‘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 10: Non-Christian Accounts Of Jesus

While this is the sixth (and last) post addressing this chapter, it’s the third of three posts on the specific topic of Josephus’s mention of ‘Jesus called Christ’ in the middle of an incident related in Antiquities 20. I’d recommend reading all three posts in sequence, so, if you haven’t already done so, the first on the ‘Jesus called Christ’ topic is here and the second is here.

In wrapping up and summarising the previous post, I pointed out that by far the most likely reason why Josephus’s works contain the mention of ‘Jesus called Christ’ is because this is indeed what Josephus wrote, and that the various alternative explanations that Price tries to give are, for one reason or another, highly unlikely. That being so, why is Price so reluctant to accept this phrase as being genuine to Josephus?

Of course, the obvious reason is that if Price can’t find a way to explain that phrase away it puts a huge hole in his theory. I don’t think it’s entirely unreasonable to theorise that perhaps that’s his main reason for trying so hard to believe in improbable alternative explanations. However, for completeness, I’m going to go through the reasons he’s actually stated and give my responses.

Nothing in this chapter or the passage has any relationship to “Jesus Christ,”

… you mean, apart from the literal relationship that the passage states that one of the people mentioned has to Jesus called Christ? The James mentioned is being identified by his relationship with his brother, Jesus called Christ. What part of that does Price feel doesn’t have any relationship to Jesus called Christ?

and the use of “Christ” as an identifier is quite odd, for Josephus never explains what this term means.’

Price seems to be completely misunderstanding identifiers. Identifiers were the equivalent of our use of surnames; they were ways of specifying which of many possible people of a given first name was the one to which the speaker or writer was referring. As such, writers would no more expect to have to explain the backstory of identifiers than we would expect to explain the meanings of people’s surnames when we introduce them. (Hands up; anyone here found it strange that in my many mentions of Price, it at no time even occured to me to explain that the surname ‘Price’ derives from ‘ap Rhys’? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?) In fact, we see this elsewhere even in Josephus, when at the end of the first chapter of Antiquities 20 he refers to ‘Joseph called Cabi’ without ever explaining what ‘Cabi’ means or why the Joseph in question was called this.

One argument against this being authentic is that Josephus doesn’t use the term Christos anywhere else, so it does not appear likely that this is original.

Why? Phrases can be quite identifiable (such as ‘called Christ’ appearing almost nowhere in Christian literature other than quotes from non-Christians, meaning that the use of that particular phrase indicates a strong likelihood of a non-Christian author). However, the most likely reason why Josephus wouldn’t use the word Kristos anywhere else is because no-one else at the time was well-known as being called Kristos and so the need never came up. (To go back to the previous example: Joseph also never elsewhere uses the term Cabi, but I don’t believe this has led anyone to conclude that his mention of ‘Joseph called Cabi’ is an interpolation.)

There are also no other examples in the works of Josephus of identifying someone in the manner that is used here if “who was called Christ” were talking about a different person from Jesus son of Damneus (i.e., mentioning the person being related first, and then the subject after, with an explanation of who the person being related is in between).

Since there are also apparently no examples in Josephus’s works of using identifiers in the bizarre way Price is trying to claim (either using an identifier only on the second mention of someone rather than the first, or using two different identifiers for the same person without clarifying that they refer to the same person), the ‘Josephus never does this elsewhere!’ argument doesn’t hold up the way Price wants it to. It did, however, make me realise another thing that Price doesn’t seem to have considered; that the argument that a Christian scribe changed the line here also works perfectly well for explaining how a sentence that did originally contain the phrase ‘Jesus called Christ’ could have ended up in the form we had today.

Let’s hypothesise, for example, that Josephus’s original text did have this mention, but written with the more expected ordering of ‘and brought before them James, the brother of Jesus called Christ, and some others’. A Christian scribe copying this, his mind on the importance of Jesus, then unthinkingly changes the order to put Jesus first: ‘the brother of Jesus called Christ, James by name’. Hey presto; a scenario that solves the problem of why Josephus would put Jesus’s before James’s, does so without requiring us to hypothesise that Josephus did something more unlikely, and does so using an mechanism (change made by a Christian scribe) that Price himself thinks could easily have happened.

Or, alternatively, the suggestion of a marginal note. Maybe Josephus only knew that one of the executed people was the brother of that strange rabbi who started a cult years back, and thus the line he originally wrote was ‘and brought before them the brother of Jesus called Christ, and some others’, and then, some years down the line, a Christian scribe (or even a non-Christian scribe who happened to know the story) added ‘James by name’ as a marginal note that another scribe later copied into the text. Since Price is happy with the idea that a marginal note could have been copied into the text, why not hypothesise that it was copied into a text that originally included the ‘brother of Jesus called Christ’ line?

Price, of course, is not going to want to consider either of those possible suggestions, because he’s only interested in explanations that let him conclude that Josephus wasn’t talking about Jesus the founder of Christianity. He wants to be able to explain this line away and go on with claiming that no historians of the time ever mentioned Jesus so that he can further claim that this supports mythicism. But, unfortunately for Price’s argument, the evidence does still point to this being an original line from Josephus that most likely referred to the person that Price is trying to claim never existed.

The other arguments against this being original deal with the structure of the sentence, the subject matter of the passage, the fact that even if Jesus Christ existed he would be an odd person for Josephus to use as an identifier for someone else, especially by brotherhood, and the fact that if this were talking about “James the Just” (which it almost certainly isn’t for reasons we shall see), then this James himself would have been more famous than Jesus at this point in time, so this association would have made no sense, as James himself, according to Christian legend, was a community leader and well-known person, though there is no reference to him in the non-Christian literature (unless this is a reference to him).

I’m quoting this sentence in its entirety because I cannot resist pointing out the irony of arguing that Josephus wouldn’t have used a cumbersome sentence. Yes, clearly we can work from the assumption that writers would avoid using cumbersome sentences… oh, wait. Anyway, let’s break it down:

The other arguments against this being original deal with the structure of the sentence,

As above.

the subject matter of the passage,

I think this is another attempt on Price’s part to claim that Jesus had nothing to do with the subject of the passage apart from, y’know, the fact that he was apparently the brother of the main person executed and very plausibly the indirect reason why this group was in trouble in the first place. If so, it’s about as logical as asking why the second Jesus was identified as Jesus ben Damneus when Damneus had nothing to do with the passage. Jesus’s name is being used as an identifier of one of the people who is involved in the subject matter of the passage, and this was a normal way for people of that time to write.

the fact that even if Jesus Christ existed he would be an odd person for Josephus to use as an identifier for someone else, especially by brotherhood,

Why?

and the fact that if this were talking about “James the Just” (which it almost certainly isn’t for reasons we shall see), then this James himself would have been more famous than Jesus at this point in time, so this association would have made no sense, as James himself, according to Christian legend, was a community leader and well-known person, though there is no reference to him in the non-Christian literature (unless this is a reference to him).

James would have been known for being Jesus’s brother, and he was a community leader in the community founded by his brother. Identifying him by his brother makes perfect sense; for those of Josephus’s readers that knew of him, it would have been in the context of being Jesus’s brother.

The real question, however, is if this is James “the brother of Jesus Christ” of the Gospels, and Christians claim that the Gospels are true, then that would mean that this James would have to be in the line of David as well, and thus, if anything, it would have made more sense to qualify James by his father, Joseph, who would had to have been in the line of David, and thus would have been seen as prestigious name worth mentioning.

Oh, come on; this doesn’t even make sense from the Christian point of view. Supposedly Jesus was not only in the line of David but also the culmination of it as the awaited king; identifying James by him would have made perfect sense. It makes even less sense from the skeptic point of view, since the whole highly contradictory claim to the line of David is pretty clearly a retcon by people already convinced of Jesus’s messiahship.

Likewise, if this was “James the Just,” then why not identify him by his supposed prestigious position in society, instead of a link to being the bother [sic] of Jesus?

Because his prestigious position a) seems to have existed only within the nascent Christian movement and b) was because of being the brother of Jesus.

Anyway, that seems to exhaust Price’s attempts at explaining why he doesn’t think the phrase could be genuine. He goes on to put forth the arguments for alternative sources of the phrase that I covered in the previous post, and then to the conclusion of the whole chapter:

Chapter conclusion

…in which he makes one of his typical leaps from claiming something might have happened a certain way to declaring that it definitely did:

With all of this, we can see that there are certainly no solid independent attestations to the existence of Jesus Christ in the non-Christian literature. Modern scholarship recognizes that the Testimonium Flavianum is the only reasonably possible independent witness to Jesus Christ in the non-Christian literature, and there is nothing else aside from that one passage that could even claim to confirm his existence.

This is, quite frankly, absolute rubbish. Modern scholarship certainly has not discarded the Tacitean passage or the ‘called Christ’ line, and, whatever shade Price tries to throw, the idea that these passages aren’t even claims to Jesus’s existence is just plain silly. What we have is what we’d expect for someone who was a real figure with some relatively minor influence two thousand years ago; a couple of mentions by historians. I realise that’s inconvenient for Price’s theory, but, since he can’t produce anything solid by way of alternative explanations, he’s stuck with the fact that, within decades of the time Jesus is said to have lived, non-Christian historians are at least mentioning his life. Which is hard to explain under mythicism, but about what we’d expect to see from a Jesus who actually existed.

‘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 10: Non-Christian Accounts Of Jesus

On to the other possible reference to Jesus discussed by Price; the passing mention of ‘Jesus called Christ’ in Book 20 of Josephus’s ‘Antiquities’. I had intended to cover this in a single post, but it got ridiculously long, so I’ve split it into three. This post focuses on general discussion/explanation of the quote, the next will discuss the various theories Price gives us as to how that line might have ended up in Josephus’s work, and the last one will discuss why Price doesn’t want to go for the most obvious explanation (namely, that Josephus actually wrote the line and was referring to Jesus).

In the context of the mythicism debate, the first two things to say about this quote are that it’s a) one of two quotes in Josephus mentioning Jesus, and b) not the one that’s known to have been tampered with. This is worth mentioning because commenters in mythicist debates do sometimes confuse the two (usually because their total knowledge of the subject comes from having skimmed the occasional podcast or post) and say something about ‘the Josephus mention’ clearly being a forgery. I think the little band of commenters I’ve got here actually do know the subject matter better than that, but in case anyone new turns up I’ll start out with a clarification of the basics:

• The first Josephan mention of Jesus is a short paragraph in ‘Antiquities’ Book 18 generally known as the ‘Testimonium Flavium’, which is clearly at least partly forged and possibly entirely so. It is thus not much use for this debate. I’ve discussed this briefly here.
• This post is going to discuss the second mention, which is also in ‘Antiquities’ but in Book 20. Unlike the first quote, this one is accepted by almost everyone in the scholarly world as genuine, for the simple reason that in this case there’s no apparent reason why a forger would go to the bother of inserting it.

Having got that out of the way, let’s take a look at the passage itself:

And now Caesar, upon hearing the death of Festus, sent Albinus into Judea, as procurator. But the king deprived Joseph of the high priesthood, and bestowed the succession to that dignity on the son of Ananus, who was also himself called Ananus. Now the report goes that this eldest Ananus proved a most fortunate man; for he had five sons who had all performed the office of a high priest to God, and who had himself enjoyed that dignity a long time formerly, which had never happened to any other of our high priests. But this younger Ananus, who, as we have told you already, took the high priesthood, was a bold man in his temper, and very insolent; he was also of the sect of the Sadducees, who are very rigid in judging offenders, above all the rest of the Jews, as we have already observed; when, therefore, Ananus was of this disposition, he thought he had now a proper opportunity [to exercise his authority]. Festus was now dead, and Albinus was but upon the road; so he assembled the sanhedrim of judges, and brought before them the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ, whose name was James, and some others, [or, some of his companions]; and when he had formed an accusation against them as breakers of the law, he delivered them to be stoned: but as for those who seemed the most equitable of the citizens, and such as were the most uneasy at the breach of the laws, they disliked what was done; they also sent to the king [Agrippa], desiring him to send to Ananus that he should act so no more, for that what he had already done was not to be justified; nay, some of them went also to meet Albinus, as he was upon his journey from Alexandria, and informed him that it was not lawful for Ananus to assemble a sanhedrim without his consent. Whereupon Albinus complied with what they said, and wrote in anger to Ananus, and threatened that he would bring him to punishment for what he had done; on which king Agrippa took the high priesthood from him, when he had ruled but three months, and made Jesus, the son of Damneus, high priest.

Josephus, Antiquities 20, chapter 9

So… a newly elected high priest by the name of Ananus decides to go for a power play before the newly elected procurator gets there, and arranges to have some people sentenced and executed without getting official permission first. This backfires on him when some people are rightfully concerned about this and speak out against it, resulting in Ananus getting kicked out as high priest and replaced by someone else, coincidentally also called Jesus but identified as ‘Jesus, son of Damneus’. And it so happens that, in the midst of this juicy anecdote, Josephus mentions that one of the people executed was ‘the brother of Jesus called Christ’. In other words, Josephus knows of a Jesus who was called Christ. Yes; now you come to mention it, we think we might have heard of that guy as well.

Why would Josephus bother mentioning this?

Why would Josephus bother telling us that one of the people executed was this particular Jesus’s brother? On this we can only speculate, but there is one obvious possible answer: it’s plausible that, by this point, this tiny but spreading cult was well enough known that Josephus would expect many of his readers to have heard about this pesky group of troublemakers that had been started by someone by the name of Jesus whose followers referred to him as Christ. If so, then this reference would clue people in to the reason why Ananus put James and co. up for execution; because they were among the followers of this Jesus called Christ.

Price doesn’t accept that this could have been the case:

In addition, since this is something that is occurring around 60 CE, it would seem quite odd to identify James by his association to a person whom the Jews had supposedly killed as a criminal some thirty years prior to the event, and sixty years prior to this writing.

Christians argue that this was done because Jesus Christ was so well known that it makes the passage make sense, but as we have seen, no one prior to Josephus had even written about Jesus Christ aside from some Christians, so it certainly does not seem that he was well known at all.

Price seems here to again be falling into the trap of assuming that the small proportion of writings that have been copied often enough over the intervening two millennia to be preserved for us to read actually equate to the amount of information that was available at the time. In reality, of course, information would also have been passed on by word of mouth and by writings such as letters that nobody thought to copy and preserve over the centuries.

It’s worth noting here that Price himself has made a claim earlier in this same chapter that requires us to believe that people were hearing about Jesus and his followers in other ways; if you recall, Price was quite happy to assure us that claims about this ‘Christ’ being executed under Pilate ‘would have been common knowledge by 109’. Well, if so, then that leaves us with the possibility that this same piece of information would have been at least somewhat known by the mid-90s CE when Josephus was writing this, thus making it plausible that Josephus might have expected many of his readership to have heard of this group who referred to their leader as ‘Christ’ and followed this Christ’s brother as a temporary replacement leader.

It’s also worth revisiting this comment of Price’s from Chapter 5:

Furthermore, if Jesus had been executed by the Jews during the reign of Pilate due to being a seditious rabble rouser, then wouldn’t followers of his that continued worshiping him in the years after his death have been seen by Jewish leaders as criminals or threats?

Why, yes. Yes, they probably would. And, more to the point, they would have been seen by Romans as criminals or threats, meaning that people would have remained aware of his followers and we can expect that there would have been at least some talk in elite Roman circles about this troublemaking group. I can’t see it being that big a topic of conversation, but it seems the sort of thing likely to get the occasional passing mention, in a ‘those pesky Christians, what are they up to now? <eyeroll>’ sort of way. That is exactly what we’d expect to happen, by Price’s own argument as well as by common sense. And so, once again, it makes absolute sense that Josephus might have expected his readers to be aware enough of this group that they would pick up on his passing reference to them.

Is it even helpful to the debate?

This wasn’t in fact a point made by Price, who’s focusing on attempts to claim that Josephus never said this in the first place, but as it’s a point I’ve sometimes seen raised in other mythicist discussions I’ll address it for completeness:

Josephus wasn’t even born at the time that Jesus supposedly died, so he cannot possibly have ever met him or have first-hand knowledge of him. Which is, by the way, completely normal for historian authors and is not normally considered an issue for dismissing everything they have to say on a subject. However, this is Jesus mythicism, and so now and again a Reddit commenter or the like will start in with the claim that as Josephus never actually met Jesus he can’t provide any evidence of his existence.

Now, I know I keep citing Tim O’Neill, but he made a really good point about this: Josephus was around for this whole incident with Albinus and the unlawful execution. We know from his own autobiography that he would have been a young man living in Jerusalem at the time (the early 60s CE) and that he was from a priestly family, meaning his own social group would have been rocked by this incident and it would have been a major topic of conversation at the time. And while this wouldn’t have told him anything whatsoever directly about Jesus, who was decades dead by then, it would have put him in a good position to know whether this James was in fact being referred to at the time as ‘the brother of Jesus called Christ’.

In other words, Josephus is another good witness (along with Paul, who actually mentions meeting James) to the fact that James, a human on earth, was known as Jesus’s brother. And, as previously discussed, humans aren’t generally referred to as the brothers of mythical beings who had only a heavenly existence; the term ‘brother’ when applied to a human being, whether literally or metaphorically, normally means that the brother was also human. Josephus’s single passing comment tells us that a real human man was referred to as this Jesus’s brother, and thus gives us yet another piece of solid evidence that Jesus was also a real human.

Which, of course, is not at all what Price wants to think, and so he tries hard to give other possible explanations for this quote. The next post will discuss those.

‘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 Jesus was originally a human being of the 1st century about whom a later mythology grew up. 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.

Paul and Jesus’s brothers

Out of all the comments from Paul that I listed in the previous post that point towards Paul having believed in an earthly Jesus, Price addresses only one more; Galatians 1:19.

This verse, for context, is in the middle of a passage in which Paul is letting the Galatians know how little contact he’s ever had with the church (which, to Paul, is a positive, because he believes that this means he’s working solely from what Jesus told him to do rather than from the influence of less enlightened church members), so Paul is stressing how little time he’s spent with the church and how few of the apostles he saw while there. However, he does tell us that as well as staying with Cephas (Peter) during the fifteen days he spent there, he did meet one other apostle, named in the Greek as ‘Iacobus’, a name which our translations consistently anglicise as ‘James’ (as this is the version of the name used in all English works, it’s the version I’ll use as well throughout this post). And, the important point for our purposes… Paul identifies this Iacobus/James as ‘the Lord’s brother’. Since ‘the Lord’ is one of the terms Paul uses for Jesus, this means that Paul is saying he met Jesus’s brother.

Since mythical divine beings don’t typically have real-life flesh-and-blood brothers walking the earth and meeting people, that one passing comment is a pretty significant problem for mythicist theory. Let’s look at what Price has to say about it.

Price’s explanations

Price gives us two different theories. The first is that ‘brother of the Lord’ was just a general term used for Christians:

Many people, including Earl Doherty and Arthur Drews, have pointed out that the term brother or brothers was regularly applied to apostles and members of the church in general and conclude that this is how it was being used here as well.

Except that it isn’t. There are indeed many examples of church members referring to one another as ‘brothers’, a clearly metaphorical term indicating close bonds of union in shared belief; when Paul used the term in that sense, as he often did, he was implying that the person in question was metaphorically his brother due to their shared membership of the church. Or, even more than that, that the person or people referred to were metaphorically brothers to everyone else in the church. However, there’s a crucial difference in the wording here. In this verse, James isn’t being referred to just as ‘brother’; he’s being referred to as ‘the Lord’s brother’. That’s a very different phrase. Paul wasn’t referring to James as his (metaphorical) brother, but as the brother of the Lord; i.e. Jesus.

Now, it might of course still be meant metaphorically. Maybe Paul meant that James had had a deep enough bond with Jesus for the two of them to be described as brothers even without having an actual blood relationship. However, while that is plausible, it still doesn’t fit well with mythicism. We don’t typically describe actual humans as having even a metaphorical fraternal relationship with divine heavenly superbeings. A child-to-parent relationship, sure; Judaism has used that particular metaphor for millennia, with Christianity following in its tracks. But not a brotherly relationship, with its rather different connotations of a bond between equals.

This, however, does bring us to Price’s second theory; that ‘the Lord’s brother’ was meant metaphorically in a different sense. Not to describe a particularly close bond, but as a title to indicate James’s level of importance in the church, or perhaps his sterling qualities:

If this is the case, then the reason that Paul called James “the Lord’s brother” in Galatians is because James was seen as such a major pillar of the community, whom people called a “brother of the Lord,” which was a title similar to “the Just.”

So this theory is effectively the reverse of the previous one; Price is now theorising that, far from ‘brother’ being meant in the sense of a generic title for any male church member, it was a specific title for this one man in particular. Price thinks that over time this metaphor became misunderstood as a claim that this particular James was literally Jesus’s brother:

This James was only later considered to be a literal brother of Jesus. It was probably the early Christian chronicler Hegesippus, in the late second century, who recorded the first concrete association of “James the Just” as the literal brother of Jesus, helping to cement this view into Church tradition.

The first problem with this explanation is that ‘brother of the Lord’ is not, in fact, similar to ‘the Just’. ‘The Just’ is a title that refers to an important quality of the person described, while ‘Brother of the Lord’ refers to a relationship, not a personal quality. But it’s still possible that this phrase could have been used as a metaphor, and, interestingly, we do have some evidence for this. Price quotes this passage from Origen which was written in the third century:

Paul, a genuine disciple of Jesus, says that he regarded this James as a brother of the Lord, not so much on account of their relationship by blood, or of their being brought up together, as because of his virtue and doctrine.

Against Celsus; Origen

Origen seems to be citing a letter we no longer have, as none of the existing letters attributed to Paul say any such thing. So, this raises the question of whether Paul actually did write something similar to the phrasing Origen here attributes to him. Unfortunately we can’t assume that he did, partly because Origen seems to have been willing to be rather free with his citing of what writers actually said (in the same passage he claims that Josephus attributed the fall of Jerusalem to the killing of James, which isn’t at all what Josephus says) and partly because so many later epistles were falsely claimed to have been by Paul that we can’t assume Origen had a genuine Pauline epistle here.

However, if Paul actually did write the words attributed to him by Origen, then that’s a very interesting contribution to the debate which doesn’t point in the direction Price thinks. If Paul actually found it worth spelling out that James’s appellation of ‘brother’ was not ‘on account of their relationship by blood or of their being brought up together’, then that is strong evidence for an early church who followed a human Jesus. If a group who followed a divine heavenly being did take the highly unlikely step of referring to one of their human members as this divine heavenly being’s brother (and it is highly unlikely, as I wrote above), then it would have been very obvious that this was metaphorical. No-one there would have had to spell out that this wasn’t on account of a blood relationship or being brought up together, because no-one in the group would have thought for a minute that it would be. If Paul really did write those words, then that would point clearly to a human Jesus.

However, since we can’t know whether Paul wrote those words or not, that doesn’t help us. We’re left with the same question as before: how likely is it that a group would describe one of their human members, however virtuous, as metaphorically the brother of their heavenly quasi-divine leader who only dropped in from heaven to visit them? And with the same answer as before: not very likely at all.

On top of this, we have an even bigger problem with Price’s interpretations here: Galatians 1:19 is only one of the two places in which Paul uses this phrase.

The problem of 1 Corinthians 9:5

1 Corinthians 9:5 is, as it happens, also a passing comment in the middle of a mini-rant. Paul isn’t happy about the church refusing to support him financially in his work of preaching the gospel, although he is Absolutely Not Trying To Claim This Support because he considers himself obliged to preach the gospel regardless, but still, hmph, what about all these other church members who get supported for this work the way the scriptures apparently say they should… And, in the middle of this, he happens to make this comment:

Do we not have the right to be accompanied by a believing wife, as do the other apostles and the brothers of the Lord and Cephas?

So, Paul not only refers to ‘brothers of the Lord’, he does so in a way that inadvertently makes it clear that they are in a separate category from ‘the other apostles’ and ‘Cephas’. ‘Brother of the Lord’ therefore was clearly an appellation that was given to more than one person, that wasn’t just some sort of generic term for church members overall, and that also wasn’t a term for particularly important church members (or Paul wouldn’t have differentiated ‘the other apostles’ and ‘the brothers of the Lord’ as two separate groups).

And so, yet again, we have something that’s very difficult to explain under mythicist theory but very easy to explain under historicist theory; if Jesus was a real person, of course it was plausible for his parents to have had other children.

So, how does Price explain 1 Corinthians 9.5?

In one of the most notable pieces of question-begging I’ve seen in a while, Price actually quotes this verse in support of his argument by assuming that it can’t mean actual brothers and working from there to claim that this verse therefore proves Paul would use ‘brother of the Lord’ in a way that doesn’t mean an actual brother of the Lord.

The five hundred brothers mentioned in 1 Corinthians 15, as well as “brothers” mentioned in 1 Corinthians 9, are examples that are often cited to show the use of brothers of the Lord in ways that clearly don’t mean literal relatives. […] Some people even try to argue that this mention of brothers in 1 Corinthians 9 means relatives, but this really wouldn’t make sense, for why would literal brothers of Jesus even be a part of this issue, especially since in later accounts where literal brothers of Jesus are discussed, they have nothing to do with him or his movement? Indeed Jesus’s family is portrayed as being rejected by him in the Gospels.

Firstly, I have to point out that the ‘some people’ who believe this mention of ‘brothers’ to refer to actual brothers (or at least actual relatives) include, as far as I know, everyone who’s ever read this passage bar the occasional mythicist. I mean, someone (hiya, db!) is probably going to dig me out an obscure reference to someone somewhere who has argued otherwise, but when practically everyone believes the obvious meaning of a word in a passage to be the actual meaning then I don’t think ‘some people try to argue’ is quite the correct phrase.

Secondly, the passage tells us why Jesus’s brothers would ‘even be a part of this issue’. Paul is complaining that he doesn’t qualify for a privilege (getting church support for himself and a dependant) that some other groups of church members do. The brothers of Jesus are a part of this issue because they do get this privilege which Paul thinks he should have. Price is talking as though there’s some kind of inexplicable mystery about the idea of ‘brothers’ here referring to actual brothers when, in fact, it makes perfect sense in context.

Thirdly, let’s look at Price’s claim that ‘later accounts’ (which I assume from context has to mean the gospels) show Jesus’s brothers as having nothing to do with him/his movement. After going through the very brief references in the gospels to Jesus having a brother called James, which are indeed blink-and-you’ll-miss-them, Price makes this point:

Given that the Gospels were all written after the works of Paul, and that the Gospels serve as a backdrop for the Christian movement, and that the Gospels establish the positions of the major Christian leaders, it would not make any sense for the Gospels to totally ignore James the literal brother of Jesus […] if James the brother of Jesus is the one who was a leader of the Christian community.

Which would be a good point, except that, later in the chapter, Price himself gives us a plausible counterargument without even noticing that he’s done so. Here’s what Price says later in the chapter:

In both the writings of Paul and the Gospels, conflict between James son of Zebedee and the others is shown. […] It appears, according to the writings of Paul, that James and John held to a more Jewish version of the faith and did not embrace the Gentile apostleship.

In the first century, however, James son of Zebedee was considered a pillar of the Christian community, but perhaps later Christians sought to exclude him from tradition and sever ties to his sect.

The references to ‘James son of Zebedee’ here are a little confusing. Price is referring to the ‘James’ mentioned in Galatians 2 (verses 9 and 12), who is not specifically identified but from context is probably the same James mentioned in 1:19. Even if that isn’t the case, this James seems rather unlikely to have been James the son of Zebedee, as Acts 12:2 tells us that that particular James was killed by Herod Antipas quite early on, at a point which would have been well before the visit to Jerusalem to which Paul is referring in Galatians 2. However, via some interesting logic contortions, Price seems to have convinced himself that a) Acts was wrong on this point and b) that this James must be the son of Zebedee rather than any of the other people of this very common name.

However, all that is by-the-by. Setting aside the dubious ‘son of Zebedee’ claim, let’s look at Price’s main point here: the possibility that later Christian authors would have wanted to downplay the importance of an early church member who held to a theology different from that which eventually won out. And Price is onto something there. We know that there was significant conflict in the early church. We know that Pauline theology was the one that eventually won out. And, in view of the conflict described in Galatians, we have reason to suspect that this theology wasn’t the one held by Jesus’s original followers.

So, on the background of that first-century conflict, how would church writers from the Pauline side of the church have dealt with awkward traditions about key members of the early church having held to beliefs that were now considered mistaken? I agree with Price on this one; that would have been rather a strong motive to downplay the importance of these people in the accounts. (It wouldn’t even have had to be a conscious thing; more a case of ‘Well, James was clearly misguided, so let’s focus on what these others had to say’.)

In other words, we have an obvious explanation from Price himself of why the gospels might have wanted to ignore a brother of Jesus who became a leader in the early Christian community; because tradition had preserved the rather awkward information that this brother did not agree with the new belief system that, by the time of the gospels, was being taught as The Truth. As potential motives go, I’d say that’s a satisfactorily convincing one. And so, in fact, we have a good explanation of why the gospels had so little to say about James, and Price is wrong when he thinks we’re forced to fall back on the explanation that James wasn’t an actual brother of an actual Jesus.

In conclusion

Paul makes two passing mentions of brothers of Jesus (one of ‘brothers’ collectively and one of a specific brother), which Price, despite his best efforts, has not managed to explain away. And there’s an important difference between these two mentions and the other information we get from Paul about Jesus; these can’t be easily dismissed as just Paul’s own beliefs.

We’ve had to be very cautious about using other Pauline-derived information as evidence for the historicity side, because Paul himself makes it so clear that he gets his information about Jesus from what he thinks Jesus told him in a vision. Therefore, although Paul clearly did believe that Jesus had lived a human life, and made many comments referring to this, we can’t assume that this belief came from actual knowledge of what the original church were saying rather than from his own belief about what he thought Jesus had said to him in visions. However, the mentions of Jesus’s brothers come from much more prosaic sources. He mentions the brothers collectively because he’s annoyed that the church is giving them and their wives financial support which he himself doesn’t get, and he mentions James in particular because he met him.

So this, unlike most of what Paul says, actually is reliable information. Not theological expositions based on visions, but passing comments about people of whose existence and status Paul has personal knowledge. These two comments that Paul makes in the midst of rants about other issues are very good evidence that the Lord of whom he’s speaking (Jesus) had human brothers. And that, in turn, is good evidence that Jesus was human.

‘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 Jesus was originally a human being of the 1st century about whom a later mythology grew up. 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. All subsequent posts will be linked at the end of that post as they go up.

Chapter 9: Finding Jesus In Paul’s Letters

Price spends the majority of this chapter arguing that Paul didn’t believe in an earthly Jesus:

[I]n the letters of Paul, what we have are dozens upon dozens of statements, and overarching themes, that support the view that Paul not only had no knowledge of a Jesus person, but that Paul conceived of Jesus as an eternal heavenly being.

I’m not seeing why this belief would be incompatible with a belief that Jesus existed on earth as a human. After all, that’s precisely the combination of beliefs Christianity has held from an early stage; that Jesus was an eternal heavenly being who took on human form and was born and lived on earth. So the question is not so much whether Paul thought Jesus was an eternal heavenly being, but whether or not he believed Jesus also came down to earth in some form to live a human life there. With that in mind, I’ll discuss Price’s points.

A few things to bear in mind during this:

1. As per the discussion in the last post, we can conclude from the Galatians passage (as well as from Paul’s letters as a whole) that Paul wasn’t interested in Jesus the person. Paul was interested in Jesus the magical sin-eraser. Hence, the things he says about Jesus aren’t focused on Jesus’s life, but on the theology Paul has constructed around him.
2. Paul was writing in a different language, for a different culture. That means that at least some of the initial assumptions we might make about what our translated versions of his letters mean or what we might expect him to say in a particular situation are not necessarily going to be valid.
3. We have no record of any of Paul’s speeches or discussions to the churches to whom he was writing, and only an incomplete record of his letters. It’s therefore important not to treat the Pauline letters we still have today as though they were meant to be a complete account of his beliefs and theology.

With all this in mind, here are the arguments Price raises:

Paul’s use of scripture to describe Jesus

There are several places where Paul refers to a line from Jewish scripture to make a point about Jesus or about Paul’s theology. Price finds this strange:

If Jesus had just been here, then why is Paul talking about old scriptures instead of Jesus Christ, who would have just recently been on earth? […] Paul is saying that ancient mysteries are being revealed and made known through prophetic writings, but why wouldn’t he be saying that these things were made known by Jesus himself?

Paul was writing for people in a society who had great respect for tradition, which meant that ancient prophetic texts would have commanded significantly more respect from the elite than what some Johnny-come-lately peasant had to say, even if the peasant was supposedly claiming to be a divine being. (There’s an interesting analysis by GakuseiDon somewhere online with regard to this, looking at Christian writings from around the 2nd century or thereabouts, showing that even Christians whom we know to have believed in an earthly Jesus still put much more emphasis on prophetic Jewish scriptures than on Jesus’s own sayings and actions when they were writing for pagan communities.)

But this does bring us to another point about Paul; that he doesn’t show much interest in Jesus’s teachings. This is another point on which Price comments:

Paul doesn’t cite Jesus

In addition to all this, with all of Paul’s discussion of the law in Galatians 3, he never once says, “Jesus said …” or “Jesus made it known that …” or “Jesus abolished the law …” Paul goes into theological discussions based on the scriptures about law and faith and covenants, developing his own explanation for why the law had been abolished. This is one of many examples where we would expect Paul to have used the teachings of Jesus to make his point if there had been a Jesus who had teachings to cite.

It’s ironic that Price chooses this specific example, because it’s highly debatable whether Jesus’s teachings on this point actually did support Paul. Of course, this has to be conjecture, because all the stories we have about Jesus’s teaching are post-Pauline and written by a church that had good reason to want to harmonise Jesus’s teaching with Paul’s. But it’s worth noting here that Jesus’s reported actions actually don’t break any of the Jewish laws as recorded later in the Talmud, and that both Acts and Galatians suggest that the apostles continued to keep to the dietary laws and attend the temple after Jesus’s death. And, given Paul’s disregard for what Jesus’s apostles had to say on the subject, it’s entirely plausible that he managed to disregard what the actual Jesus had to say.

This does, of course, still leave us with the larger question of why Paul showed so little interest in Jesus’s teachings generally; but, again, we’re up against the problem that mythicism doesn’t explain that either. Even according to the mythicist hypothesis, Paul would have believed that Jesus existed (as a heavenly being who sometimes contacted his followers with pronouncements), and could just as well have thought of a heavenly Jesus as a source of teachings to his followers as he could an earthly Jesus; if he wanted to know what Jesus would teach on a given topic, we’d expect him to show an interest in the message his followers passed down regardless of whether he believed this message had come from a heavenly Jesus or an earthly Jesus. So, this lack of interest on Paul’s part doesn’t get us any further forward in the debate.

Why does Paul show so little interest in Jesus’s teachings? Most likely for the same reason that he shows so little interest in anything else about Jesus’s life; because Jesus’s importance, for Paul, was as the uber-sacrifice that allowed Paul to feel he was free from the law, and he simply didn’t see Jesus as also having been a source of teaching.

Of course, that view seems strange to us; our natural assumption is that Jesus’s followers would be interested in both. But it’s worth remembering that we come from a culture in which the idea of Jesus as Teacher is as strongly ingrained as the idea of Jesus as sin sacrifice, and that the people who were there at the start of Christianity would not have been starting with the same cultural assumptions. Paul supposedly came from a Pharisaic background, and the Pharisaic worldview was that the details of how to interpret the Law in day-to-day life were to be worked out by humans rather than micromanaged by God. From what I understand of the Hellenistic worldview, they also did not see the gods as a source of advice on the details of how to deal with moral dilemmas or day-to-day life. And, with that background in mind, it becomes more understandable that Paul wouldn’t jump from ‘Jesus is a heavenly being sent as a sin sacrifice’ to ‘Jesus must be a good source of advice; wonder how he’d manage this problem?’ He’d do what he was used to doing, and manage issues himself.

‘In one of whom they have never heard’

In Romans 10:14 Paul asks rhetorically how anyone is meant to believe ‘in one of whom they have never heard’, and Price takes this up:

Romans 10 is a very significant passage. If Jesus had just been on earth and been ministering to the Jews and performing miracles in Galilee and Judea and drawing large crowds, as the Gospels claim, then why does Paul ask here if Jews cannot be blamed for not believing in Christ because they haven’t heard about him?

This letter was addressed to people in a city well over a thousand miles from Galilee, who would not be expected to have seen or heard Jesus regardless of whether he had recently been on earth or not. Price seems to have read this passage as referring to Jews rather than the Romans to whom it was addressed, but, while this is plausible, it doesn’t really help; there were millions of Jews in the world at the time, most of whom wouldn’t have been around the backwater province of Galilee to hear Jesus.

Paul is, in fact, touching on an extremely good question here, one of the main ones that always bothered me about Christianity; if the only route to salvation is through Jesus, what about all the people who didn’t happen to live in the right time or place to have heard of him? While Paul doesn’t actually do much to address this question, it’s still a highly valid one regardless of whether Jesus lived on earth or not, and the fact that Paul at least mentions it is hardly evidence that he didn’t believe Jesus was earthly.

Paul’s repeated use of the word ‘mystery’

Price puts great weight on this:

So Paul claims that he is telling these people a “mystery”, but why would this be a mystery if Jesus Christ had just been on earth a few years earlier to bring this very message to people, a message that he supposedly proclaimed several times according to the Gospels?

Back to translational and cultural issues: Paul and his readers wouldn’t have attached the same meaning to the word ‘mystery’. It comes from a word meaning ‘to shut the mouth,’ and hence, in this culture, it referred to secrets made known only to a select group of initiates (hence, the ‘mystery religions’ of the time). Of course, it’s debatable how applicable the word was here, when Paul was out to convert as many people as possible, but it’s easy to see how Paul would have wanted to make his followers feel like a select group with access to superior inside knowledge. So, when Paul uses the word this way, he isn’t throwing his hands in the air and admitting that there’s something here no-one can figure out; he’s trying to make his readers feel like a select group who get to be in on a secret. ‘Mystery’ here in no way precludes the existence of a real-life walking talking earthly Jesus.

The body of Christ and the desert rock

Price also brings up Paul’s references to the church as ‘the body of Christ’, as well as one line (1 Cor 10:4) referring to Jesus as the rock that the Israelites drank water from in the desert. Price’s implication seems to be that this somehow precludes Paul having believed Jesus had an actual body.

That, however, doesn’t work even with mythicist beliefs. Paul specifically stated that Jesus had had human form; he also believed Jesus had been crucified and buried, as well as being able to pick up bread and wine during his life. It is, therefore, clear that Paul believed Jesus had a body. Even if we go with the (dubious) theory that he thought this body had only existed in a heavenly dimension, Paul clearly wasn’t believing in some sort of disembodied spirit here.  It should, therefore, be extremely obvious that the lines referring to the church as Jesus’s body or comparing him to a rock are meant to be metaphorical rather than some sort of literal claim that Jesus did not have a body.

The future coming of Jesus

Price quotes the descriptions of the future coming of Jesus in 1 Thessalonians 4 and 2 Thessalonians 1, and makes much of the fact that these aren’t described as Jesus returning to earth; Price insists that this must mean that Paul (or whoever the author of the disputed 2 Thessalonians was) was saying that this would be Jesus’s first arrival on earth. That would be a lot of weight to put on word choice even without the issue of translating from another language; the word ‘coming’ can just as well be used to mean that someone is coming back to a place they’ve previously been. (For example, I find it completely normal for my mother to talk about coming to see us or to ask when I’m coming to see her, even though not only have we had repeated trips back and forth over the years but she’s still living in the house where I grew up! Clearly, when she asks when I can come to see her, she’s not meaning that word choice to imply that it’s the first time I’ve visited the house.)

On top of that, the translation issues raise another problem with Price’s argument here: atheist history blogger Tim O’Neill has pointed out that the word used in the 1 Thessalonians passage is ‘parousia’, which carries strong implications of a formal royal arrival. ‘Parousia’ thus makes complete sense as a word choice for someone who believed that Jesus had previously been on earth as a humble peasant but would be coming back as a glorious king.

Conclusion

Price has convinced himself that this collection of passages is a powerful indication of Jesus’s nonexistence. However, this claim doesn’t really stand up when the passages are looked at in the context of Paul’s own culture and theological focus.

Next up: The other side of the story. What passages in Paul suggest that he did believe in a Jesus who’d lived on Earth, and does Price give any alternative explanations for these?