When last we left Robert Price and his critique of Evidence That Demands a Verdict Chapter 9, it seemed that he had almost learned the process of civilized discourse with the human race. Those who may thereby have held out hope for him may have held out that hope too soon, for in Price's latest effort, Deconstructing Jesus, every one of Mr. Hyde's bad habits are resurrected again. It is of no curiosity that Price published this work with the atheistic/humanistic Prometheus Press; even the most liberal of the scholarly Christian presses would have bypassed this extended temper tantrum, even had they been given the choice between publishing either this work or an updated version of the Book of Mormon.

Every five to ten pages, one scholar or another who disagrees with Price's position is accused of having ulterior motives or else of being full of insecurities; this, in line with Price's usual tactic of attempting to claim the argumentative high ground by accusing his opponents of being either spin doctors or else deluded. We are told that when a writer says that something has been "long-refuted" it "only means that those committed to a rival paradigm mounted some arguments, whether weak or strong, against their competitors and moved on." (How's that for critical evaluation of competing theories, of which Price does rather little!) N. T. Wright is sloughed off in a footnote (not with pages of critical evaluation, mind you!) as an "Evangelical apologist" who "has merely used Schweitzer's Jesus as a cloak to sneak reformed theology back into the mouth of the 'historical Jesus' ventriloquist dummy." Most startling of all, though, in resurrecting the "pagan similarities" thesis, Price points the finger not only at his usual suspects, "Christian scholars" who have rejected the thesis "one must suspect, for dogmatic reasons," but also at non-Christian history-of-religions scholar Jonathan Z. Smith! Smith rejects the thesis on quite rational grounds (see below), but while he's at it, Price offers his suspicion that Smith "adopt(s) the program of Christian apologists" (!) because he "suspect(s) it is part of (Smith's) root-and-branch campaign to undo the theories of his great predecessor James Frazer" (!!) Is there anyone who isn't somehow clouded by biases and/or in on this conspiracy to undermine Price's position as the clearest-thinking, most unbiased New Testament scholar to have ever existed? ("All the world does wish me dead/Could I perhaps kill them instead?")

And there are other bad habits resurrected as well: broad, overgeneralized (and in many cases, unsubstantiated) claims; parallels drawn to irrelevant literature (like Apollonius of Tyana's biography, and to Muslim works!); literary-critical shenanigans; overreading (the same old "James vs. Paul nonsense; the idea that because the Gospels show Jesus in conflict with other Jews regularly, they are "implying Jesus was opposed to a monolithic 'normative' Judaism -- which did not yet exist!"); downright silly mistakes (for example, that Paul preached a "Torah-free gospel" that amounted to a cheap, watered-down Judaism that Gentiles could handle - what of the many moral constraints that Paul preached which were just as demanding? - and the claim that Mithraists "undertook a ritual shower in the blood of a disemboweled bull," which is not reported in Mithraic studies literature anywhere), and poor critical thinking efforts, of which I will share a couple of samples: