Politically Correct Fairy Tale

Mack's work is typically composed of several parts: Argument by incredulity, for example, plays a small role, but by and large the assumption of theory as fact is the chief methodology; thus, for example, Mack can safely assume seven individual "streams" of Christian belief in the first century that largely ignored and/or despised each other -- the Bauer hypothesis in new dress. Jesus himself was no more than a Cynic sage that was deified by people who basically decided to deify him. All of this sort of thing is answered between our material, and that of Glenn Miller and Boyd's Cynic Sage or Son of God?, so that we need not go into detail here.

Fortunately, Mack's writing style is so droning that the average reader may not swallow the hypotheses hook, line and sinker. The "conventional" view of the New Testament is debunked mostly by simply assuming it to be ridiculous; what little substantiative argument is made is rather desperate: For example, Mack supposes that the Gospel authors, whoever they were, could have gotten away with producing their works anonymously because Greco-Roman students of rhetoric were often assigned to create speeches and letters as though they were from authentic historical figures. That's nice, but did any of these rhetoriticians ever try to pass off those works as genuine, and succeed in doing so? Like many in this school, Mack is the master of the irrelevant parallel. I find him little different from other college professors with whom I have crossed swords in the past.