‘Walking Disaster’ review: Chapter Eleven

This is a chapter-by-chapter review of problematic romance novel ‘Walking Disaster’ by Jamie McGuire. Posts in the series will all be linked back to the initial post, here.

‘Walking Disaster’ is a companion novel to ‘Beautiful Disaster’, which is currently being snark-reviewed by the magnificent Jenny Trout. Links to that review and other reviews of Jenny’s can be found here.

 

Chapter Eleven: Cold Bitch

Well, there’s a title with ominous connotations.

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‘Walking Disaster’ review: Chapter Ten, Part Two

This is a chapter-by-chapter review of problematic romance novel ‘Walking Disaster’ by Jamie McGuire. Posts in the series will all be linked back to the initial post, here.

‘Walking Disaster’ is a companion novel to ‘Beautiful Disaster’, which is currently being snark-reviewed by the magnificent Jenny Trout. Links to that review and other reviews of Jenny’s can be found here.

Jenny Trout has her next ‘Beautiful Disaster’ post up! Check it out! For those wanting to read the two reviews in parallel, the plot covered in that chapter of ‘Beautiful’ is the same as that covered in the end of Chapter Eight, Chapter Nine, and the first part of Chapter Ten of ‘Walking’, because of how badly the books are synced up.

And, yes… I did find it cool to read her review after having done the parallel chapters in ‘Walking’, so now I’d like to cover enough of ‘Walking’ to get through the equivalent of Chapter Five in ‘Beautiful’ before Jenny reviews that chapter. But, again, we’ll see how it goes. (And I do have my other book review to work on as well.)

Back to Chapter Ten of ‘Walking’, guys!

Content warning

Red flag levels of possessive jealousy.

 

Chapter Ten: Broken (Oddly appropriate chapter title, since I broke the chapter review. Ba-dum, shh. OK, OK, moving on.)

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‘Deciphering the Gospels Proves Jesus Never Existed’ review: Preface and Introduction.

Hey, guys, anyone up for a bit more Jesus mythicism debate? Yes… it’s time for me to start reviewing R.G. Price’s book!

A bit of background, for those who don’t know it: A few months back, I wrote a post here about why I’ve always found it more likely that Jesus did exist as some kind of real-life figure, rather than being a completely mythical figure as many non-Christians believe. (That post isn’t a comprehensive list of reasons for believing in Jesus’s historicity, by the way; just the reasons why I thought Jesus likely to be historical even before I started reading up properly on the debate and learning more about it.)

Anyway, the post sparked off some pretty major discussion, and Jesus mythicist R.G. Price came to join in. (This might, by the way, be a good moment to clarify that R.G. Price is not the same person as Robert M. Price, who is also a Jesus mythicist.) We had some further discussion, and he very kindly offered to send me a free copy of his book. I offered in turn to review it for him, and here we are.

This one, unlike some of the other stuff I’ve written, is not going to be snark. I’m up for a serious discussion about R.G. Price’s arguments and the reasons why I disagree with them (which I still do; I’ve read the whole book already). If that’s not for you, no worries, hope to see you on another review.

This book has both a preface and an introduction; I’ll try to cover them both in this post. As with previous reviews, I’ll then link all other chapter reviews back to the original post to keep everything in one place, so the list of links to reviews of subsequent chapters should be at the bottom of this post (I’ll update each time I post a new chapter review).

Here we go, folks!

Preface

R.G. Price’s first sentence is ‘By conventional standards, I am not qualified to write this book.’ This amused me; by the same conventional standards, I’m not qualified to debate it, so we’ll just bumble along together in happy amateurism. (If anyone out there who does have relevant qualifications spots any howling errors in anything I write or anything I quote from R.G. Price, do feel free to step in and set us straight.)

R.G. Price goes on to give us a quick outline of his background:

  • He’s a software engineer/data analysis, with a BSc in biology. (That’s interesting; I’m curious as to how he got from the latter to the former? Not that it’s relevant; I’m just interested.)
  • He grew up in a ‘nominally Christian’ family but was skeptical about Christianity from an early age. However, he was always fascinated by religion in general, and read the Bible several times while he was growing up. (He’s got more sticking power than me. I tried to read it several times, but invariably bogged down somewhere around the Chronicles. Although the part I did read was certainly… informative.) When he read the Bible’s accounts of supernatural phenomena, he would try to think of possible natural causes for the things described.
  • He first found out about Jesus mythicism in the late ’90s, because Internet. (Yes, me too.) He was very skeptical about it at first, and in fact spent quite a bit of time over the next few years debunking some of the more improbable mythicist theories. However, in the process of researching these claims, he found some of the things he was coming across were starting to change his mind on the subject.

At this point, R.G. Price gives us an example; He often saw mythicists claiming that the twelve disciples were actually symbolic of the twelve signs of the zodiac. (Good grief; people were claiming this often? The internet is a worrying place.) R.G. Price pointed out that a much more likely source of the story was a Jewish tradition of heroes or prophets appointing helpers from each of the twelve tribes of Israel. However, having come up with this explanation, he found himself believing that this was indeed the source of the story; that the disciples were ‘a symbolic literary intervention’.

Now, this is interesting. If I understand this correctly, R.G. Price seems to have moved from ‘This is a possible explanation for this part of the story’ to ‘This is a likely explanation for this part of the story’. And I can’t quite see how he got there. I mean, certainly the story of twelve disciples could have been invented for that reason, but it’s also perfectly plausible that a real-life Jewish preacher of that era would deliberately choose a group of that size for that reason. So, as far as I can see, that particular part of the story could fit with either a historical or a mythical Jesus.

(In fact, once you take into account that two out of the three leaders of the original Jerusalem church supposedly started out as part of Jesus’s group, the probability seems to swing at least a little more towards the historical. It’s plausible that an author writing a symbolic story about a mythical Jesus might decide to include all the existing church leaders as members of his inner circle, or, even more likely, none of them… but it seems a bit odd that they’d include two out of three and have a different backstory for the third. Not impossible, but odd enough to seem on the unlikely side.)

Anyway, by now R.G. Price had read about how some scenes in the gospels seem to be literary allusions to the Hebrew scriptures (for example, many details in the crucifixion scene seem to be based on Psalm 22) and he formed a hypothesis; that this was true of almost all the gospel stories. Or at least, almost all the stories in Mark, the earliest gospel. So he set out to test this by – and I love this – spending a year going through gMark line by line, searching the OT in various translations to find related passages on which each story could have been based. A year. R.G. Price, my man, you may proudly take your place amongst the Fellowship of Obsessive Geeks, which I totally just invented but absolutely should exist. Welcome to our ranks. <extends hand>

His conclusion, at the end of all this, was that all of the stories in gMark could be attributed either to literary allusions to OT stories, or to points that ‘Mark’ had found in Paul’s epistles. From this, and other parts of the Jesus story that he’d been looking into, he found himself coming round to the mythicism side of the argument.

At this point, he still felt he needed a theory explaining how the Jesus story originated. He feels he’s managed to come up with such a theory, and is writing this book in order to present it. He concludes ‘The case I am putting forward essentially shows that belief in a real human Jesus arose out of confusion and a misunderstanding of how the Gospels were written.’

Introduction

In the introduction, R.G. Price outlines his theory. Put together chronologically, it goes like this:

  1. Christianity originated as a small apocalyptic Jewish cult that believed that the material world was hopelessly corrupt and thus the kingdom of God would need to be established in heaven rather than, as was more traditionally believed, on earth. As such, they developed the belief that the Messiah – eagerly awaited by Jews – would be an immaterial heavenly being rather than an earthly human.
  2. Paul became an apostle of this cult. He preached reconciliation between Jews and Gentiles, believing that the expected kingdom of God would be open to anyone who had faith in God.
  3. Along came the First Jewish-Roman War, the sacking of Jerusalem, and the destruction of the Temple. One of the members of the Pauline-founded sects came to the belief that these events were God’s punishment on the Jews for not having heeded the message of harmony between Jews and Gentiles. He expressed this belief in a fictional, allegorical account, in which he made Jesus the protagonist. This story was the one we now call the Gospel of Mark.
  4. The other gospel writers, misunderstanding Mark’s gospel and believing it to be a real story of a real person, wrote more detailed stories based on it. (At least, that seems to be what R.G. Price thinks happened here; his theory seems a little vague at this point.)

Some of this, of course, gets discussed in more detail through the book, and I’ll discuss it then. The last part, however, doesn’t really seem to get addressed further (unless I’ve missed something) so I’m going to take a minute to look at it here; how is this supposed to have happened? We’re talking here not just about people mistaking a fictional story for a true one (which I can well believe someone, somewhere, would manage to do) but about multiple people getting so caught up in this that they write more detailed versions of the fictional story, adding in new points!

How likely would this be to happen? Why should we consider it a more likely explanation for the existence of the gospels than the more usual explanation that they’re based on stories about a real person that were passed down (albeit in embroidered form) over the years?

Anyway, that’s about it for the introduction. In the next chapter, we’re going to get more detail about the theory of Mark’s gospel as an allegory.

 

Links to other chapters

(Each link will be followed by a quick summary of the points covered in that post)

More on the intro/first thoughts on Chapter 1

  • How would a cult following a mythical heavenly Jesus have developed a belief in a crucified Messiah?
  • How could a cult following a heavenly Jesus be so thoroughly supplanted by a cult believing in an earthly Jesus that we’re left with no mention or trace of the former?
  • Why we can’t assume that ‘allegorical story’ = ‘fictional protagonist’

Chapter 1, part 2

The problem of Pilate/the execution scene; a key scene that isn’t explained under Price’s theory.

Chapter 1, part 3

Some of the examples Price gives to illustrate his theory are good ones, but some are much weaker. I look at two examples of the latter.

Chapter 1, part 4

  • The flaw in Price’s theory about Mark’s motivation
  • The question of how the Parable of the Vineyard fits with mythicism

Chapter 2, part 1

Discussion of Price’s examples of Markan passages supposedly derived from Paul.

Chapter 2, part 2

General discussion both of Price’s thoughts on Markan derivation from Paul, and of the theory so far overall.

Chapter 3

Price’s claim that the other gospel authors’ usage of gMark must mean they couldn’t have had other sources to work from.

Chapter 4

Mostly about the early Church’s flawed claims about gospel origins, but accidentally raises a couple of very awkward questions about Price’s own theory.

Chapter 5, part 1

Price misunderstands Docetism.

Chapter 5, part 2

Some unrealistic suggestions about what second-century apologists could have done if they had wanted to prove Jesus’s existence.

Chapter 6, part 1

On to the other traditional gospels, and two more problems with Jesus mythicism: the birth stories, and Jesus’s Pharisaical sayings.

Chapter 6, part 2

More problems with Price’s attempts at explaining the other traditional gospels under mythicism.

Chapter 7

Price and I agree on something; the non-canonical gospels aren’t much help in this debate.

Chapter 8

The problems of explaining the origins of Christianity under a mythicist theory.

Chapter 9, part 1

The problems with using Paul to bolster a mythical or a historical theory.

Chapter 9, part 2

Price’s arguments for the claim that Paul didn’t believe in an earthly Jesus.

Chapter 9, part 3

Reasons to conclude that Paul did believe in an earthly Jesus, plus discussion of Paul’s ‘born of a woman’ quote.

Chapter 9, part 4

Price vs. Paul on ‘brother[s] of the Lord’.

 

‘Walking Disaster’ review: Chapter Ten, Part One

This is a chapter-by-chapter review of problematic romance novel ‘Walking Disaster’ by Jamie McGuire. Posts in the series will all be linked back to the initial post, here. ‘Walking Disaster’ is a companion novel to ‘Beautiful Disaster’, which is currently being snark-reviewed by the magnificent Jenny Trout. Links to that review and other reviews of Jenny’s can be found here.

 

Content warning:

  • Alcohol (mis)used as a coping mechanism
  • Swearing (mine and the book’s)

 

Chapter Ten: Broken

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‘Walking Disaster’ review: Chapter Nine

This is a chapter-by-chapter review of problematic romance novel ‘Walking Disaster’ by Jamie McGuire. Posts in the series will all be linked back to the initial post, here. ‘Walking Disaster’ is a companion novel to ‘Beautiful Disaster’, which is being snark-reviewed by the magnificent Jenny Trout.

You might well at this point be wondering how long I’m going to keep on with this particular novel without taking a break to do something else (such as, for example, the other review project I promised I’d work on). If so… well, good question.

What I like the idea of doing, you see, is snarking a section of ‘Walking’ and then reading Jenny’s snark of the equivalent section in ‘Beautiful’; I think that would be fun. So, my initial ambition was to try to get a chapter ahead of Jenny before taking a break. What I hadn’t realised was how far out of sync the chapters are. I mean, this is Chapter Nine, but the story in ‘Beautiful’ is still only part way through Chapter Four. So I’d like to get to whatever point equates to the end of Chapter Four in ‘Beautiful’, but Potato only knows where that’s going to end up being in ‘Walking’. Anyway, my plan at the moment is to keep going with this one until I either get there or lose it completely and run screaming into the night.

Content warnings

  • Pathological possessiveness
  • Anger problems

 

Chapter Nine: Crushed

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The Transphobic Comments Of Dr Jacob Edward Les

Siobhan, a blogger on this site, has posted an article on one Dr Les of Calgary, titled Calgary Physician Calls Transgender People “Demented, Distorted”. She quotes, with links, multiple examples of frighteningly transphobic comments Dr Les has made on his blog or Twitter account.

In the post at the first link Shiv gives, for example, Dr Les dismisses gender identity as a belief that’s ‘soft-headed’, ‘blithering idiocy’, and ‘dangerous bunk’. He also describes the AAP guidelines on care for transgender youth as recommending that transgender children be ‘ushered post-haste down the injurious road to sex reassignment’, which is, quite frankly, a bare-faced lie. (And a very dangerous lie for transgender children whose parents make the mistake of trusting Dr Les to be honest with them on this point and don’t check the guidelines out for themselves to see that this doesn’t remotely represent the advice they give. This dishonest scaremongering could put people off seeking the help their children need.)

This is really bad behaviour from someone who, as a doctor, has a responsibility to show the public a better side. It’s horrifying that he feels it appropriate not only to hold these kinds of bigoted, simplistic beliefs without finding out more, but also to express them in such insulting terms.

You can read more in Shiv’s article; she’s read more of his work than I’d be able to stomach.

‘Walking Disaster’ review: Chapter Eight

This is a chapter-by-chapter review of problematic romance novel ‘Walking Disaster’ by Jamie McGuire. Posts in the series will all be linked back to the initial post, here. ‘Walking Disaster’ is a companion novel to ‘Beautiful Disaster’, which is being snark-reviewed by the magnificent Jenny Trout.

Content warnings:

  • Ablist term (but not used to insult anyone else)
  • Carelessness about prospective animal ownership

 

Chapter Eight: Oz

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‘Walking Disaster’ review: Chapter Seven

This is a chapter-by-chapter review of problematic romance novel ‘Walking Disaster’ by Jamie McGuire. Posts in the series will all be linked back to the initial post, here. ‘Walking Disaster’ is a companion novel to ‘Beautiful Disaster’, which is being snark-reviewed by the magnificent Jenny Trout.

Content warnings:

  • Aggressive behaviour
  • Swearing (mine and the book’s)
  • Rape culture
  • Misogyny
  • Heavy drinking

 

Chapter Seven: Seeing Red

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‘Walking Disaster’ review: Chapter Six

This is a chapter-by-chapter review of problematic romance novel ‘Walking Disaster’ by Jamie McGuire. Posts in the series will all be linked back to the initial post, here. ‘Walking Disaster’ is a companion novel to ‘Beautiful Disaster’, which is being snark-reviewed by the magnificent Jenny Trout.

Content warnings:

  • Misogynistic insult
  • Drunk driving being treated casually, careful driving being treated negatively

 

Chapter Six: Shots

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‘Walking Disaster’ review: Chapter Five

This is a chapter-by-chapter review of problematic romance novel ‘Walking Disaster’ by Jamie McGuire. Posts in the series will all be linked back to the initial post, here. ‘Walking Disaster’ is a companion novel to ‘Beautiful Disaster’, which is being snark-reviewed by the magnificent Jenny Trout.

I realised, from reading over the bit of Jenny Trout’s post that’s equivalent to Chapter Four in this book (which makes it the middle part of Chapter Two in ‘Beautiful Disaster’), that McGuire left out another scene in this book. In ‘Beautiful’, there’s a scene where, after a few weeks of tutoring from Travis, Abby gets excellent grades and Travis celebrates this by throwing her over his shoulder and running through the crowd of students shouting. I was going to comment on this because – while it’s potentially a nice scene in itself and you can see how, in the right context, it could work well to show an easy and affectionate friendship between two people – it’s completely at odds with Travis’s realisation in a previous chapter that Abby hates getting attention. Once you know that Travis knows this about Abby, that scene becomes yet another unpleasant example of him disregarding her wants.

Anyway… in ‘Walking Disaster’ that scene was left out completely. I’m never sure to what extent scenes are left out because McGuire realises on at least some level they are absolutely not going to work when seen from inside Travis’s head, and to what extent it’s that she just can’t be bothered to put them in, but on this occasion I do think it’s the latter; I just don’t think McGuire would have joined the dots in her own narrative enough to notice the problem. Whatever the reason, it wasn’t here. But it was in ‘Beautiful’, so, if retconning it out was McGuire’s intention, then she was a bit late in doing so. A better way to rescue that scene would have been to include it but to show Travis realising afterwards that it would have been embarrassing and awkward for Abby and that he shouldn’t have done it. As it is… yet another example of Travis being focused on how he wants to act at the expense of considering what Abby wants.

Oh, well. On with this one.

Content warning:

  • Misogynistic insults (some of them recapped from Chapter One by me in order to illustrate a point; some of them new to this chapter)
  • Swearing (mine)
  • Slut-shaming and prude-shaming (yup; can’t win)
  • Pushy, boundary-trampling behaviour

 

Chapter Five: Roommate

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