‘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’?