Thoughts and plans for future book reviews

Having finally finished one of my two ongoing book reviews (pause for cheering), I can now pick a new review to start. Also, I now seem to be only a few chapters from the end of Walking Disaster, which, even at the rate I go, means that at some point in the just-about-foreseeable future I should (hey, let’s think positive here) also finish that one and be able to pick a second new one to review. So… what should be next on the agenda?

The first one’s simple enough; years ago, I came across a second-hand copy of The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari, and decided that this absolutely needed a full-on snarkreview. Then Walking Disaster came up as an option because I had the idea of doing it in parallel with Jenny Trout’s review of the companion book, and Deciphering The Gospels because Price donated me a free copy, and so both of those ended up jumping the queue. Having finished one of those, I can now finally start TMWSHF, so that’s the one that’s next up.

As to which book should replace Walking Disaster when the joyous time comes that I complete that as well, I have an entire list of options in mind. Here, as best I can remember (and no doubt I’ll remember something else after hitting ‘publish’), is the list of books I’d potentially like to deconstruct/snarkreview at some point:

  • Midwives – Chris Bohjalian (about homebirth/midwifery in the US)
  • Lila – Robert Persig (sequel to his more famous Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance, and not nearly as good)
  • The Little Voice – Josh Sheldon (supposed to be about self-actualisation or some such, seems to be largely ‘privileged guy whinges about stuff he doesn’t want to do’)
  • Suzanne’s Diary for Nicholas – James Patterson (badly-thought-out romance novel)
  • Beyond Choice – Don Baker (dreadful and fortunately obsolete anti-abortion book)
  • The Daughter Of Time – Josephine Tey (a re-examination of the Princes in the Tower case which, while a vastly better book than some of the drek on this list, could definitely do with some re-examining of its own)
  • The Surrendered Wife – Laura Doyle (never actually read this, but it looks worth a takedown)
  • On The Historicity Of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason For Doubt – Richard Carrier (self-explanatory, but do note that this one is not going to be any time soon, as I definitely need a change of pace at this point)
  • Too Good To Be False – Tom Gilson (apologetics book)
  • The Unexpected Legacy Of Divorce – Judith Wallerstein (a research project on the effects of divorce on children; I want to write about why I disagree with her widely-cited conclusions)

Readers, I would love to hear what thoughts you might have here. It’s not a vote; I’ll pick when the time comes based largely on convenience/practicality/how I feel at the time. But there’s some wiggle room there and I’d still be interested to know if anyone has any thoughts on any of the above. And I’d also be interested to know if any of you have had moments of looking at a book and thinking ‘If only some skeptic would volunteer to take this book’s argument apart; I would so like to read that!’ because, well, I make no promises, but I’m at least somewhat open to suggestions. What say you?

‘Deciphering The Gospels Proves Jesus Never Existed’: Questions, 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.

 

Readers, we’re nearly there; we made it to the last post on this book. I noticed a few weeks ago that the first post I published on this book was on the 17th Feb 2019, and since then I’ve secretly hoped to be able to get finished by what’s about to be the seventh anniversary of that date… and here we are with the end in sight. The realisation that I’ve spent seven years on this has indeed made me question some of my life choices (especially when I also realised that this means I’ve spent even longer on Walking Disaster), but, nope, I like taking this sort of stuff apart and I have, at least on this subject, no regrets. But I’ll still be glad to tick this one off my list and move on.

So! Home stretch. Four more questions from Price’s list, four more from my list, and we’re done. Let’s get going.

 

Questions from Price

9.
Why would Paul insist that his knowledge of Jesus was superior because it came from revelation, if Paul knew that other apostles had direct knowledge of Jesus the person and were taught directly from the mouth of Jesus?

Paul believed that Jesus actually had appeared to him, so he and his followers believed that Paul had heard directly from Jesus, and he thought that was better than getting information second-hand from the apostles. (This would have no doubt been fuelled by the fact that Paul’s beliefs about what Jesus had told him fitted a lot better with what he wanted to hear, meaning he was pretty well motivated to hang onto this belief.)

10.
If a real Jesus were worshiped and executed, then why was his real grave unknown and unvenerated?

His followers were so reluctant to accept his death that they started believing he’d miraculously come back to life. I very much doubt they wanted to think about his body rotting away in a criminal’s graveyard when they could keep believing that he’d magically risen from the dead instead.

11.
If the “Q” teachings come from a separate independent source, then why does the “Q” dialog fit so neatly into the Markan narrative, using elements of language that are unique to the Gospels?

The problem with this question is that Price hasn’t demonstrated his premise here. I went back to what Price wrote about Q earlier in the book as I’d skimmed over it before, but I hadn’t missed much.

Price’s claim (from back in Chapter 6) is that the Q material (material shared by both Matthew and Luke but not Mark) is too well integrated with the Markan material to have been added later, from which he concludes that Matthew and Luke originally copied a longer form of Mark that also contained the Q material. However, although Price claims there are ‘dozens of examples’ showing this, the only one he gives is the temptation scene (the scene in which Jesus is fasting in the desert and is tempted by the devil). And… looking at that, I’m hard-pressed to see how else Matthew and Luke would have integrated the material.

Mark gives us a very brief account; Jesus went into the desert and fasted for forty days, the devil tempted him, angels ministered to him. Matthew and Luke both add a more detailed account of the devil’s temptations. Not surprisingly, they both add this just after the bit about Jesus fasting in the desert and just before the bit about angels ministering to him. Looking at the three accounts side by side, I’m at a loss as to where else Price thinks the extra details would have been added. And, while I’m sure he’s convinced himself that he does indeed have ‘dozens’ of other examples, my seven-year experience with reading Price has not left me with any reason to trust that those examples will stand up any better. So, again, if Price wants to claim that the Q material is integrated in such a way, he’s going to have to show his working.

Meanwhile, I’m still wondering how on earth Price hasn’t spotted the problem this whole theory causes for the rest of his argument. Price’s original claim, if you recall, was that every single important scene in gMark could be shown to be derived from somewhere else, and, despite the flaws in his argument, he did at least put a lot of effort into going through gMark sequentially trying to hit every scene and come up with some kind of explanation. Yet he somehow doesn’t seem to have noticed the glaring contradiction between ‘I have demonstrated this for every important scene in gMark’ and ‘gMark also had a lot of extra material that I haven’t previously mentioned’. I honestly wonder whether Price has ever thought critically about his own arguments at any point.

12.
If Paul knew that Jesus was a real person who was recently on earth, then why did he never talk about him “returning” or “coming back”?

I can’t say one way or the other whether this is even true, as I don’t know Koine Greek. However, Price doesn’t either, and at this point I don’t think it’s unwarranted for me to be somewhat suspicious about whether he’s actually correct or not. Oh, well, if you want to think about whether it means anything whatsoever even if Price is right about it… I doubt it. Discussed it a bit further in this post.

And that’s it for Price’s twelve questions and for Price’s first book. Just my last four questions for Price here:

 

Questions for Price

9. If Jesus was thought of by his original followers as a purely heavenly being, why were specific members of the group (who weren’t even the apostles) referred to as his brothers? If this was meant metaphorically, in what way would it make any sense to think of humans as being even metaphorically the brothers of a heavenly being, especially when this designation was given only to a few men who weren’t even apostles?

10. Why is it that there’s no sign at all, amongst all the diversity of opinion in existing writings, of anyone believing that Jesus lived and died entirely in the heavens? We have mention of beliefs that Jesus was originally a heavenly figure before being born to a woman on earth, we have mention of beliefs that Jesus only appeared to be leading a human life on earth but his flesh wasn’t really real flesh. But we have absolutely no record – not even in the form of anyone attempting to refute the belief as heresy – about anyone having believed that Jesus lived entirely in heaven. If this was really what the group believed at their origins, why would they have no record of it at all?

11. New religious sects are typically started by charismatic and inspiring individuals who become indelibly part of the records of the movement (as the great divine prophet who taught the true wishes of God, that kind of thing). In our records of Christianity’s beginning, we certainly seem to see such an individual in Jesus. If the first group wasn’t started by a historical Jesus, then why is there no record at all of whomever did start it?

12. Given the evidence we do have for a historical Jesus, plus the fact that none of your arguments or evidence have actually stood up to examination, plus the difficulties you yourself have had in explaining parts of your case that don’t make sense… can you think of any reason at all why we should believe your claims instead of the much simpler explanation that Christianity started with a historical Jesus?

 

That’s it; this book review is officially over. I look forward to seeing whether anyone wants to join in with further discussion in any of the comment threads (if you do, just remember to keep it civil). But for this post, it remains only for me to indulge in my habit of misquoting Richard Ayoade each time I finish a book review, by saying: Thank you for reading, if indeed you still are.

‘Deciphering The Gospels Proves Jesus Never Existed’: Questions, 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.

 

Second part of the question list with which Price finishes the book, and second part of my question list for him. I just want to start this post with a shout-out to the four Ifs that start these four questions for the amount of heavy lifting they’re doing; it certainly puts my gym regime to shame.

 

Questions from Price

5.
If we can conclude that the “cleansing of the temple” is a truly fictional
event based on literary allusions, what then would explain why a real
Jesus would have been executed?

I’ve already disagreed that we can conclude that, but I’m also very puzzled that the second part of this (the query as to why Jesus would have been executed) is even something Price finds worth questioning.

The story we’re given is that Jesus was gathering an increasing crowd of Jewish followers that thought he was the Messiah and were proclaiming him as such. ‘Messiah’, to the Jews, meant the king who would rule over Israel in a time when their oppressors and enemies (who at that time were the Romans) had been overthrown, and plenty of Jews believed that the Messiah would play a direct role in the overthrowing. There had already been incidents in which Jewish attempts at rebellion against the Romans had had to be forcibly put down with execution of the leader. This is, therefore, exactly the sort of scenario that the Romans would want to nip in the bud, and execution of the troublemaker thought to be the Messiah was exactly the sort of action a governor like Pilate would have found it appropriate to take. All of this is well accepted among scholars. How on earth does Price not know that?

6.
If we can conclude that the crucifixion of Jesus during the Passover
festival is not credible, then what would account for the fact that every
description of his execution follows the narrative from Mark, other than
that no one had any knowledge of the actual event?

This seems to be more of a problem for Price. Since Matthew and Luke clearly did think Mark’s account worth using as a source, that suggests that they had some reason to do so that was good enough to convince them. Such as, say, being part of a group that was handing this and other stories down as being real stories of a real Jesus.

7.
If the events of the Gospels are indeed a purely fictional postwar
narrative, then what could explain why a real human Jesus would have
been worshiped as such a powerful divine being? If the “real Jesus” didn’t
perform miracles, didn’t actually rise from the dead, didn’t have teachings
that were cited by either Paul or James, then what would cause people to
worship this real human Jesus who had no deeds or teachings worth
noting by the earliest writers about him?

Addressed here. The tl;dr version is that I don’t think the original human Jesus was worshipped; he was followed, which is not the same thing.

As for ‘the earliest writers about him’, the earliest surviving writings we have about him are those of Paul, whose lack of interest in a human Jesus we’ve already discussed, and the next earliest are those of Mark, who does indeed spend most of the gospel noting Jesus’s deeds or teachings. As per my answer to question 4, we don’t know whether or not there were earlier writers and thus can’t make any assumptions about what any writers before Paul might have written. So this claim of Price’s doesn’t stand up at all.

8.
If the earliest worshipers of Jesus believed that the material world was
corrupt and needed to be destroyed, then why would they worship a
material human being? The only theological explanation for why a Jesus
of the flesh would be worshiped is that by becoming flesh and
“overcoming death” Jesus transcended the corruption of the material
world. But if we can conclude that a real-life Jesus wouldn’t have actually
“overcome death,” then why would a real-life Jesus be worshiped?

I’m baffled by this one because Price seems to be asking us to explain the very problem that his theory sets up.

Price is the one claiming that the earliest followers of Jesus were worshippers who believed the material world was corrupt and needed to be destroyed and that the Messiah therefore had to be heavenly. All of that is a theory that came from Price. And yet he’s now pointing out to us exactly what I’ve been trying to point out to him; that this doesn’t fit with the known fact that within the next couple of generations Jesus’s followers believed him to have been a material human being. Yes, Price, that is indeed a major contradiction, and it seems to me that the obvious way to resolve it is by working with the vastly more plausible theory that in fact Jesus’s followers didn’t believe that at all, but instead were following an actual human Jesus.

 

Questions for Price

Questions 5 – 8 from my list:

5. The original sect belonged to a culture that overwhelmingly believed holy sacrifice to be by throat-cutting. How would they have spontaneously come up with the idea that Jesus’s sacrifice was by the completely different and (under their beliefs) accursed method of crucifixion?

6. The entire reason that Jews eagerly hoped for the Messiah was because he was supposed to usher in a wondrous age of freedom, peace, and plenty for Jews on earth. Why would a group have taken such a sideways swerve into believing the Messiah was a divine being whose sacrifice was needed to wipe out all sin?

7. If gMark was a fictional account written for a small sect who believed in a heavenly Jesus rather than an earthly Jesus, why would multiple authors write expanded accounts adding all sorts of extra stories and details and go on to form a religion based on this earthly Jesus, all apparently without noticing that this earthly Jesus had never existed, and without being corrected on this extremely obvious point by the existing sect?

8. If Jesus’s life on earth never happened, how is it that within less than 50 years things could go from ‘one little-known and anonymous author wrote a fictional story about his life on earth’ to ‘ it’s so widely believed that this person was real and was really executed at Pilate’s order that Tacitus reports this as an unquestioned fact’?

‘Deciphering The Gospels Proves Jesus Never Existed’: Questions, 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 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.

 

This is the first part of the list of questions that finishes off Price’s book. It’s a twelve-question list and I’ve decided to divide it into three posts of four each, which works out rather nicely. I’ve also collected my own list of questions for Price, which I was originally going to list at the very end but which I’ve decided also to split up between the three posts to avoid getting one huge long post at the very end. Here we go:

 

Questions from Price

1.
If Jesus were a real person, then why do neither the letters of Paul nor the
epistle of James provide any description of him?

Probably the main reason is that they’re religious writings and not celebrity biographies. Why would they provide any description of him? On top of that, there’s the fact that Paul never met Jesus and we have no idea who the James was that wrote the epistle of James and so have no idea whether he ever met Jesus.

2.
If Jesus were a real person and his brother James became a prominent
leader of the Christian community, then why didn’t James provide any
account of the life of his brother Jesus?

Since we don’t know what accounts James did or didn’t provide of his brother’s life during his own lifetime, I’m going to assume that Price means that James didn’t provide any written account. Given how poor literacy levels were at that time, I’m going to guess that the reason was that James just wasn’t good enough at writing, plus the fact that, again, this was not a celebrity biography situation and people probably weren’t as interested in getting some kind of inside scoop as Price seems to be assuming.

3.
The epistle of James goes into an extensive discussion of the importance
of works, yet uses examples of figures from the Jewish scriptures to show
the importance of works. Why wouldn’t this letter have used Jesus’s deeds
as an example of the importance of works if the writer were someone who
knew of Jesus or thought that Jesus was a real person?

With thanks to GakuseiDon for his work on this one: Because this was a time when tradition and the scriptures were the sources considered important as roadmaps of how to act. Jewish followers thought Jesus was important as the king who was going to bring forth the awaited Messianic age, and Paul and his recruits believed Jesus was important as a sin sacrifice. But the concept of Jesus being the ultimate ideal example of how people should behave was more of a later development.

4.
If the narrative of Jesus’s life and death were developed before the First
Jewish-Roman War and maintained by a community of Jesus worshipers,
why was it not recorded until after the war?

We don’t know when it was first recorded, and have no way of knowing whether or not it was recorded before the war, so this question is based on a premise that can’t be demonstrated.

Having done the tl;dr, I will now go into (quite a bit) more detail about this:

The usual reason for believing that the gospels weren’t written until after the war is that they show Jesus giving predictions of coming disaster, and thus it’s assumed that these refer retrospectively to the Jewish-Roman War and that the gospels were all written after this. And this is, to be fair, a belief very widely accepted by scholars. In fact, this is perhaps the only occasion on which I’m arguing against a mainstream belief held by Price.

However, for some time now I haven’t believed that this particular claim stands up. What gMark actually gives us is a very vague generalised prophecy of disaster. (In fact, even in its vagueness, it doesn’t match the details of the Jewish-Roman War; Jesus is shown as prophesying that the Temple will be thrown down and ‘Not one stone will be left upon another‘, but in actual fact a) the Temple was burned rather than knocked down and b) one wall has remained to this day. So it’s hard to see this as an after-the-fact prophecy.)

Bear in mind that this was a culture in which it seems to have been fairly normal to make fatalistic proclamations about the doom and destruction that were awaiting people for supposed sins, and, of course, it was a time of considerable unrest and upheaval for the Jews; the Jewish-Roman war was not out of a clear blue sky. So, it strikes me as well within the bounds of probability that someone of the time could have made a vague doom-and-destruction prophecy that ended up approximating actual events out of sheer coincidence, and I find it perfectly plausible that that could be what happened here.

(To add to that, there’s also the possibility that Mark could have been reacting to some event other than the War. I’ve seen a theory that these passages were in fact a reaction to Caligula’s plan to put a statue of himself in the Temple in 39 CE, which would make Mark a few decades earlier than thought; I don’t know enough to comment on how well this stands up, but I’m not aware of any reason to dismiss it as at least a possibility.)

And, on top of all this, there’s the fact that we don’t know what was or wasn’t done about recording the story prior to Mark. I’ve been reading some of Maurice Casey’s work, and his claims include a) that Mark worked from various rough notes that were written by followers in Jesus’s time, and b) that the Q material was a collection of similar rough notes in various languages. He’s got some interesting arguments for these claims, but this isn’t the time to go into them; the question in this context is whether we can exclude this as being at least a possibility. Since it seems perfectly plausible that devoted followers of a travelling rural preacher would make these sorts of notes and that, once the content of the notes had been written up properly and coherently as the gospels, the growing church wouldn’t put that much care into keeping the original notes (remember that we don’t even have to picture a scenario in which they were thrown out, just one in which they were put in a drawer somewhere and not checked or recopied; time and entropy would have taken care of the rest), I can’t see any reason to dismiss this possibility. So, since we don’t know what notes were made in or shortly after Jesus’s time, that’s another reason why we can’t just go with Price’s claim that Jesus’s life and death were ‘not recorded until after the war’.

Lastly, there’s the question of why it would be an issue if gMark were written after the War. Christianity started out as a small group of whom most of the members were probably illiterate or very poorly literate, and who believed that Jesus’s return and the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth were imminent. They were spreading their teachings to a population of whom the majority were also illiterate. It seems perfectly plausible that they’d focus on oral teaching for a good while before they got to the point of realising they needed more of a written record. On the whole, thinking it over, I do think it’s less likely that they’d take forty years to get to that point and so I do lean more to believing that gMark was earlier and possibly that written notes were earlier than that, but I can’t rule out the possibility that the followers did leave it that late to write an account.

 

Right, my turn:

Questions for Price

  1. A significant part of your argument is around the similarities between gMark and other writings of the culture (the Jewish scriptures) or of the proto-church (Paul’s letters). How have you decided which of these similarities are likely to be due to derivation from other sources and which are more likely to be due to coincidence?
  2. Since we know that it was normal for biographies of real people of the time to embellish and mythologise their subjects (as per your statement in Chapter 4), why do you feel that the mythological embellishments and scriptural references in gMark are evidence that this isn’t a biography of a real person?
  3. If Mark believed Jesus was actually a heavenly being, why is one of his main messages that the Jews were being punished for killing Jesus along with other prophets?
  4. Mark and the other gospel writers had no need to name a specific executioner in their accounts, would have probably found it politically better not to do so, and clearly weren’t happy about doing so, given all the attempts in the gospels to excuse and explain away Pilate’s involvement. That being so, why would they have all brought Pilate’s name into it if the scene was a fiction that they could write any way they wanted?

‘Deciphering The Gospels Proves Jesus Never Existed’: Chapter 12, 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.

 

Hoo boy, nearly at the end… I’m going to try to finish off this chapter in this post, then use three posts to cover the final list of questions.

Content warning for ablism regarding mental illness.

Paul

We can see that the vast majority of teachings Christians have attributed to Jesus actually come from Paul, not Jesus.

While I will certainly buy that some such teachings did, if Price wants to claim ‘vast majority’ he needs to break it down and show his workings here.

Who was Paul? Nothing is known about him other than what is recorded in his writings, but
any objective assessment of his writings reveals Paul to have essentially been a raving lunatic.

(facepalm)

‘Raving lunatic’ is what’s known as an ablist insult; in this case, one using stereotypes and prejudice about mental illness. Ablist insults don’t work well for anything, but they certainly don’t work as a substitute for knowing what you’re talking about.

OK, I’m going to try to break it down… ‘Raving lunatic’ is a term used to dismiss someone by evoking the false stereotype that people with any form of mental illness and/or psychotic experience can’t possibly be a reliable witness on any other subject. Oh, and mixed in there we frequently get a huge dollop of assumption that beliefs based on religious or cultural differences can be taken as a sign of mental illness, which they can’t.

Meanwhile, these stereotypes can be deeply harmful to people who do have some type of mental illness and as a result can’t get taken seriously in other areas of life. Price, if you take nothing else away from this entire critique – which I’m suspecting will be the case – please, please, in future, think twice about this careless use of terms like ‘raving lunatic’ to dismiss those with whom you disagree.

As for Paul, an ‘objective assessment of his writings’ actually shows him to have been a man who could write articulately and fluently, and teach a rather complex theology which he seems to have also worked out himself. So, no, dismissing him as a ‘raving lunatic’ is not only offensive, it’s inaccurate. And, yes, you can take that as my medical opinion as a qualified and experienced GP.

Ablism aside, how much weight should we give to Paul’s writings as any sort of evidence about Jesus? Well, I do think it’s fair to say that on the subject of Jesus he is not particularly reliable; he didn’t know Jesus, he’s tried to minimise his contacts with people who did know Jesus, and he’s driven by the theology he’s worked out around who he thinks Jesus is. So, although Paul did in fact clearly believe Jesus had lived a human life on earth, I don’t think that’s particularly good evidence for whether Jesus did have a human life on earth. However, when it comes to more basic prosaic stuff such as whether he met such-and-such a person or whether he knew of particular people within the church, I do think he was perfectly capable of commenting on what happened. So, his two comments about brothers of Jesus are in fact strong evidence for the existence of people referred to as Jesus’s brothers.

 

Other Abrahamic religions (alternative subheading: ‘Seriously, WTF, Price’?)

The legitimacy of Islam is every bit as dependent on the historical existence of Jesus as Christianity is. Likewise, it is reasonable to conclude that Judaism itself would either no longer exist today or would have a significantly diminished status and following if not for the rise of Christianity. The preservation of Jewish works and culture occurred to a large degree because of the relationship between Judaism and the dominant religions of Christianity and Islam, despite paradoxical hostility toward the ancestral religion by its descendants.

Hoo boy.

I can’t speak for Islam, although I very much doubt that ‘every bit as dependent’ claim; I’m guessing that ‘we’re wrong about the existence of somebody else’s prophet’ would blow at least somewhat less of a hole through a religion than ‘we’re wrong about the existence of our own leader and founder whose willing death was supposedly absolutely necessary for erasing our sins’. However, as far as Judaism’s concerned, Price seems to be overlooking the very obvious fact that Jews have done a good job of preserving Jewish works and culture over the centuries, and have been far more motivated to do so than Christians, who’ve tended to be somewhat more interested in retconning Jewish history and a lot more interested in changing Jewish future by converting and/or persecuting Jews.

So, excuse me, but I am absolutely not giving the credit for preservation of those works to the very group who’ve done so much to destroy Judaism. As someone who’s ethnically part Jewish and still cares deeply about it from the cultural point of view, I can tell you that this had a very uncomfortable white saviour vibe to it (in this case, Gentile saviour). Don’t do that, Price.

 

Conclusion (Price’s)

Price has a couple more paragraphs at this point to wrap up. He tells us that the ‘Jesus of Christianity’ was just a hallucination of Paul’s, which is… actually not too far off correct, since the concept of Jesus as a deliberate sin sacrifice certainly seems to have been an invention of Paul’s. However, that still leaves us with the question of who Jesus was before Paul retconned him this way. Despite Price’s exhortations in the final paragraph that we ‘have to’ recognise that Jesus never existed, Price has still failed to give us any convincing evidence that Jesus was originally an imagined divine being rather than a human preacher who founded the group that became Christianity.

 

Conclusion (mine)

Well… looks like I made it through Price’s argument. Which, as far as I can see, breaks down to the following claims:

And I think that’s it. Did I miss any? As far as I can see, those are all the arguments Price has made that are actually pro-mythicism rather than rearguard attempts to explain away the various bits of evidence for historicity. And, on going through them, none of them have stood up to examination. Deciphering the gospels hasn’t come out with the answer Price wanted, and deciphering Price’s work has left us with no valid arguments for his case.

 

Well, that was the end of the last chapter! As I’ve said, this leaves us with a list of twelve questions for mythicists which Price has included as a sort of epilogue. I plan to split those up into three groups of four, just to manage post length. I’ve also taken the opportunity to come up with my own list of questions for Price and other mythicists that haven’t been answered properly (or, in most cases, at all) through this debate, so I’ll include those as well. And then – after a mere seven years – we will finally be done with the book! See you guys soon.

 

‘Deciphering The Gospels Proves Jesus Never Existed’: Chapter 12, 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.

I’d optimistically planned for this post to finish off Chapter 12, but of course it got longer than I’d expected, so there will be at least one more post after this one addressing points in Chapter 12 (plus the planned posts for the question list at the end).

 

The Gospels

Price, having cobbled together his supposed proof about gMark being fictional, builds on this for the next stage of his argument:

The Gospels do not corroborate each other. In fact, the only thing that the Gospels do corroborate is that none of their authors could possibly have had any knowledge of a real Jesus, because every single Gospel, canonical and noncanonical, shows dependence on the fictional story that we call the Gospel of Mark. The only way that every single writing about the life of Jesus would be based on a single fictional story is if no one had any knowledge of a real Jesus.

…which, of course, falls down at the premise, since Price’s attempts to show that gMark is fictional have been so utterly unsuccessful, so that’s that. However, there is something further I wanted to say here:

This argument seems to be based on the assumption that the other gospel writers were casting around for the best account they could find of this Jesus person of whom they were writing. But this seems like yet another thing that doesn’t fit with the rest of Price’s argument, because Price also believes that this whole shebang started out with one fictional account written for a group who actually believed Jesus was a heavenly being, and that the people writing embroidered versions of that account somehow completely failed to find this out at any point.

Well… you can’t have it both ways. You can’t simultaneously claim that Matthew and the rest would be so colossally undiscerning that they never asked even basic questions like ‘hey, this Jesus sounds really interesting, can you tell us a bit more?’ and that they would also want to look round to see whether any better or more detailed accounts were available before opting for gMark as their source. Price, once again, doesn’t seem to have thought about how any of this would have happened in practice.

Meanwhile, Price has still completely failed to explain why on earth all these gospel writers would be putting so much effort into writing expanded versions of a fictional story. I mean, imagine someone reading gMark with no knowledge whatsoever of the background, just as a random manuscript they’d come across. Yes, some people would believe it. Yes, some might even have wanted to find out more about this Jesus person and whether he really had risen from the dead as the ending claimed. But Price’s theory seems to require a situation where multiple people would decide to start proclaiming this gospel as fact and rewriting it with a load of extra detail… but all without making any effort at all to check whether the existing group had any extra detail. There’s no realistic way in which I can see any of that happening.

By the way, while I think of it, let’s also not forget the unlikelihood of someone reading gMark with no context or background in the first place. Again: all manuscripts at that point were handwritten. No-one was going to be running off extra copies in a print run or keeping them on the shelves of a local bookshop. Mark would have been passing his copies around himself, because that was what happened in those days. Anyone who acquired one would be getting it from someone they knew (if not Mark directly, then someone else who was passing it on). So… did whoever passed a copy on to Matthew not give him any kind of explanation as to what this book was? Did Matthew not go back to that person to ask them any questions before writing an expanded version and spreading it as a new belief? How on earth does Price picture this as having worked?

 

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means…

Furthermore, if we accept that the Gospels do not actually describe the life of Jesus, nor do any of the early epistles, then what could possibly explain why a real Jesus person would have been worshiped as an eternal heavenly being capable of overcoming death, destroying the world, and saving the souls of the righteous? If one acknowledges that a real-life Jesus wouldn’t have performed miracles, risen from the dead, or fulfilled prophecies, then why would this real-life Jesus have been worshiped? Clearly, later Christians worshiped the Jesus character from the Gospels, precisely because they believed that he had performed miracles, risen from the dead, and fulfilled prophecies. Those are, explicitly, the reasons why Jesus is worshiped by Christians. But if those are the reasons that Christians worship Jesus, and a real-life Jesus wouldn’t have done any of those things, then why would the real-life Jesus be worshiped at all?

A couple of notes: Firstly, can we note that the actual explicit reason why Jesus is worshipped by Christians is that they believe he was part of God. Secondly, I’m slightly amused by how unaware Price seems that in fact quite a few real-life people have been worshipped by others over the centuries. Being worshipped certainly isn’t a sign of being fictional.

That said, I think the main point to make here is that I don’t think the real-life Jesus was worshipped by his original followers. I think that he was followed, not worshipped; in other words, his followers saw him as a human leader rather than as a divinity. And beliefs then changed over the years so that he came to be seen first as a divine being probably more on the level of an angel, and eventually (after what seems to have been some centuries and quite a bit of controversy) as a part of Yahweh himself.

As to why people would have followed a real-life Jesus, there are obvious reasons for that. He was apparently charismatic and a good preacher, and and he was what we would call a faith-healer (which does not involve actually performing miracles but has more to do with what your followers/the people you’re healing believe you can do). In addition, his followers were looking for someone who might be the prophecied king who would usher in the Messianic age, and Jesus looked like he might fit the bill. Wishful thinking did the rest.

It actually makes far less sense that worship of a powerful celestial being who had overcome death would have started with the worship of a mere mortal, than for it to have started with the worship of a celestial deity to begin with.

This gives Price a much greater problem which he still hasn’t solved: how would this belief take the reverse journey? How would worship of a powerful celestial being turn into a belief that this celestial being lived a mortal life? According to Price, all that was needed was for one person to write a fanfic. Multiple people then believed this so strongly and unquestioningly that they formed a whole belief system with even more detailed accounts of this imaginary life, completely obliterating the original belief in Jesus as a heavenly being, all without these people ever noticing that everyone else who believed in Jesus (including the original author of the fanfic that started the whole thing) believed that he had in fact been a heavenly being. Just how does Price think all that happened? He’s yet to explain.

There is absolutely no evidence of belief in a real human Jesus prior to the writing of the Gospel stories.

… you mean, other than Paul repeatedly writing about Jesus in human terms and mentioning having met his brother?

 

Price still misunderstands Docetism

When faced with opposition to the belief that Jesus was actually human, or had ever been on earth, even the earliest believers in “the flesh” of Jesus could do nothing more than cite scripture to support their beliefs […] Within two hundred years of his supposed life, the only evidence that could be produced to show that God, or God’s son, had come to earth and taken
human form was four written accounts that supposedly corroborated each other and corroborated the divine prophecies that predicted his life, deeds, and death.

Yes, because there is no evidence of anyone disputing that Jesus had been on earth. There was plenty of argument over whether he was human, a divine being cunningly disguised as human, or a divine being that had become human… but you know what all those beliefs have in common? The belief that this Jesus person had showed every indication of having been on earth as a human. And what would be the most likely reason why everyone would believe this? That Jesus actually was on earth as a human.

On which note, I’ll split the chapter here and hope to get the last of it dealt with in one more post.