although in fact he doesn’t review much of it. However, he does summarise the original part that has been the cornerstone of all the rest of his argument; his theory about gMark. So, let’s go over this.

The gospel of Mark: Price’s views and the reality

The case I have presented shows that a story we now call the Gospel of Mark was the first narrative that portrayed the life and deeds of Jesus on earth. […] It is clear that whoever wrote the Gospel called Mark intended that the story would be understood as fictional.

So clear, in fact, that almost every single person who’s read it from the time it was written until now has interpreted it as being about a real person who really lived on earth and had followers who became the origin of Christianity. Whatever Price’s thoughts on what gMark really did mean, I think he might do well to rethink that ‘clear’.

Of course, the reason Price believes in the face of all evidence that this is ‘clear’ is because he’s convinced that gMark was meant as fictional. So he now takes a minute to summarise his basic argument:

We can prove that the story is fictional because of the abundant use of literary references within the story. Virtually every scene in the Gospel called Mark is based on literary references to either the Hebrew scriptures or to the letters of Paul.

And on his firm belief in this claim, Price has piled all the rest of his argument. So let’s look at it.

Firstly, that ‘virtually every scene’ is a huge exaggeration. And when I say ‘exaggeration’, I do want to be clear that I mean just that. I am not trying to say that gMark doesn’t contain any literary references to the Hebrew scriptures; it’s long-since been well accepted by scholars that many passages in gMark absolutely are scriptural references. That much isn’t controversial at all. I also think it’s fair to say that the early church, Mark among it, was heavily and disproportionately influenced by Paul and that this also accounts for parts of the teaching in gMark. So, if Price had stuck with ‘Quite a bit of gMark is based on either the Jewish scriptures or or Paul’s letters’ then I would have no disagreement with that claim whatsoever. What I am disagreeing with, here, is the claim that these derivations account for not just some parts of gMark, but for ‘virtually every scene’.

The problem here is that Price’s requirements for the level of similarity needed for him to declare a scene to be based on a literary reference have been so slight and flimsy. For example, he’s claimed that the calling of the apostles is derived from Jeremiah 16, solely because both passages mention fishing and hunting. He’s claimed that Jesus’s teaching in Mark 7:20 – 23 must be derived from Galatians 5:16 – 21 just because both passages have a list of sins… even though it’s an almost completely different list of sins in a completely contradictory context.

When you look for similarities this minor between writings, of course you find them! Especially when the writings come from approximately the same cultural background, and the body of work in which you’re looking for these similarities is a very large one covering a wide range of topics. The fatal flaw in this argument of Price’s is that he shows no sign of having at any point considered the possibility of the similarities being coincidental; yet he’s set up comparisons so broad and vague that they make it virtually certain that we are, in fact, going to get coincidental similarities.

What we have, then, is a gospel in which some scenes are clearly derived from Hebrew scriptures, or arguably from things Paul has written. And Price and I do agree on that much; there is at least some derivation there. So, is that enough to ‘prove’ that gMark is entirely fictional?

Not even close… because, as Price himself has pointed out, it was normal at the time for biography writers to embellish the facts in their writings. Here’s what Price wrote back in Chapter 4:

These types of pseudo-historical mythologized accounts of people’s lives and deeds were not at all uncommon during that period, so the modern sense of recording fact-based history is simply something that wasn’t pervasive in that culture. These types of fabricated embellishments of biographies were widespread, so even if the authors of Matthew and John thought they were writing biographies of a real person, embellishing them would have been a common practice.

….so, by the same token, if Mark was writing a biography of a real person it would still have been normal for him to embellish it with mythical elements… such as presenting it in a way that reflects scripture. And, in fact, we can see that Mark was prepared to present the life of an actual person in a way that’s embroidered and given a particular scriptural slant, because he does this with John the Baptist, whose existence has been confirmed by an actual historian.

In other words, the story we have – that of a contemporary rabbi and apocalyptic preacher of the time, dressed up with lots of Scriptural references – is exactly what we would expect to see in a hagiography of an actual contemporary rabbi and apocalyptic preacher that had been written by one of his unquestioning followers.

There’s an important question here that it never seems to have occurred to Price to ask himself; what would we expect the biography of a real Jesus to look like? If an author of the time was writing about an actual rabbi/apocalyptic preacher who was the original founder and leader of the author’s religious group, what sort of thing might we expect him to write? In what way does Price think that such a work would have differed from what we do in fact have? GMark is a collection of stories about a preacher saying the kinds of things that a rabbi or apocalyptic preacher of the time would have said, significantly embellished in ways that framed it clearly within the context of the Jewish scriptures, and heavily influenced by slightly later writings (Paul’s) that we know were indeed very influential in shaping the direction of the early church. What part of that does Price think doesn’t look like something we would expect from a hagiography of an influential Jewish preacher from a time and culture where embroidering stories and paying homage to the scriptures was normal?

Meanwhile, Price still leaves us with no satisfactory answer to why, if there was never a real human Jesus, gMark would have invented one in the first place. Why would a member of a group that believed Jesus to be an immaterial heavenly being decide to rewrite him as an imperfect human rabbi? And, speaking of having no satisfactory answers to questions… why would this fictional work catch on so completely and rapidly that multiple other people would write extended versions without realising it was fiction and, within the next fifty years, people who had nothing to do with the group would also hold a widespread belief that this fictional person had in fact led the group and been executed?

Price has simply not given us a single argument that stands up to any kind of examination. He’s pointed out derivative passages in a work where we would expect to find them, and then stretched comparisons to the breaking point in order to claim far higher numbers of derivative passages than are actually there. And this deeply flawed analysis of gMark is the cornerstone of his whole argument. If you’ll excuse me phrasing it this way… he has founded his house on sand.

This seems like a good place to split the chapter. Can probably manage the rest of it in one further post (maybe two) and there’s then the list of questions, which I think is also best split into two or three posts. So, the end is in sight.