‘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?