Response to Robert Price on "The Case for Christ"

Price’s first chapter is about the Blomberg interview on the reliability of the Gospels, and much of what is covered here is the same as what I cover in Trusting the New Testament (and here on the site) relative to the authorship of the Gospels. It will be no surprise that Price doesn’t bother with an epistemology of authorship that resembles anything used by scholars on other ancient documents; instead, invoking his privilege as an alleged “critical historian” Price simply creates rules for determining authorship out of thin air, that is, when he bothers to use any rules at all. Most of the time it is simply a case of Price smelling something he thinks is rotten and then proclaiming loudly that it must be the Gospels; but this is again a case of Price perfuming an elevator with his personal odeur and then trying to blame someone else for it.

Price begins with a negligible complaint that he thinks the answers given by scholars like Blomberg are just the same as what used to be given by the likes of McDowell. As a longtime critic of McDowell, that is news to me; it seems more likely that Price is using the same logic he uses to collapse Jesus into a twin of Attis: Blomberg and McDowell are alike because they both provide answers with the intent to show Christianity is true. In terms of depth and detail of argument, there is simply no comparison; not that it matters anyway who repeats what, since an argument’s validity or lack thereof is not determined by such circumstances. Price as usual is simply ill-resistant to starting his speechifying without an appropriately decorated bucket to be dipped into the poisoned well.

When we get to Gospel authorship, starting with Matthew, Price descends into the usual cow-eating-grass portraiture with a reflection that perhaps evil orthodoxers suppressed valid alternate opinions that Matthew was written by someone else; evidence is not considered needed or necessary, which makes it all the fairer should we wish to speculate that American Atheist Press is hiding the fact that The Case Against the Case for Christ was written by Rocky J. Suyhada of the American Nazi Party. After all, Frank Zindler of American Atheists would have a good reason to want to cover that up, so we have a right to be suspicious. In any event Price can cite no actual alternate opinions, save that he seems to think Marcion didn’t believe Luke wrote Luke, but that Paul did, but he doesn’t document where it is said that Marcion believed this, and I have seen no such speculation offered anywhere.

Reaching further into inanity, Price cites fellow conspiracy lunatic Robert Eisler’s as saying that “Papias sought to account for apparent Marcionite elements in the Gospel of John by suggesting Marcion had worked as John’s secretary and scribe and added his own ideas to the text.” This idea from a 1938 text is not mentioned by Blomberg not because he wishes to hide some great secret, as Price implies; it is not mentioned by Blomberg because it is lunacy. Eisler’s contention that Marcion was John’s scribes is not based on a direct statement of Papias (eg, “Marcion was John’s scribe”) but is based on an idiosyncratic reading of an anti-Marcionite prologue, which Roger Pearse has reported as follows here:

The Gospel of John was revealed and given to the churches by John while still in the body, just as Papias of Hieropolis, the close disciple of John, related in the exoterics, that is, in the last five books. Indeed he wrote down the gospel, while John was dictating carefully. But the heretic Marcion, after being condemned by him because he was teaching the opposite to him [John], was expelled by John. But he [Marcion] had brought writings or letters to him [John] from the brothers which were in Pontus.

Eisler suggested that the original of this text had Marcion as the scribe for John, but that is the pure fancy of one who, like Price, governs his historical epistemology based on conspiracy-mongering rather than evidence. Price is thus reporting some fringe lunatic view as though it were some certified mainstream finding that Blomberg was stubbornly and judiciously ignoring because he couldn’t face the facts.

Price also notes that some ascribed John to Cerinthus, though he fails to note that this attribution came from the anti-Montanists, who disliked John’s Gospel and were reckoned heretics themselves. In any event Price makes no effort to deal with the usual evidences to determine authorship.

I am perhaps less inclined to grant weigh to the contention, noted by Blomberg, that some Gospel author attributions (Luke, Mark) are unlikely because they were given to minor names. As I say in TNT, however, responding to the very position Price replies with: “At this point, of course, some will argue that Mark was chosen as author precisely because he was unknown, like those selected for the late apocryphal Gospels. However, most (even Kümmel) agree the attribution to a non-apostle adds weight to the argument that Mark was the author.” It’s not the heaviest piece of data; it’s more of a supplement to what we have according to standard rules for determining authorship of a document.

Price’s own idea for how Matthew got to be the attributed author of his Gospel involves a convoluted explanation that because it was clearly a teaching gospel, someone at some point made a pun between the word “mathetes” (disciple) and the name Matthew, and this somehow became universally adopted. Well, by the same logic, then, Price’s own book became tagged with his name because someone realized that the price of letting Christianity succeed was ruining our society, and Robert was added because – the name meaning “fame” – American Atheist Press wanted to assure everyone that Price was a famous dude who deserved attention. “Critical history” can be a lot of fun at times. Of course we should ignore the fact that “Matthew” was a known and used name in the first century; which means that anyone named “Matthew” obviously did not exist since their name could be turned into a pun. (Actually, we can use this point to argue that Matthew the former Levi chose the name himself because he wanted to indicate himself as a new “disciple” par excellence of Jesus. It never occurs to Price that what some anonymous “editor” could think to do, Matthew himself was just as capable of doing.)

In turn Price speculates that Luke and Mark were attributed to subpar persons because of their subpar quality compared to Matthew. Well and well again: Now we know why so many American Atheist books are attributed to Frank Zindler. Clearly attributing them to a person with such a funny sounding name was a way of indicating that books by people like DR. ROBERT PRICE were of better quality. He also stumps for the usual bravado from Bultmann that John underwent Gnostic editing, a position which is far out of date thanks to the Dead Sea Scrolls, but as elsewhere, Price refuses to offer any actual arguments, preferring to take Bultmann for granted. Nor does he seriously engage the evidence for Gospel authorship as we do in TNT. He rejects the equation of Matthew and Levi, for no other reason than that Mark and Matthew never explicitly equate the two; apparently Price needs a pencil a mile thick to connect the dots on that one, whereas suspicion, “critical history” and a pencil with a microscopic point is enough for him to suppose that Marcion was the author of John. Some consistency from Price would be helpful at this point, but we aren’t holding our breath.

In what follows, much of Price’s critique assumes Marcan priority over Matthew, something we dissent fromagainst both Blomberg and Price, and doubt Price will have the will to argue about. Hence we need not examine each of Price’s claims individually on this subject, though it is worth a note that he is still plying the same old misreading of Mark 10:18 as though Matthew “improved” the responses. Maybe one say Price will come up with something that wasn’t stale when Bultmann was sucking on a pacifier.

The allegation that Blomberg is a “scissors and paste historian” who does not “ask his ancient authors to justify their claims” carries with it a certain presumption that Blomberg has not done this justifying work in the background of his studies, simply because he has not reached the conclusion Price agrees with. I rather doubt that this is the case; not that it matters, since Price’s own methodology is to scissor and paste with inane speculations as opposed to ancient documents. Price’s supposed “cross-examination” of Papias and Irenaeus regarding Matthew’s authorship is a case in point. His chief objection is that Papias “does not seem to describe our Gospels of Matthew and Mark,” though he once again apparently needs a pencil a mile thick to make the connection: Papias does describe Matthew as a Hebrew (or Aramaic) document, yes, so it is obvious he cannot be speaking of Matthew in the Greek version we now know, but how hard is it is draw the conclusion, based on external testimony, based on the equation of the two by writers like Eusebius, and based on the likelihood that the first documents of a Jewish movement would BE in Hebrew or Aramaic, that Greek Matthew is an in-line successor to the document Papias references? This is a simple view in accord with all the evidence and circumstances. Price’s fancy that Papias was actually referring to some other document has no basis in evidence, and also simply assumes gratuitously that writers like Eusebius were ignorantly supposing that what Papias said had relevance for Greek Matthew as a successor of the earlier version.

Regarding Mark and Papias, Price digs into his crypt and exhumes David Strauss (by now, he stinketh worse, as Price might say), who made an argument that appeared to have been composed while on psychiatric medication:

On the whole, it would appear that when Papias explains the want of order in Mark from his dependence on the lectures of Peter, who may be supposed to have testified of Jesus only occasionally, he intends to refuse to his narrative the merit not only of the right order but of any historical arrangement whatever. But this is as little wanting in the Gospel of Mark as in any other, and consequently Papias, if we are to understand his expression in this sense, could not have our present Gospel of Mark before him, but must have been speaking of a totally different work.

I have read this several times and can still see nothing that resembles a chain of logic or evidence. But it appears that Strauss made the common error (noted by the classicist Kennedy) of misconstruing Papias’ statements about Mark not being composed “in order” as referring to the final product, when it would actually refer to the initial collection and compilation of notes (per the usual way of creating an ancient document). Strauss, being too much of an anachronism to think that works were composed in any other way than all at once, assumed Papias meant the final product, and observing that Mark as we have it seemed orderly, therefore assumed Papias couldn’t be referring to Mark. There are reasons why Strauss is not cited as an authority in peer-reviewed journals and scholarly commentaries: He had no idea what the heck he was talking about 99% of the time. (See more here.)

Continuing to diss Papias, Price deems him unreliable because of the old “he said Judas got so fat” canard. Here Price is simply once again the victim of his own retained fundamentalism: Read Papias here like a Redd Foxx routine (“he’s so fat he has his own zip code”) and suddenly the problem disappears. Price also objects that Papias attributed to Jesus some words from the Syriac Apocalypse of Baruch, though actually, all that is in common are a couple of images of the sort that are just as readily derived in both cases from Old Testament imagery; or else, why not say that the Apocalypse borrowed from what someone read in Papias, especially given the relatively poor evidence for this document (see here)? But to ask Price to argue according to actual evidence would be too much to ask.

Not done with Papias yet, Price disputes whether he would have even written anything at all since he said he preferred oral tradition to books. That’s rather an anachronistic argument; Papias is expressing a preference that was common to everyone in that world, including literate people who put down their comments about this in writing. For more on this subject, see the oral tradition section of TNT.

Finally, Price objects that Papias has “nothing to say of Luke,” which is presumption; all we know is that he was not quoted about Luke. He merely dismisses the testimony of Irenaeus as gotten from Papias, a point I answered in TNT:

Some object that Irenaeus was merely copying what was said by Papias, whose work he knew, and so his testimony can not be considered independent...However, this is a gratuitous assumption. Simply because Irenaeus knew of Papias’ work does not mean that Papias was his sole source of knowledge for this information. The same argument could be made concerning virtually any other writer or reporter of information, with just as much credence. Irenaeus also offers more information than is available from Papias (as quoted by Eusebius), which suggests an independent investigation or more sources of information.

The parallelomania speculativa continues as Price supposes that Irenaeus simply made up the idea of Luke as a scribe for Paul was just copied from the idea of Mark as a scribe for Peter, as though Irenaeus had no idea before and made it up on the spot. Why, again, we should accept this hypothesis is not explained, and “Robert Price says so” is not an argument. Why not then also say that the idea that Price got a doctorate is false, based on the idea that Craig Blomberg got one? As it is, since the use of an amanuensis was as common (even among the literate) in that day as Price’s beard hairs, “this looks like that” is an even more foolish line of reasoning to reject what Irenaeus says.

Irenaeus is then dissed for unreliability based on a couple of supposed muffs; by that account Price ought to have been packed away years ago; how about him changing his mind about Acharya S? Apparently with Price you are not to be trusted unless you record is spotless, but as it is, he can’t even accuse Irenaeus well, he appeals the old ”he sais Jesus was 50” argument, and a very odd argument regarding what Irenaeus says of the number 666 being in Rev. 13:18. Irenaeus saus, “this number is placed in all genuine and ancient copies, and those who saw John face to face provide attestation.” Price remarks in surprise, “The Asia Minor presbytery weighed in collectively on a matter like that?” Well – no. And it’s hard to see how Irenaeus is saying such a thing there, either; how is the collective presbytery the same as “those who saw John face to face”? I can’t see how either.

Briefly addressed then is the time needed for legendary accrual, and I would probably not have used Alexander the Great as an example the way Blomberg did. But Price leaves that topic almost at once to discuss the date of Mark. Here, we won’t find anything new, though Price’s obsessive focus on Mark 13:30 and how it errs is pretty well dashed to pieces on the rocks by a preterist exegesis (which Blomberg probably would not appeal to). He appeals to his fellow in imagination, Colani, who wrote an item for Price’s vanity journal claiming that Mark 13:30 was added later; his proof is that verse 32 answers the question of verse 4, showing that 5-31 were added in later. In this Colani is simply ignorant of how to read an ancient text. I will appeal to a similar idea by analogy:


I will offer one more example, from Herzog's newer book Prophet and Teacher [129f]. Here is the passage of concern:

Mark 7:1-15 Then came together unto him the Pharisees, and certain of the scribes, which came from Jerusalem. 2And when they saw some of his disciples eat bread with defiled, that is to say, with unwashen, hands, they found fault. 3For the Pharisees, and all the Jews, except they wash their hands oft, eat not, holding the tradition of the elders. 4And when they come from the market, except they wash, they eat not. And many other things there be, which they have received to hold, as the washing of cups, and pots, brasen vessels, and of tables. 5Then the Pharisees and scribes asked him, Why walk not thy disciples according to the tradition of the elders, but eat bread with unwashen hands? 6He answered and said unto them, Well hath Esaias prophesied of you hypocrites, as it is written, This people honoureth me with their lips, but their heart is far from me. 7Howbeit in vain do they worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men. 8For laying aside the commandment of God, ye hold the tradition of men, as the washing of pots and cups: and many other such like things ye do. 9And he said unto them, Full well ye reject the commandment of God, that ye may keep your own tradition. 10For Moses said, Honour thy father and thy mother; and, Whoso curseth father or mother, let him die the death: 11But ye say, If a man shall say to his father or mother, It is Corban, that is to say, a gift, by whatsoever thou mightest be profited by me; he shall be free. 12And ye suffer him no more to do ought for his father or his mother; 13Making the word of God of none effect through your tradition, which ye have delivered: and many such like things do ye. 14And when he had called all the people unto him, he said unto them, Hearken unto me every one of you, and understand: 15There is nothing from without a man, that entering into him can defile him: but the things which come out of him, those are they that defile the man.

Bultmann wondered why the question in v. 5 was not being answered until v. 15 and thus claimed that the "artificiality of the composition is clear as day." But Bultmann was simply unaware of the form in which challenge and riposte was performed. In such conditions, an immediate and direct answer to the question was the last thing that would be offered, for to put it in modern terms, it would be like dignifying your opponent by implying that his question deserved an answer.

As Herzog notes, in this setting, the "proper riposte to a hostile challenge is not to answer the question but to attack the one who asked it, and this is exactly what Jesus does. Where the modern reader finds discontinuity, the ancient reader finds continuity."


Although there’s no riposte in Mark 13, it’s not hard to suppose that some similar principle is at work: In a nutshell, it simply wasn’t required for a teacher to immediately answer a question, Colani’s anachronistic expectations notwithstanding.

So Price’s late date for Mark is argued on nothing more than this. Matthew he dates later partly because of his belief in Markan priority and Matthew’s use of Q, which is a “dogma” he remains content not to “interrogate.” Since that is so we consider any argument of his that relies on such a premise (such as his appeal to Nau) completely answered. Apart from that there is not much to be had in the way of argument. I do not know where he gets the reading that Matthew has Jesus command “Gentile converts” to keep the law; I have seen such arguments from legalist cultists but never from a serious scholar. Since Price does not deign to exegete the text that he thinks says this, there’s no way to answer further.

Not much is said worth a reply otherwise. Mere declaration is all Price offers about Matthew being filled with “legendary embellishments” (other than the implied, “they’re miracles” canard). He supposes, borrowing from Overman, that titles like “abba” and “rabbi” and the use of the “seat of Moses” were not around in Jesus’ time. I have never taken such arguments seriously and never will: If this were Philo rather than Matthew, it would be taken as evidence that Philo records the first such usages.

Strauss is exhumed yet again for a return to Luke; he makes yet another incomprehensible argument lacking any sense of evidence or logic, namely that Luke’s preface shows that he “appears not to be aware of any Gospel immediately composed by an Apostle,” though why this is so is not explained or exegeted from Luke’s text. The same preface is also used to deduce that Luke could not have been a companion of an Apostle, though again, this is not explained by Strauss, merely asserted as though it were painfully obvious. It’s not, though perhaps if we smoked the same things Strauss did, it would be.

Then Strauss is again called on, to explain that “Irenaeus’ description of a Lukan writing down of Paul’s preaching would fit Acts better than Luke.” It’s not clear, again, why Strauss thinks this, but we can sort of get the hint that he’s acting a little Doherty before Doherty, and thinking that the epistles represented what Paul preached. They don’t.

Next: A huge point for dating Acts (and Luke) early is that Paul’s death is not mentioned. Amazingly, Price, who takes the silence of the Markan women as eternally permanent, deigns to argue that Luke’s silence shows that he was aware of Paul’s death and intended to write about it; or maybe, he says, Paul’s death was so well known that it was taken for granted – which is the sort of argument he didn’t seem to appreciate when endorsing Earl Doherty’s nonsense. As Price decides what side of his mouth to speak out of on this point, we’ll note our own comments from TNT which answer what else Price has to offer:


In response, it may be objected that:

Luke desired to appease the Romans, and that is why he doesn’t mention Paul’s sentence. This does not work as an objection, since Luke readily reports Jesus’ execution at the order of a Roman governor.

Luke’s literary intention is simply to show how the commission to preach the gospel in “Jerusalem, Judea, and to the uttermost ends of the earth” was fulfilled by the Lord, so the arrival and preaching of Paul at Rome is more than a fitting ending for his literary purpose. This argument can then be taken a step further and defeated. First, there is the idea that a sub-theme of Acts is the “equality” of Peter and Paul -- the vindication of Paul's apostleship; so, how better to demonstrate this than to end with both martyrdoms in Rome? Second, if Luke's readers knew that Paul had been martyred, then he has ended Acts in the worst possible way for inspiring confidence and commitment in his readers. Ending the work on an “upbeat” note, when it is known that Paul went on to be executed, is like writing a biography of a soldier who went heroically to war, in order to exemplify and encourage patriotism, and omitting the fact that he was killed in action. If you knew this, would you appreciate the patriotic sentiments? An author would be practically required to report the death and do so in a patriotic light; otherwise readers would consider the work to be propaganda


Price also appeals to reputed “parallels” between Jesus and Paul, but these are the usual case of parallelomanics illicitly expanding terms and collapsing down situations to force parallels, or making too much of commonalities. For example, Price notes that both Jesus and Paul were “arrested in connection with a disturbance at the Temple.” The words “disturbance” and “in connection with” are vague generalizations which cover over the vast differences in the nature of what happened to Paul and Jesus. An exercise exposing this sort of reasoning can be found here.

Summary information is then provided on a group of fringe scholars who date Acts to the second century, and some of the positions they took. Since no actual arguments are forwarded, there is nothing that can be answered; suffice therefore to refer the reader to TNT for further information; we’ll just touch on a couple of points as exemplary.

Price again engages parallelomania between Paul and Peter in Acts, noting that each one is shown doing the same thing, such as healing a paralytic. My answer: So what? I agree that Luke was showing that Peter and Paul were on equal terms. But given the actual ability to heal people, why is it so hard to believe that both might encounter a dead person in need of being raised, or paralytics? Does Price think dead people were in short supply in the first century? Does he suppose that in this age prior to decent health care, there might not be a fair supply of persons with paralysis among Rome’s 70 to 100 million people? Is that what Price calls “critical history”? If so, what does one have to smoke to become a critical historian?

One other point we’ll note: Price says Acts seems to “deny [Paul] the dignity of the apostolate,” apparently ignoring Acts 14:4, as well as the fact that “apostle” would hardly be seen as a proper noun at this time. Paul IS denied the “dignity” of being one of the Twelve, but that is simple historic fact; Price in any event is confusing the two categories. I’ll also add that Price is again here speaking out of both sides of his mouth: He has just argued that Acts is trying to make Paul and Peter out to be equals, as a way to bring together Pauline and Petrine factions (whose existence is merely imagined out of thin air), and now he argues that Acts is also denying Paul equality with Peter. Perhaps Price should call us when he makes up his mind which side of his mouth we should be listening to.

Price next turns to the efforts of Hans Conzelmann, whose reading of the eschatology of the New Testament led to further theorizing; under our own preterist eschatology, Conzelmann’s theorizing is rendered moot, based as they are on the alleged disappointment of early Christians; so likewise Price’s further arguments based on the same premise: There is no “replacement of horizontal with vertical eschatology,” for it was all “horizontal” from the very beginning. One peculiar point is that Price says that Luke is the only Gospel that “speaks of people going to heaven or hell as soon as they die.” Since that was the normal view of pre-Christian Judaism, there is no reason to suppose that any other Gospel viewed the matter any differently.

Price then hints at a late second-century date for Luke based on the idea that Luke shared the “agendas” of certain second-century apologists who sought to refute heresies. Apparently Price believes that heresies didn’t exist until January 1, 101 AD, and that before that, there would be no reason for Luke to depict the Twelve as “guarantors of the orthodox tradition of Jesus.” No, there is certainly no way that, as Christianity emerged into the syncretistic environment of the Roman Empire, it would ever run into any problems with “heresy” until the second century had its turn. As we know from the example of the Mormon church and its splinter groups, it takes at least 75 years for a good heresy to crop up. (I am being facetious of course. See here.) To put it in a nutshell: Price’s indication is that Luke must be dated later because there would be no occasion for him to show the apostles as tradition-minders earlier. Not only is that a naïve understanding of the syncretistic environment in which it emerged (and didn’t Price go all on elsewhere about how much early Christians changed things like eg, how resurrection worked, spiritual vs physical?), it also fails to recognize that in a collectivist society, persons like the apostles would rapidly emerge as guarantors of the ingroup’s repository of wisdom; it would not take 100+ years for such a view to come to fruition.

The next several pages are a motley collection of ideas that seem in many cases to have no coherent purpose, and in many cases are simply expansions on Price’s ridiculous notion that there’s no way that the Apostles could have been recognized as tradition-guardians so early. A few comments otherwise:

  • Price falls for the argument we have addressed previously, about why Acts 8 does not show the Apostles being persecuted:

    Critics, however, miss a very subtle point in this verse. It does not say that the Apostles were not persecuted; it only says that they were the only ones who did not leave Jerusalem. [Bck.BAPS, 428-9] This does not mean that the rest of the Jerusalem church was not persecuted, and it does not even necessarily mean that the Apostles were not persecuted.

    One of two options is possible: Either they were persecuted, and they decided to withstand the pressure; or, they may indeed have escaped persecution - in that regard, Witherington [With.AA, 278n] observes that we cannot apply here the modern notion of "kill the head to destroy the body". Even if they were despised, holy men who were able to perform miracles, especially healing miracles, might be left alone out of awe or respect.

    It is perhaps significant, in this light, that while Paul reports in his letters that he persecuted the church, he nowhere says that he persecuted the Apostles.

  • Price finds it curious that both Tertullian in the second century and Luke fight “against the Gnostic idea of a spiritually resurrected Christ…as opposed to the presumably earlier view if 1 Corinthians 15:49-50 and Peter 3:18?” It is hard to see what Price is on about here, since it is thought by many scholars that Paul is fighting a very similar view. But even if he is not, the basis for the Gnostic idea – rejection of the material body as evil – existed long before the second century. In addition, Luke is not fighting a “spiritual resurrection view: Price presumably alludes here to how Luke has Jesus eating fish and being touched. No, with that, Luke is recording how Jesus affirmed that he was not actually his own guardian angel, a being of spirit – which is how most Jews would have interpreted his appearance. Finally, it is worth note that since Price has elsewhere suggested that Paul teaches a spiritual resurrection, it is fairly clear that once again he needs to make up his mind what he wants to argue.
  • Yet another wild reason why Price thinks Acts is a second-century product: He adopts wholesale (he doesn’t “interrogate”) the views of J. C. O’Neill that Acts shows that the Jews have “forfeited their claim on God and have been shunted to the side…” I don’t find such a reading of Luke in the least plausible; I find no more than one might find in Romans 11, or in the Olivet Discourse, or Revelation: the old covenant is set aside, and Jews are as free to join the new one as anyone is. I find no basis for the claim that Luke gives out Jews as “horned caricatures” – this reading is accomplished by extrapolating Luke’s description of a handful of malcontents into the whole of Jewry.

    Price presents no specific arguments for his view, though, so not much more can be said; he goes on to make similar assertions, none of which he actually argues, so not much can be said of those either save our own counter-assertions. The alleged “supersession” [sic] of the Temple in Stephen’s speech is nothing extraordinary for the first century; try Jesus’ own eschatological discourses, as well as the Essenes –or maybe don’t, since Stephen doesn’t even mention the Temple in the first place; that was the charge of his opponents.

  • The charge that the Apostolic Decree of Acts 15 represents a later period is simply silly, given that we see Paul in his own letters trying to implement it. Of course, Price would perhaps arbitrarily date those letters to the second century as well, but in any event, Price is again exceptionally naïve if he thinks it would take at least 100 years for any question of “Gentiles: keep the law or not?” to emerge. There is no reason to think that it would not emerge almost immediately after Gentile evangelism – after all, the emergence of God-fearers meant that someone already had been wrestling with the question of what it meant to convert for a long time before that.

    The argument that because eg, Tertullian says that Christians do not eat blood, that the Decree must be an “after the fact” effort of “apostolic legitimization” is simply Price starting with his theory of Acts as a late document and mashing the facts into line. His one argument to the opposite effect is that Tertuallian et al never trace these prohibitions back to the Decree, which is simply yet another case of a low-context reader misreading high-context documents (see here). Price’s implied demand for a specific reference to the Decree is simply arbitrary and out of touch with the expressive realities of a high-context society.

  • Price designates the use of the title for Jesus, “Servant of God,” as a sign of a late date, since it appears in later documents. Yes, I am sure, too, it would have taken at least 100 years for disciples of Jesus to understand him as a “servant” (3:13, 3:26, 4:27) of God. After all, he did nothing at all to “serve” God at any time in his ministry. And no one could come up with such a title anyway, especially not after passages like 1 Chr. 6:49, Neh. 10:29, and Dan. 9:11 (about Moses, also the broker of God’s covenant) . Frankly, it is hard to believe that Price is making an argument this inane.
  • So likewise, it is hard to believe that Price thinks that it would take at least until the second century before, as in Acts 17, Christians sought common ground with their pagan subjects during evangelism; such was definitely not a known rhetorical tactic. (Of course, it was; I am being facetious again.) And the Jews certainly had not been trying that in their efforts to make God-fearers out of Gentiles, now, had they? And certainly an intelligent rabbinic student trained in rhetoric, like Paul, would never have come up with such an idea.
  • Price appeals to the idea of Acts as a Hellenistic novel; for a refutation, see Witherington’s commentary on Acts. The foolishness of such theorizing is seen, for example, in the appeal that Acts, like such novels, contains “crowd scenes.” So apparently, crowds never assembled in the Roman Empire, except in Hellenistic novels; in real life, people never assembled in groups of more than 3.
  • The appeal that Luke must be late because, unlike other Gospels but like later gospels, he has a story of Jesus’ childhood, is the most spectacularly inane of the arguments to be found here: Unless Price wants to deny that Jesus had a childhood at all, it seems manifest that there would be events for the taking regardless of the century. At the same time, Price is insensitive to the use of such material in Greco-Roman biographies (the genre of the Gospels).
  • A collection of “Acts vs. Paul” objections over several pages offers nothing we have not covered here. He also briefly stumps for the exceptionally fringe idea that Luke and Acts were not by the same author, but present no arguments: The goal is apparently to simply throw hay in the air and hope that someone is distracted.

    John is next, and we see the usual canard asking about why John is different from the other Gospels; the solutions we have here are not in Price’s window, and he is also oblivious to the strength of the divine claims in the Synoptics (see series here). Price’s notion that Jesus considered the “Son of Man” someone other than himself (and from there, his premise of “development”) is simply silly (see article on that title, and see “miscellaneous” article on forgiving of sins – Price’s efforts on the “Son of Man” title are, to put it mildly, pathetically marginal considering the amount of study that has been done on that subject). The hub link also contains material on the validity of finding Trinitarian thought in the claims of Jesus, as well as the use of the “I am” verbiage (it isn’t Exodus Price needs to look at for a precedent). I do think some of Blomberg’s choices for proof texts are not the best that could be had, but Price is still far behind the times in any event. His treatment of Mark 10:17-18 is particularly badly out of context (see here).

    So ends Ch. 1, and it is something of a tragic effort, as Price has spent so much time on diversions that his chapter ends up looking like something his dog spat out after eating Price’s entire library of theologically liberal and fringe books.


    Chapter 2 is a relative monster in which Price offers vagrant commentary on eight “tests” described by Blomberg when checking historical documents. It’ll be convenient to offer our reply in eight corresponding sections.

    The Intention Test. Price confuses this one from the get-go; the intention test was brought up to answer any sort of odd claim (I hear it now and then) that ancient writers had no interest in recording true history. Price somehow (actually, given his record, “how” is not a necessary question) confuses this with some sort of test showing that ancient writers always knew how to discern true reports from false ones. Thus he rings up what he thinks are incredible reports from Josephus and Luke to prove, so he thinks, that these guys were uncritical stooges unable to report anything as simple as a cow mooing without turning it into a report of the same cow flying to Tahiti in a supersonic jet. That’s misplaced in two ways.

    First, of course, Price is up to his usual Humean schtick:

    ”Luke doesn’t report outlandish stuff.”

    ”Oh yeah? That report of Jesus walking on water sure is outlandish!”

    ”Why?”

    ”Because I say so, that’s why! Isn’t that enough????”

    No, not really. But it’s all the “argument” Price offers when it comes to explaining why these things are not for real. Prince Price of the Jungle would have thought ice was “outlandish” 200 years ago, remember.

    Second, as noted, Price has confused the purpose of the Intention Test. What it means in this context is that Luke, Josephus, et al have every intention to record real history. That they may or may not have got it wrong is not the issue at hand; the issue is what they thought about reporting actual events. Here Price would have to reply, “Luke didn’t really think Jesus walked on water because…” if he was interested in an intelligent rebuttal.

    One more thing to note is that Price has cut off any possibility of reporting an event like Jesus walking on water, if it actually did happen in space-time. As such his historical epistemology is merely contrived (this is what he calls “critical”).

    After a few paragraphs of the usual bad-tempered psychoanalysis we’ve come to expect from Price when he’s short on actual arguments, we get to a related issue of whether the early church contrived prophetic words from Jesus and put them in the mouth of the earthly Jesus. Much jabbering ensues before we get to anything that remotely resembles argument; no need to address it all, as it is mostly Price showing that he is still wearing his Freddy Fundy Underoos again: E.g., “Aren’t evangelical Christians committed equally to taking whatever they find between the covers of the Bible seriously?” No – that was Price in his fundy days, not anyone I know. If Price took, e.g., 1 Kings 16:11 as “seriously” as he took Matthew 5:10, I can see why there were obvious reasons for his outstanding failure as a personal evangelist. All of that, anyway, is in service of some notion that it shouldn’t matter to Christians whether Jesus said “boo” on earth or through some prophet; this after Price just got done from the other side of his mouth making a big deal over how Luke and Josephus allegedly gave us history on steroids. So is it a big deal, or isn’t it? Would it matter to Price if I ring up Shirley MacLaine and have her “channel” him giving instructions in the pursuit of bestiality as a lifestyle? If he “doesn’t get it” now, he will then.

    One obvious point made about this debate is Paul’s distinction between Jesus’ teachings and prophetic “words” from Jesus in 1 Cor. 7. Price calls this a “bogus apologetic” because it “completely begs the question” that “Christians always distinguished prophecy from historical Jesus quotes.” No, sorry, it doesn’t: It uses our available evidence to reach a conclusion. If Price thinks it will help to have a temper tantrum to replace the evidence he does not have that Christians did NOT make such distinctions, he is sadly mistaken. So might Johnny Cochran say: “Your evidence, Marcia, begs the question that O. J. always had the same blood type. How do you know a Colombian drug lord didn’t have the same DNA?” If Christians who did not make the distinction existed, Price needs to prove that they did – not merely assume it (beg the question).

    It might be added that Price, still apparently bewildered, confuses the point of Blomberg’s argument re 1 Cor. 7. It is, as I have put it, “if Paul could just drop into a creative ecstasy, why would he not ‘dive in’ and bring out a word from the risen Jesus?” This is in contrast to the fact that when he does have a “command from the Lord” he dips into what comes from the written tradition we have. Price’s further objections are addressing the wrong argument.

    Price also wonders why Paul didn’t make use of Matthew 19:10-12 for the situation in Corinth. Well, a little exegesis of both situations goes a long way to saying why: Jesus is addressing a situation that has to do with service in the Kingdom, whereas Paul is addressing a situation that has to do with a local ecological crisis (see here). Typical again of his fundamentalism (and his parallelomania with pagan copycat figures), Price sees the word “marriage” in both passages and thinks they’re twins (when they’re actually third cousins).

    Next, Price displays as proof that Christians did channel Jesus and put words in his mouth on earth – the fact that Gnostic heretics did so! That’s rather amazing. By the same logic, we can use what Biblical scholar Richard Pervo got caught doing as evidence that there’s more to (ahem) Price’s editing of volumes like “Lewd Tales” than meets the eye. Sorry, but no, not even that far, actually: This wasn’t a case of Gnostic getting “prophetic” words and putting them in the mouth of Jesus on earth; rather, this was a case of them thinking they had a more clear window on what happened in Jesus’ time. In other words, they didn’t take Jesus’ words as received in ecstasy and put them in the mouth of the earthly Jesus; rather, they thought they were channeling genuine historical reports of what Jesus did say while on earth. Price yet again can’t seem to grasp a simple distinction like this: Even false prophets like Helen Schucman were not attributing “heavenly Jesus” words to “earthly Jesus” -- they always preserved the earthly-heavenly dichotomy, or never violated it. (On the side, if he thinks this is what people think they are doing when they put up billboards with cutesy sayings of Jesus, he’s more out of touch with reality than we might expect.)

    We’re not done yet with Test 1, though actually, we’re still listening to Price hammer away at things that have nothing to do with it as his Rant-o-matic plunges ahead unhindered. It’s another good point that if the church was inventing sayings of Jesus, it sure missed the boat by not inventing stuff to handle certain church controversies like roles for women in ministry. Price says this is thought of as the “trump card against form criticism” but that’s not quite right. It’s a trump card against the specific notion that the church invented sayings for Jesus, not “form criticism” as a whole. Form criticism is, admittedly, more complex than just that, but the sum of the whole isn’t much better than any one of the parts, including this one. In any event, Price’s “answer” to this is to ignore the argument and turn everyone’s attention to his new carnival barker’s outfit, consisting of pieces of paper inscribed with places where he thinks the church DID do such a thing. How many places though? Er...he’s got those so far wrong he may as well be wearing the clown suit instead of the barker’s outfit.

    His first pick is…wait for it….Mark 7:14-19, about the eating of food that isn’t kosher. (He also picks a saying from the Gospel of Thomas [!] but why he thinks we should care about heretics did is not explained.) So why’s that put into Jesus’ mouth and not an actual saying? Well, it sounds like Romans 14:14 knows about it. Okay. So why’s that a proof that it was made up for Jesus, rather than Paul alluding to Jesus? Uh….well, it also sounds like Galatians 2:12-14. Um, problem. The subject there isn’t “whether Gentile converts must eat only kosher food.” The real problem is described here and Gentiles eating kosher isn’t even on the map. It’s all about whether Gentile converts are ritually pure, and more importantly, not retaining bad social habits that imply that the Gentiles are still a bunch of “d*** dirty apes,” as Heston might say. Did Jesus say “boo” about such a thing? No, not in Mark 7 or anywhere else. Rip. There goes Price’s shirt.

    Second pick: Legitimacy of a mission to the Gentiles. Price first tries to shimmy the focus a bit to say that the “sticking point” was having to eat Gentile food as a travelling Jewish missionary. Well, no, it wasn’t: The “sticking point” was one of ingroup-outgroup anthropology, of suggesting that those “dirty apes” in Gentileland would be allowed to share in the blessings (gasp)of Jewish eschatology. The Jews counted themselves an exclusive club, and nothing Jesus is recorded as saying or doing has any bearing on this. Price appeals to “Great Commissions” and healings of Gentiles, but that won’t fill the bill: What was critical here was depth: The bad guys thought the Gentiles would just get the dribs and drabs; even guys like Namaan the Syrian might get a crumb once in a while, but that was all. The good guys said, no, the Gentiles will be admitted as full share partners in the Kingdom. THAT is something Jesus is never shown addressing for the church. RIP. Well, there went Price’s pants.

    Last: Table fellowship with Gentiles. Price changes the subject again, supposing that he can get away with pointing out that Jesus was shown dining with sinners, and that was an end-around that we were supposed to “get” as it showing it was okay to dine with Gentiles. After all, Price says, we’d expect the writers to know that they couldn’t have had Jesus ACTUALLY dining with Gentiles in Palestine and “plausibly” addressing the issue that way.

    Did you get that? The whole issue here has been that Christians lacked such a sense of critical historical consciousness that they swiped words of the “heavenly” Jesus into the mouth of the “earthly” Jesus. But from the other side of his mouth, Price wants to argue that the Christians were so conscious of Jesus’ contexts on earth that they had to make sure they added verisimilitude to the sayings they swiped. While he makes up his mind…there go his paper Fruit of the Looms. Yipes.

    In reality, table fellowship with “sinners” is like that with Gentiles in only the broadest sense: One has to do with issues of moral association which cause ritual impurity, while the other has to do with ethnic, ingroup associations. The sinners could repent and be clean, but the Gentiles could not. And Price might have forgotten that under his rubric, it would hardly be difficult to have had Jesus accept a dinner invitation from, say, the centurion.

    After this it doesn’t get much better. Price thinks the role of women in the church is covered by Luke 10:38-42, where he somehow (by wizardry Harry Potter would be proud of) reads this passage as saying women should limit themselves to serving the Eucharist (as Martha serves dinner) and live a “stipended, celibate life as ‘widows’ and ‘virgins’ “ as Mary did. If you think that’s an exegesis that would make a cult member proud, wait until you catch the next one: Speaking in tongues, according to Price, was addressed Jesus here (apart from Mark 16:17, which he admits is not valid):

    Matthew 6:7 In praying, do not babble like the pagans, who think that they will be heard because of their many words.

    That’s imaginative enough as is, but as the context makes clear the issue here is not intelligibility of words but amount being used. Price cuts off the last part of the verse when he offers his own idiosyncratic translation.

    And that’s Price case for a “prophetic arms race” in which folks fabricated sayings of Jesus. It’s pretty sad, isn’t it?

    The Ability Test. Not sad enough. Price next gets into the subject of ancient orality, and he shamelessly plugs the notion that it was no better than the game of “telephone.” Having done far more and better research for this, I know better. (See some of that info here.) My answers to all of Price’s (few) points are there and I won’t repeat myself; Price is too far behind on the scholarship to be a respectable voice on the matter.

    The Character Test. Basically this is a burden of critics to prove that the authors of the NT were dishonest in their reporting. Unperturbed by the category distinction, Price reads off a few examples of apostolic bad behavior, but the only actually instance of dishonesty he can dig out is Peter lying about knowing Jesus. Okay, so we can argue that Peter might be the sort who would lie….if he had a bunch of Temple guards in the area who could turn him into coleslaw and have him crucified. Was that happening when he wrote 1 or 2 Peter, or dictated Mark? Probably not. Aside indeed from his reformed character (which Price admits is a factor that’d be appealed to, but merely dismisses as part of his pursuit to win the Golden Begged Question Award), for which we need not even appeal to the Holy Spirit, despite Price: Even humanly speaking such a turnaround is far from out of the question.

    As for all else, Price digs out bad temper and hypocrisy, but can’t seem to find any indications of dishonesty, especially in reporting historical events. So that means we can use Price’s fondness for editing “Lewd Tales” as proof that his reporting as a scholar is worthless, correct? I thought so.

    But anyway, since he can’t find actual instances of dishonesty, Price decides he may as well invent some. Noting that events like the multiplying of loaves are not found in sources like Josephus (yes indeed, reporting stuff like that would have been a good way for Joe to keep his head, writing under Vespasian’s patronage), Price says that “the public is not said to ever have witnessed spectacular scenes like this one…” and maybe that was to cover the lie that they never happened.

    Say what? The public never saw these things? Who was fed with all the bread and fish, a cluster of 5000 orangutans?

    Next posed lie…not sure. Price offers some sort of thing about how maybe Elijah did appear, not as John the Baptist, but in person, but only appeared to four people. Who thinks that is an explanation, I don’t know. Maybe Price was the one and only person who thought this when he was a Christian. Then: The old canard about Mark saying the women stayed silent, which we answered in another chapter closer to that subject, though we might add that despite Price, Mark is not “explaining why no one had ever heard of the Empty Tomb story until his late date.” Such “explaining” is not in Mark’s text, period; it’s a theory contrived from Price’s gratuitously late dating of Mark, plus his gratuitous rejection of an empty tomb referenced in Paul (1 Cor. 15 – or maybe his gratuitous arguments that the creed is a late interpolation, which he alludes to later, and which we respond to in detail in Trusting the New Testament). There’s a lot of gratuities around here, but Price is the one who needs a tip.

    There’s a short bit about 2 Peter being a forgery with the usual sub-standard arguments that have been answered 5000 times. We have our usual reply linked. Price then dallies into other forgeries in Christendom like the Donation of Constantine, as if this proves that any other document was forged. Remember what we said about that kind of reasoning: Richard Pervo. Robert Price. Both New Testament scholars with fringe ideas…now thus both proven child porn collectors. Right?

    It’s still pastiche party time. Allusion to the idea of Simon the Zealot as a member of the Zealot party? No thanks, been there and it’s wrong. (See about ¼ down.) Variation in apostolic names -- here, about 2/3 down, for Thaddeus, but who the heck is arguing that Nathaniel was Batholomew? And what exactly is Price arguing when he poses questions like, “Who was this Andrew?” So if I rummage through Tacitus and ask stuff like “Who was this Piso?” does that make me a brilliant scholar who has proven that the Annals are bunk? Apparently he thinks questions like these prove that “none of them are historical.” How? I don’t know, we never see anything like an argument explaining it. Price says that the fact that Peter is frequently a “literary foil for Jesus” who always has to be corrected proves that records about him aren’t historical. Well, then, the fact that I’m always having to correct Price – play Buddha to his Ananda – proves that there’s nothing historical about Price either. (Really, does Price think that there were no dim-witted people in need of correction in history?)

    The section closes with a treatise on martyrdom, and as readers know from my impossible faith thesis I don’t use this argument the standard way. In any event you can see there how, for example, his comparisons to Joseph Smith fall flat, and how his own response to the martyrdom point fails.

    The Consistency Test. Price regales Blomberg’s assessment of the gospels as independent witnesses with vague platitudes for “basic source criticism and redaction criticism,” as well as the usual Marcan priority/Q canards with which we are neither impressed nor amused. There’s a lot of bombast from Price about how the contradictions have never been solved, but hauls out on one, the answer which says that Luke produced Mary’s geneaology while Matthew offered Joseph’s. No, that won’t work, he says, because, “imagine someone claiming Davidic, Messianic credentials for a would-be king if all he could produce was the lineage of an adoptive father!” OK – I just did it. It would work just fine. Adopted sons had the same rights as natural ones; this canard is merely borrowed from Jewish anti-missionary polemics, which for some reason forget to look into the nature of adoption rights in the ancient world before making this argument. Seems like Price forgot his “interrogation” skills again.

    The Bias Test. Pretty much, Price declines to weigh in on this one way or the other, and goes off on some tangent about how allegedly disturbing it is that God kills people like Ananias and Sapphira, though if you’re looking for more than argument by outrage you won’t find it. He also says it isn’t hard to “posit” reasons for people to make stuff up, which we can certainly agree is true based on his writings. Thankfully, he didn’t say that it wasn’t hard to come up with good reasons, which would be untrue, as his arguments (and his appeal to the wacky ideas of Derrett) indicate.

    The Cover-Up Test. Or, the criterion of embarrassment as some say; things that are recorded that seem embarrassing are likely to be true. Once again though, Price bows to his favored idols of “form-criticism” and “redaction-criticism” and replies that this one doesn’t pan out because Mark was rewritten by Matthew and Luke to resolve embarrassments. It’s amazing how much weight Price places on that Marcan priority canard, but as our linked series shows, it is a weak reed.

    That means we really don’t need to answer in more detail, but just for chuckles, let’s consider a couple of instances. Price calls Mark 13:32 “damage control” but that’s based on a dispensational eschatology; preterist eschatology makes that a non-problem, since there is no “failed prediction” to cover for. Then there’s where Price thinks Luke is somehow covering up the “problem” of how John the Baptist’s followers “began denigrating Jesus as their own guru’s inferior” by having Jesus “baptized during a flashback relegated to a subordinate clause, almost leaving the reader to think that he had been baptized by unknown persons after John’s arrest! You have to read it carefully to void that impression.”

    Oh really? Seems to me you have to read it like someone on psych meds to GET that impression. Apparently Price managed to “void” his memory of Luke’s very long speech by John; anyone who thinks “others” might have baptized Jesus needs to ask themselves where these “others” are and where their speeches are – “in Price’s fevered imagination,” seems to be the best answer. As for being reduced to a subordinate clause, that’s a fairly hilarious one: Luke’s “subordinate clause” describing Jesus’ baptism takes up 44 words in Greek, while Mark’s takes up a comparably astonishing 53 words; most of the extras come from Mark sparing space to tell us how Jesus “came from Nazareth in Galilee” to be baptized, which obviously reveals Mark’s subversive agenda against the Judean tourism industry. Given that Price finds it easy to spend 100-200 words at a time complaining about scholars being nothing but Sunday School teachers, it seems he badly needs a lesson in interpretation of statistics. He also thinks John doesn’t mention Jesus’ baptism at all, which seems a fairly goofy reading in light of John 1:31-33. There John the Baptist says he was sent to baptize precisely to reveal Jesus to Israel. So how thick a pencil does Price need to connect the dots here? Does he think John is saying, “I was sent to baptize so that I’d be there when Jesus walked by on the river bank and the Spirit came down on him”? Is this the sort of genius that the study of “form criticism” will grant you?

    I’ll close with a note that I do think that in some cases, the criterion of embarrassment isn’t that big a deal. Things like statements of self-humility, in the agonistic social setting of the Biblical world, would not be as uncommon as we might find in our own social world. On the other hand, it takes a lot more than assertion to argue such inanities as that Mark was actually Marcion, an enemy of the disciples, which is why he depicts them as goofballs. Price is simply reaching desperately for any and all theories that he can throw against the wall; it also takes a lot of nerve to say that such wacky ideas come from “close scrutiny of the text itself.”

    Corroboration Test. No need to dig deep here, Price just hauls out all the usual stale breadcrumbs about how worthless the secular references to Jesus are; see my encyclopedic treatment for an answer to each and every one of ‘em. See also here for the idea that Luke borrowed from Josephus.

    The Adverse Witness Test. No hard row to hoe here either, as Price just wiffles up with the usual line that the Gospels were written very late, therefore there was no one alive to act as adverse witnesses to them, blase squase. Does he provide any epistemic tests of authorship? Nyet. But he does manage to argue that the Toledeth Jeshu is from “early centuries” (see here), once again proving that granting special privileges to documents you like any denying them to those you hate is one of form-criticism’s most enduring legacies.

    Next up, Price relies on the “ancient people are stupid” canard to argue that it doesn’t mean anything that Jesus’ opponents admitted he did miracles. We do agree that the main issue was a tit for tat kind of thing, but nevertheless, as the example of John 9 illustrates, we don’t need for these to be early CSICOP members for the validation to occur. Rather ironically as well, Price, who grants the Toledeth Jeshu so much authenticity, from the other side of his mouth says that we can’t accept a third-century Rabbi’s witness to Jesus doing miracles because he was “way too late” to be an independent witness. Huh? This from the guy who said in Deconstructing Jesus that Muslim sufi traditions may have more accurate info about Jesus than the Gospels? In any event, as with his reply to TIF, Price remains without cognizance of the honor-shame dialectic that would have fostered precisely the sort of challenges to Peter, et al that Price thinks would not have occurred. (As an aside, it is a little silly to suppose this can be compared to, “How did Mithraism get off the ground unless plenty of people witnessed the god slaying the celestial bull?” Has Price not read that this WAS witnessed, by millions all over the Empire, in the form of the precession of the equinoxes?)

    In between ranting and things we need not dispute, Price can’t resist horning in with the “Jews stole resurrection from the Persians” canard which we have a chapter coming on in Defending the Resurrection, or you can see our response to Richard Carrier, Ch. 3, here (Special Editions). He also hauls up an objection we have answered before on Acts 8:1, here.

    The chapter closes with a rant about how Price knows of no NT scholars who came to faith through study. Well, I’m not a scholar, but that’s where I entered the Kingdom at any rate, which is probably why Price can’t stand the sight of me. On the other hand, Price is proud of scholars who left their faith, but if I were him, I wouldn’t be – the ones I know are either fringe loonies (like him, or Avalos, or Allegro) or couldn’t reason their way out of a paper bag (like Koester, Funk, and Crossan, and Price, too). There goes that bad fruit tree sprouting again.


    This one’s on textual criticism, and for this Price out-Ehrmans even Ehrman in his radical approach to textual fidelity. Most of the chapter, however, is irrelevant fluff. I’ll ignore the initial distractions (about two pages’ worth) in which Price rambles on about the motivations of evangelical scholars with his usual well-poisoning attempts, and get right to the arguments, such as they are.

    Price is in a bind as most critics are when it comes to this issue, because they can’t deny the superiority of the evidence when it comes to NT textual criticism. Price begins by whining that there might be so many more NT mss because well, the church wanted more copies of that than they did the works of Sophocles. That’s true, but irrelevant, and Price’s bellyaching won’t change that.

    Second, Price declares that it is “evident” that there was a lot of doctrinal controversy, so it was “tempting” to alter texts. He refers, though, to Ehrman’s Orthodox Corruption of Scripture, which he no doubt wishes did not contain the following statement and others like it:

    The scribes of our surviving manuscripts more commonly preserved theological variations than created them, and none of these scribes appears to have made a concerted effort to adopt such readings with rigorous consistency. Almost certainly there was no effort to create an anti-adoptionistic recension of the New Testament. Indeed, the Christians of the proto-orthodox camp did not, on one level, need to change the texts; they believed that the texts, in whatever form they came, already attested their christological views.

    And Ehrman also said in correspondence to one of our readers:

    I do not think that the "corruption" of Scripture means that scribes changed everything in the text, or even most things. The original texts certainly spoke at great length about Jesus' crucifixion and resurrection. The issues involved in the corruption of the text usually entail nuances of interpretation. These are important nuances; but most of the New Testament can be reconstructed by scholars with reasonable certainty -- as much certainty as we can reconstruct *any* book of the ancient world.

    In other words, Ehrman does not go as far as Price does by any means – and sorry, just because it was “tempting” to change texts is not sufficient argument. Ehrman also indicates that scribes did not try to change texts to mean something they did not actually say – which is also contrary to what Price would want to be true.

    It is telling enough that Price must resort to the likes of John Beversluis – whose expertise on textual criticism is nil – to get someone to say what he wants to be said. (Note as well that Price criticizes Geisler and Nix for not being textual critics, even as he uses Beversluis as source!) Only someone as ignorant as Beversluis would think that textual criticism is useless without the autographa.

    There is more to be said on this in Trusting the New Testament, including on Price’s misuse of William Walker’s material. The bottom line is that professional textual critics –whether Biblical or secular – do not require that we have the autographa to achieve a level of certainty about the text. Indeed they are quite certain about the contents of ancient texts with barely a sliver of the evidence had by the NT. If Price wants to argue for tampered-with texts, he will need to do better – paranoid suspicion is not a viable replacement for evidence.

    Price briefly diverts into the doctrine of inerrancy, but this is a side issue of no relevance to any argument made by Strobel or Metzger. He then diverts into a very wasteful diatribe on Trinitarianism, supposing (as he does in other chapters) that the doctrine was developed late; as we note in reply to him in a later chapter, this is simply far from the scholarship on the issue, showing that Trinitarian theology was rooted in pre-Christian Judaism and the concept of hypostatic Wisdom. Despite Price, this is not a “complex philosophical model” but a very simple idea with common-sense parallels in other cultures (like Plato’s Logos); it is Price , not Metzger, who is doing “Sunday School stuff” with this doctrine – and there is no way to get modalism or tritheism out of the NT once this is realized.

    The subject then turns to canon, and here Price is not much less out of his depth. We have fuller treatments in TNT which answer Price’s objections, though the answers can also be found in the earlier version of a chapter here. Price’s rendition of Metzger’s arguments are a vastly childish oversimplification, and in some cases range into questionable assertion; he says for example that we “possess copies and citations of the Gospel of Thomas from far-flung quarters of the ancient world.” Really? I seem to have missed this little fact from the vast literature on Thomas; no one seems to know of it. In any event, if Price thinks GThom should have got a shot at being in the canon, there is a whole chapter in TNT explaining why that view isn’t respectable – and it involves much more sophisticated arguments than the ones Price was using as a Christian apologist, and which he now attributes to Metzger. The bottom line: Price presents no arguments for or against any book being canonical; once again he thinks rootless suspicion and paranoia is all he needs.

    The chapter closes with a summary of the views of Brent Nongbri, someone whom some Skeptics have accorded messianic status of late because he has argued that P52 (the Rylands papyrus) should not be dated as early as it is. We’ve got a copy of Nongbri’s article and will look at it in the E-Block for August-September.


    • Price begins his chapter against Edwin Yamauchi with a rather dishonorable diversion in which he supposes that Yamauchi entered into Mandean studies as an “adjacent field” in order to avoid “the challenge of genuine historical criticism.” He adds , carefully, that he “certainly does not know” Yamauchi’s actual motivations; but in so doing he is merely taking the rhetorical advantage that the speculation affords him while attempting to maintain plausible deniability against actually making the charge. One wonders if he’d have any patience with someone who suggested that though they “do not know his motivation” it “would not surprise them if Price got into so many radical theories as a way of inuring himself against reasonable Christian arguments.” In any event Price’s slanderous disrespect for Yamauchi as a person speaks for itself; that he finds it necessary to focus so obdurately on the motives of others as a preface to all else he says reveals an inherent inability to grapple with them on factual and argumentative terms – as we shall see.

    • Speaking of radical theories, Price here (against the expertise of those like Yamauchi who are specialists in the field) takes a stand for a rather absurd notion that Christianity owes something to the Mandean religion in terms of its origins. This idea, once promoted by Bultmann, has long been disgraced: As we replied to Price some time ago here:

      Before one parrots the ludicrous dictum of C.S. Lewis that the Johannine discourses bear no resemblance to ancient, non-historical genres, one owes it to oneself to read the Gnostic and Mandaean revelation soliloquies abundantly quoted in Bultmann's commentary on John, something I rather doubt any apologists take the trouble to do.

      I have indeed read those soliloquies - and Lewis was right in his assessment. The closest literary parallels in the Bible to the Gnostic and Mandean revelation soliloquies is found in the Psalter - not in the Gospel of John. The highly mystical character of the soliloquies, the patterning, and tone, are quite unlike the historical genres - just as Lewis surmised.

      But even beyond literary grounds, Price's position has a number of problems. Research since about 1940 has had a new and broader base through the texts published by Lady Drower, and as a result of the beginnings of differentiation of strata within the Mandean texts, scholarship has reached the common opinion that the Mandaean religion, or at least its roots, belongs in spatial and temporal proximity to primitive Christianity and either developed out of gnosticizing Judaism or at any rate engaged in polemical exchange with a syncretistic Judaism.

      Simply put, John could not have been influenced by the preserved Mandaean writings, so that there is no question of John's ties with Mandaean or even proto-Mandaean circles. But the often-observed similarity cited by Price of John to the Mandaean concepts actually points to the conclusion that the Mandaean writings are late, modified witnesses for a Jewish Gnosticism which was formed on the edge of Judaism and which is assumed to be the intellectual background of John. A careful interpretation of John shows that he utilized, in an emphatically anti-Gnostic way, the Gnostic language take over by him (cf. 1.14; 3.16; 17.15; 20.20).

      Or, as one set of authors puts it:

      Quite apart from considerations of dating (all but the first of these are attested by sources that come from the second or third century or later), the conceptual differences between John and these documents are very substantial. Moreover, the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947 and their subsequent publication has show that the closest religious movement to the fourth gospel, in terms of vocabulary at least, was an extremely conservative hermetic Jewish community...Whatever parallels can be drawn, it is now virtually undisputed that both John and these movements (other specifically Palestinian movements) drew their primary inspiration from what we today call the Old Testament Scriptures...

      Words such as light, darkness, life, death, spirit, word, love, believing, water, bread, clean, birth, and children of God can be found in almost any religion. Frequently they have very different referents as one moves from religion to religion, but the vocabulary is a popular as religion itself. Nowhere, perhaps, has the importance of this phenomenon been more clearly set forth than in a little-known essay by Kysar. He compares the studies of Dodd and Bultmann on the prologue (John 1:1-18), noting in particular the list of possible parallels each of the two scholars draws up to every conceivable phrase in those verses. Dodd and Bultmann each advance over three hundred parallels, but the overlap in the lists is only 7 percent. The dangers of what Sandmel calls parallelomania become depressingly obvious. [INT.CMM, 159-60]

      Finally, I would like to add that it is an interesting commentary on how seemingly disconnected Price is with modern scholarship, if he is still using Bultmann on this topic.


      Price does nothing to counter any of this in terms of argument, but does —despite his denigration of CFC as one long “argument from authority” – appeal to his own authority in agreement, Kurt Rudolph, and nothing else; the counter-appeal to the parallels to DSS literature is merely waved away as orthodox scholars sticking to what they find more comfortable. Actual arguments are conspicuous by their absence.

      Price does attempt an answer to one of Yamauchi’s points, that the Mandeans forged a false connection to John the Baptist as a way to avoid being persecuted by Muslims who would have more respect for them as a “people of the book.” Price says he “doesn’t buy this” because it “does not begin to explain the strange business of glorifying John and vilifying Jesus” as the Mandeans did; he says rather that a situation in which there was “polemical rivalry between Christians and Mandeans” is preferable, hence he wants to move the whole of the Mandean movement back a few centuries – in contrast to serious Mandean scholarship and all hard evidence.

      However, simply because Price’s imagination is limited is not a reason to ignore hard evidence and arbitrarily push Mandean origins back 100+ years to suit his own polemical purposes. It might not occur to Price, in any event, that the “vilifying Jesus” aspect is just as intelligible in the Islamic age: Christians, seeing that the Mandeans were pulling a fast one by absorbing John illicitly, would naturally deny the connection, leading the Mandeans to respond in kind by vilifying Jesus. This is perfectly intelligible as a form of challenge-riposte between the two groups.

      Price objects, “why risk the ire of Muslims who consider Jesus the sinless, virgin-born Messiah and prophet of Israel?” But it apparently escapes him that the Mandeans vilified Jesus right in front of the Muslims’ noses anyway, even according to his own alternate history fantasy, so obviously they knew the risk and took it anyway. They already did the very think Price is trying to say they would not do. That Price cannot see this quite obvious point is rather peculiar.

      Regarding the horrible textual evidence for the Mandean scriptures which would allow us to date them any earlier, Price refers back to his flawed reasoning in Chapter 3 regarding absence of textual evidence, a courtesy that in any event he’d never extend to the New Testament; we’ll deal with that argument in that chapter.

    • Price alludes to alleged Zoroastrian influence on the Old Testament. His claim that parallels between John and Mandean literature are better than those between John and DSS literature is not argued with any details whatsoever; in early-dating the Mandean texts,, Price is simply engaging in wishful thinking. So likewise is he thinking wishfully when he dates Gnostic beliefs earlier than can be justified based on the physical evidence of their texts. It escapes Price, when he says that there is “no real reason to try to deny a pre-Christian origin” for these groups, that it is his burden to demonstrate such an origin – not anyone else’s burden to “deny” what he merely arrives at via wild, arbitrary speculation or what he wants to be true.
    • In other books, Price argues for certain theories that the story of Jesus was stolen from that of pagan deities. He will suggest some specifics later, but we have long ago debunked all such connections here including several suggested by Price.
    • We now move into Price’s commentary on secular references to Jesus, a topic on which I have written extensively and to which Price offers nothing of worth in response; indeed he does little more than reiterate the standard, already-refuted arguments:

      Josephus: Longer Passage. An apologetic for the usefulness of this passage will acknowledge that it has been influenced by scribal interpolations and justify those portions deemed to be authentic. Price declines to engage these arguments – one perceives that he is not capable of doing so, certainly not to the level of scholars like Feldman, Thackery, and Meier – and instead opts for well-poisoning tactics, as he observes what he calls the “rich irony” of “apologists” who, he says, allegedly “scream ‘Foul!’ if a critic proposes interpolations in scripture without the benefit of first- or second-century manuscript evidence.” Price is simply displaying poor sportsmanship here, for he provides no example of any apologist or scholar actually using such a simple dismissal. Rather, what is called “foul” is critical proposals that use horrible arguments for interpolations apart from manuscript evidence. To propose an interpolation apart from hard manuscript evidence requires good evidence otherwise. Price is aware of this, for he himself recognized the need to provide such arguments in his case for the creed of 1 Cor. 15 as an interpolation. Nevertheless, his arguments for this were, quite simply, appallingly bad. (See relevant chapter in Trusting the New Testament.) In any event, Price does nothing to invalidate the value of the longer passage in Josephus, as he refuses to even engage the issue honestly.

      Josephus: Shorter Passage. Price opts for a desperate counsel in which this text was altered, originally having referred to some other Jesus. He has no manuscript evidence, of course, and provides no argument or reason why anyone should believe that this happened. His wishful thinking does not constitute an argument.

      Tacitus. Price alludes to his treatment in a previous chapter; he apparently used two arguments, which we have previously answered here . In brief:

      He says that Tacitus was not a contemporary of Jesus. But Tacitus was not a contemporary of a great deal of what he reports, and no serious historian makes an issue of this or denies his accuracy on this account. Rather, they look at Tacitus’ ability as a researcher and historian, and on that account, he is regarded as excellent, and the best the ancient world had to offer. It is Price’s burden to explain why Tacitus is not reliable enough to be trusted as a historian to report events earlier than his time. Certainly Price is not going to object that Civil War historians of today are bogus because they didn’t live in the 1860s.

      He suggest that Tacitus was just reporting what Christians believed in his time, which also goes against every scrap of evidence we have concerning Tacitus’ critical and historical ability. Once again, Price cannot simply throw doubts into the air and hope that they land on something.

      Thallus. I myself make no use of this citation, but readers may find the article here of interest.

      Yamauchi also apparently made a very brief ”impossible faith” sort of statement; the reader will find it of interest that Price attempted his own failed response to my more developed form of the argument. There we also discuss the means by which the word was spread, particularly in the response to Carrier.

    • Price now briefly alludes to pagan deities he thinks were a source for Jesus’ story: Attis, Adonis, Osiris, Dionysus. Each of these is dealt with in the series linked above. He also alludes to Spartacus and Cleomenes as persons who prove there was “nothing disgraceful in martyrdom,” but he neglects the point that these two men had “validating” aspects that countered the shame of their crucifixion – just as it is argued that Jesus needed the Resurrection as a validation. Price is only affirming the very argument he is trying to refute.
    • The questions Price raises in his section, “Pilate the Pussycat?” we address here -- see sections, “Who is the Real Pontius Pilate?” and “Barabbas” in particular.
    • Price gratuitously insults Yamauchi again accuses him of engaging in “unconscious special pleading” in one of his other books; however, not one specific argument showing this is offered, so there is no reply that can be made. Price’s main point, however, is that he doesn’t think it takes that long for a story to become distorted. Note though that the issue is not simply whether it can occur, but 1) whether there were mechanisms in place to keep it from occurring; 2) whether there is specific evidence for it occurring; and 3) whether corrupted versions had the power and means to displace accurate versions. Sadly, Price is conspicuously deficient when it comes to providing arguments and evidence in this respect; his best “argument” is “it could have happened, and I want it to have happened.” Price thinks he is offering us a look through Galileo’s telescope, but it’s fairly clear that what he has to offer is a Viewmaster with a reel of pictures from Scooby Doo and the Haunted Lighthouse.

      The Chapter 5 interview with John McRay is about archaeology and the New Testament, and we learn at once that Price is still living with the misinformed presumptions he had as an evangelical. He asks questions like, “Who’d have guessed Davidic Jerusalem was only a crossroads with a gas pump?” Who would have been surprised by such information unless they added more to the Biblical text than was warranted in the first place? Apparently, Price is still feeling the pain of having his additions to the Biblical text rubbished, the ones he should never have had in the first place. Perhaps the reason he does not see “evangelical apologetic literature” coming to grips with such things is that it is only he and a few other people who had erroneous notions turning Davidic Jerusalem into New York City to begin with.

      The main subject in any event is New Testament archaeology, but as it happens Price spends very little time on archaeology, and when he does, he is offering nothing new. He is still bemoaning the lack of evidence for synagogue “structures” in Galilee, thinking that archaeology has shown the Gospels (and Josephus!) wrong for saying they were there. We corrected Price on this ages ago, noting that a “synagogue” was not a building, but any gathering of ten men in any place – a home, out of doors, on the roof, in the middle of the air even. Price has apparently been stung by a similar answer, for he notes Gospel references to “synagogues” and muses that, “None of these sounds right to me if we try to substitute ‘private gathering’ or ‘lawn party,” though who is saying precisely that is not explained. What is being said – by me and certain scholars, at least – is that a “synagogue” is a meeting that could have been had anywhere -- on a “lawn” or in a private house; apparently Price is confounding location of the gathering with its purpose.

      Price vaguely alludes to passages that refer to a “benefactor bank-rolling the construction of a synagogue, or of the religious peacocks angling for the podium seats...or the flogging of heretics” and says, “I just can’t imagine the evangelists were thinking of anything but discrete synagogue buildings.” Price’s distinct lack of imagination isn’t a good argument. Seats can be had out of doors or in a private setting just as readily as anywhere else (and the “podium” idea is Price’s own imagination as well); the same could be said of floggings. Only the “benefactor” matter has any pull, and that occurs in Luke 7:5, referring to a benefactor of Jews in Capernaum. There, the consensus is that although there are ruins of a synagogue that may or may not date precisely to the time of Jesus, there is also evidence of a prior synagogue building on the same site which would date to the time of Jesus. (See for example here.) Price’s idea that the “evangelists simply assumed things had been as they were in their own day” is simply groundless.

      The next several pages Price spends promoting the theories of Rene Salm, the Nazareth mythicist. That Price would promote such careless, dishonest work speaks for itself; it speaks further that he did not bother to consult with serious scholars of archaeology before accepting blindly and at face value, the renditions of Salm, who is merely a musician and a mental-health professional, along with the unqualified assessments of Frank Zindler. See more on that issue here.

      Price next denies the relevance of verified historical accuracy in the NT as a marker of general reliability, supposing that “historical method” (as he parlays it) provides no vindication for other reported acts like healings or other miracles. But the methods of Price and his own Skeptical fellows speak for themselves in terms of the dishonesty of this remark: Inevitably, if Luke or some other NT author gets some detail wrong, this is immediately pounced upon as proof that they were not eyewitnesses; that they were gullible, or ignorant, or uncritical; therefore, why should we trust their accounts of miracles? The Skeptics cannot have it both ways. They must either acknowledge that these accuracies place a heavier burden on the Skeptic to deny historicity (Price falsely frames the argument as that we think such accuracies prove that miracles “must therefore really have occurred”), or simply throw a standard test of reliability – both for historians and for courts of law – out the window.

      Ironically, Price is willing to grant that in rabbinic materials, accurate information about place names and landmarks could “percolate down through the ages” and still be accurate in later documents. But this he wants for the sake of arguing that it need not prove an eyewitness tradition. Actually, it does, and Price has cut off his rabbinic nose to spite his New Testament face: Those rabbinic accounts would have begun with an eyewitnesses’ testimony, and if Price is willing to grant that such details can be passed down accurately, then he has just thoroughly undercut his own skepticism in other chapters regarding the accurate transmission of oral information, and in the Gospels: Now, even if he gets the late date he wants for those, he has just admitted that their details are able to remain accurate, and he shows that he needs to do more than he has done in far too many cases – merely dismissed accounts as late.

      Price also commits the standard error regarding John 9:22 which we cover here.

      A section is then devoted to the Lukan census issue, a matter we have deferred to Glenn Miller on for some time now; see our own minor contribution here. (Much of this stuff was also known long ago -- see for example here.) As for Price, suffice to say that (as the articles show) he is far behind the scholarship on the issue, and is also seeking such desperate counsels as that the story of Krishna influenced that of Jesus here (the documentary evidence just won’t stand behind that, and neither will scholars of the Hindu religion. It is also an irony that Price, after having just told us how little accuracy matters to showing a document is by an eyewitness, nevertheless continues to act as though it is important by objecting that Luke is in error on the census. Like we said, Price, like many Skeptics, wants to have it both ways.

      Price’s next objection has to do with the timing of the ascension, a matter we have resolved here. The problem yet again is that Price is still reading texts with his retained fundamentalist glasses, and still cannot mature past the idea that ancient historical accounts were not crafted for a chronology-obsessed Western mind.

      It is amazing (and a testimony to Price’s blind trust in the authority of radical critics) that he quotes Reimarus as objecting that Luke has crammed 3000 people into a room at Pentecost. The last numeric reference is to 120 persons (1:15), and where Reimarus got the idea that 3000 were in the room is perhaps best found at the bottom of a bottle of liquid stimulants. Even so, Price ought to be aware that his comments regarding “absent-minded story telling” reflect a graphocentric, modernist form of bigotry. What he sees as “absent-minded story telling” reflects rather what happens when a modern, literate reader comes across literature that is primarily designed to be presented to an audience attuned to oral presentations. Like Bultmann and other form/higher critics, Price mistakes the artifacts of oral presentation for mistakes in literary craftsmanship. It would never occur to Price that units in the narratives were originally presented independently as oral units; rather, he assumes that Luke et al were writing consecutive narratives from the beginning.

      Price’s next sortie is to object that it is proven that the speeches in Acts as “Lukan compositions.” But his appeal to Dibelius is full of yet more gross presuppositions of the sort common to form/higher critics unable to think in more the one dimension. Dibelius notes that the various speeches of Stephen, Paul, and Demetrius “are concluded in a similar way.” It would never occur to such critics – since they are very much out of touch with the contexts that governed this social setting, and too intent in imposing their own – that the speeches are similar in form because the same basic principles of rhetoric were taught to all. It would also never occur to Dibelius or Price that there was nothing extraordinary about a speaker being interrupted by listeners (see especially Shiner’s work on this). That was the nature of an oral-aural society. Finally, it would never occur to a higher critic that in any event, Luke would of necessity be selecting from a much larger roster of events, so that he would easily be able to present each speech in the same format -- something his readers would welcome, as it would make his content far easier to remember. But that does not signify that Luke merely created his speeches out of thin air.

      So likewise, Haenchen’s claim is nonsensical that the judges would certainly have interrupted Stephen rather than let him go on with all that Jewish history. What escaped Haenchen was that the judges were not modern, deadline-obsessed Westerners as he was, who would have no patience to sit by and listen to a speech. In reality, because Stephen was reiterating, for the bulk of his speech, points with which the judges agreed and for which they would have held unusual civic and social pride, interrupting is the last thing they would do. They would not tell him to “keep to the point” – they would relish what they heard! Price is simply unable to get out of his mold of a modern person who will react to an extended speech by checking his watch to make sure they are not missing Bonanza.

      Price next comments on the trial of Peter and John in Acts 4, and it is hard at times to decipher a coherent objection for his comments. He notes that John here is a “wordless shadow” but what is the point of saying so? Has Price conducted a survey of ancient historical dialogues and found that invariably, named persons always have at least one or two words to say, and so John’s “wordlessness” somehow indicates ahistoricity? If Price wants to show that there’s something wrong here, he needs to prove that there is something wrong, not merely act as though his own perceptions govern what is normal. Price also wonders why the Sanhedrin seeks to suppress the truth; it is not, as he supposes, that they are “a gang of Satanists” but that it is a matter of personal honor: The Resurrection of Jesus amounted to a reversal of their public judgment, and to that extent was a significant detraction to their personal honor ratings.

      Then Price wonders of the note that the leaders feared the people’s reactions, and quotes Baur’s argument that if the people were so feared, then Peter and John would never have been arrested in the first place, especially not after doing a miracle. There is a reason why Baur’s scholarship is most often left in the 1800s, and this is a perfect example of why: He displays the common inability of the radical critic to think in more than one dimension. Those in authority undoubtedly had at times to make unpopular arrests, but let’s face it, they had the weapons, and the people didn’t. Not only so, but the arrest occurred in the temple precincts, a place where most people would be hesitant to shed blood and risk profaning the place. The nature of the arrest was tactically sound. Finally, the reactions of “the people” would take time to foment; no one was prepared at just that moment to fight back, and nor would they unless some outrage were performed that inspired instant action (which we see no evidence of here). Baur in his time (and Price now) are simply too inured as members of the comfortable leisure class to envision the give and take that would have occurred in an entirely different social setting.

      There’s a brief reference to the angel who appears to break Peter and John out of jail as ”surely a literary dues ex machina” although why this is “surely” so is not explained, other than that, apparently, Price is a materialist, although an objection is also presented from an 1875 commentator (again, there is a reason this stuff is now left in the 19th century: "rationalists" of that time had poor thinking skills as well as poor scholarship!) that it must be a mythical story because no one says anything about the angel when Peter and John are arrested again. As usual, higher critics are stuck on their low context, graphocentric beams: They are expecting every single detail to be reiterated, when rather it would only be the most important that would be, at most; and the raising of Jesus (Acts 5:30) was a far more relevant point than, “an angel broke us out of jail.” We may have little doubt that the miraculous escape was mentioned in the actual historical trial; but expecting Luke to make mention of it again is simply misguided, the product of a low-context cultural supposition that Luke is writing to entertain us.

      Price also denies the historicity of Gamaliel’s speech, though his reasons for doing so are typically one-dimensional. First, he objects that the rest of the Sanhedrin didn’t listen to Gamaliel, and flogged the apostles, as if indeed even a visionary leader’s advice were always followed to the letter by lesser authorities. But while flogging was often deadly, it was also fairly routine, so it’s hardly any mark against historicity for Luke to have reported such a thing.

      Second, Price supposes that all of the speech is stolen from either The Bacchae or Josephus, the latter being a case of Price picking up on the usual Skeptical error Miller discusses here.. Price is apparently aware of this or a similar answer, but has no actual answer in reply; he merely waves it off in a note as “not historical criticism” – which is an apparent code phrase for, “not simply accepting what those who call themselves ‘critics’ say at face value.” We’re not to treat the Bible as inerrant, but the critics do deserve such reckoning: And once again, be sure and remain one-dimensional in your thinking, never taking into consideration such things as how common the name “Theudas” was in that time.

      As for the Bacchae bit, it seems that Price has no conception that ancient people believed in gods, and that warnings not to contradict their will were a dime a dozen; they’re all over the Old Testament, for example, and historically, there’s hardly any reason why Gamaliel would not issue a similar warning. Luke did not need The Bacchae to come up with the idea; Price’s idea that Gamaliel’s words are “plainly based” on those of Pentheus is nothing but a contrived and vain imagination, mere “parallelomania” at work. Why not instead see in his words an allusion to the acts of Balaam, or to Pharaoh? Did Price suppose Jewish history had no examples of people fighting against God?

      Finally, Price calls on Mason’s points re parallels in who Luke mentioned in common with Josephus, a matter we have addressed here. It may not occur to Price that no one knew the actual name of “the Egyptian” as he would hardly be going around introducing himself to authorities; perhaps Price envisions such rebels wearing nametags. Either that, or he might not be aware that reference to the rebel as “the Egyptian” was meant as a dishonoring insult, his actual name being purposely ignored.

      Price’s next effort, drawing parallels between the stories of Ananias/Sapphira/Stephen and Ahab/Naboth/Achan, might simply be dismissed as parallelomania, and I have little doubt that some of it from his source, Brodie, would amount to that: Some of the examples Price lists (eg., Achan appropriated booty, as did Ananias and Sapphira) are the familiar tactic of collapsing down descriptions to a least-common denominator to achieve a forced parallel, while others simply reflect common practice (eg,it would be normal to stone someone outside the city limits; that would preserve ritual purity within the city) and yet others are simply inane cases of “transvaluation” made up when the evidence itself does not cooperate (eg, Ahab tearing his garments is paralleled to Paul watching the clothes of the stoning mob!). The mania continues as Price does the same thing between Paul’s conversion account and The Bacchae/2 Maccabees.

      However, even if the parallels hold, Price is insensate to the methods whereby actual history could be reported using clever allusions to past history. Our explanations on these points have been made answering Dennis MacDonald and Randel Helms -- the critics can pick their poison.

      In the end, Price ends up saying almost nothing about archaeology, preferring to change the subject to literary techniques, for the most part. However, in both cases Price is badly behind the times when it comes to the scholarship, which is to be expected when one believes that the likes of Baur remain useful authorities. Price speaks of “childlike credulity when it comes to what this ancient book says,” but it is apparent that in his case, the credulity was simply transferred from one place (the Bible) to another (higher critics). He has failed to realize that the time of his own naivete is not over.


      Chapter 6 starts with some material on the Jesus Seminar, and Price’s personal leanings, which contains little to nothing in the way of substantive argument; it’s mostly description and appeal to diversity of views, coupled with some “I’m rubber you’re glue” commentary directed to Strobel and Greg Boyd, as well as professions to not be holding to certain views as virulently as he supposes Boyd makes it out to be (though with Price, such moderations of his claims seem to emerge only when he is called on the carpet for them and called to defend them). I can certainly note, however, that Price’s estimation of the results of oral tradition study with respect to the Gospels is merely an oversimplified caricature; on this see the first section of Trusting the New Testament.

      Other than that, we don’t get to any substantive argument until about halfway through the chapter; the main subject is whether the recorded words of Jesus are historical, or invented. My comments here will not necessarily take up with Boyd’s arguments; I go for a somewhat simpler, less philosophical approach of demanding the critics like Price produce actual arguments for why Jesus did not say or do what is recorded in the text. My series here, while mainly about harmonization, also lampooned some of the premises of those who deny the historic words and deeds of Jesus: Using the same techniques, one could easily divest any historical figure of any words and deeds one pleased. Does Price have anything that would answer such critiques? No, of course not: His recourse is to the bankrupt “principle of analogy,” which is merely Hume warmed over and history placed in a straitjacket. Amazingly Price is still using the same foolish argument about Samson (Judges 15:14-17) which we defeated a decade or so ago:

      Price is not doing justice to the dimensionality of the stories being told. Where are we told that "the thousand Philistines lined up to be killed one by one" or that Samson "overcame the simultaneous onslaught of a thousand men"? This is not what we are told happened in either case. We are told that a thousand men were killed - period.

      But Price, stuck with the silly idea that the story has Samson killing the thousand one after the other as if on an assembly line, on that grounds declares the story a “legend”. He also erects the same straw retort we defeated in a review of Deconstructing Jesus:

      Arice asks: "Does the mother have to be named Mary? Does the divine child have to be named Jesus?" Answer: No, and this is no more than Price erecting a straw man: No one has demanded such a level of precision before a parallel can be drawn. What would be acceptable (merely to begin making a case -- there's lot more that's needed; see here) is another case of divine fiat.

      Price’s notion of an “ideal type” is nothing but a vague, generalizing type of categorization that he uses as an excuse for why the parallel is weak, non-existent, or lacking in meaningfulness: The category needed is simply altered, trimmed, or manipulated in order to include within it whatever one wants (or exclude what one does not want). The appeal to the “dying and rising god” type is a classic example; theorists like Price necessarily resist attempts to impose discipline on the study, for the obvious reason that to do so would expose the bankruptcy, arbitrariness, and artificiality of the typecasting.

      In terms of particulars offered, I would not differentiate Jesus, at least, from Jewish miracle workers like Hanina ben dosa, denying historicity to one and not the other, as Boyd does. Nor would I do as Price does and dismiss them as history just because of some imagined likeness to prior events: eg, stilling of storms, with parallels to Jonah. It would never occur to an unimaginative thinker like Price that in this culture, to re-enact older events was considered a way to display your authority. If Jesus multiplies food like Elijah did, it is precisely to show that he has the power and authority Elijah had, if not more. Strangely as well, it never occurs to Price that whatever motives he supposes some later church author had for attributing this miracle to Jesus are more aptly motives able to be ascribed to Jesus himself. Sadly for Price, when he hauled out Occam’s Razor, he didn’t account for certain cultural values that render his explanation anachrionistic.

      In an interlude Price complains of how his remarks were edited on Strobel’s Faith Under Fire such that he was misrepresented. I rather doubt that, given Price’s proclivity for seeking any available excuse for failure, but in any event I am told by Strobel that the editing was done by someone else.

      It is hard to find a coherent point in some of what follows, leading us to wonder if Price edited his own book with the help of the Fox Network. He considers Jesus’ use of Isaiah in Luke 4 impossible because the scattered verses would be “a lectionary conflation impossible on a single Sabbath,” as if teachers were in some way physically constrained by threats of torture from using amalgamations of text apart from allegedly assigned and inviolable lectionary readings. In fact, such usages would have bestowed considerable honor on a teacher, showing them to be masters of the text. Once again the main problem seems to be Price’s latent fundamentalism, which makes him think that there could be no variability in such things as text selections. Price’s commentaries about how Jesus asked for miracles seems little but aimless wandering otherwise, and it is not clear what it is he is trying to prove.

      There a section after on Apollonius of Tyana, a subject we have written on here. I am inclined to agree that the real issue here is not that Philostratus copied from the Gospels, as Price says; and of course, Price denies without serious or worthwhile arguments early enough dates to the Gospels, a subject discussed in Ch. 1. He appeals to his comparisons of Sabbatai Sevi which we answered here -- Price has still learned nothing in the interim. But back to Apollonius, he says there is “no reason to think any less of Philostratus than of Luke,” which we have shown is simply false, and nothing Price says does anything to counter our own points. I don’t, however, go along with most of Boyd’s own points (like the use of tentative statements by Philostratus).

      The next section is another one of Price’s appeals to pagan copycat deities, and you’ll find no names or arguments we didn’t cover here. tyr for what must be the hundredth time in his career: See here.

      And that’s pretty much it – stale bread thrown to dead ducks, one might say, with very little actual argument concerning the real point of the chapter. But I’ll close with a little something special for Price, who makes much of Boyd’s closing commentary about “falling in love with Jesus” and so on: I find such language as anachronistic as Price’s own arguments in this chapter. Price, who makes so much of those who places feelings on a pedestal, and thinks it a worthwhile argument to point that out, can’t play that card with J. P. Holding. And I’m sure he knows it.

      I’m also sure that’s the real reason he won’t respond to me any more – no sense in coming to the battlefield naked, after all.


      • Price’s response to Witherington is deeply flawed by his failure to realize that Jesus didn’t have to “memorize the Nicene Creed” – the whole template for the Nicene Creed existed long before Jesus lived on earth; it was part of the Jews’ theological furniture in the form of Wisdom theology. You can read more about that here.
      • A note about Price’s bewilderment about the idea that, as he puts it, Jesus was being “tactfully coy” by not making brazen claims to divinity: There were social reasons why that was necessary. Please see our reference material here.
      • Regarding Jesus’ choice of 12 apostles, and how this gives a clue regarding what Jesus thought of himself, Price says:

        Uh, that would mean Jesus saw himself as…the new Jacob, right?...Surely that’s more likely than implying he was Yahweh. But if that is what Jesus meant, that he was Yahweh, then what happens to the fancy distinctions between members of the Trinity that Witherington claims Jesus secretly drew?

        What happens to them? Nothing; like we said, that distinction existed in Wisdom theology prior to Jesus’ birth. In any event, Price himself quotes the very line which shows Jacob wouldn’t be in mind here: Jesus was “not merely part of the group, he’s forming the group – just as God in the Old Testament formed his people and set up the twelve tribes of Israel.” If Jesus was trying to imitate Jacob, the method would have been to team himself up with about four Jewish maidens and produce twelve followers with them.

        Actually, it’s not even clear what Price thinks would be the purpose of Jesus declaring himself the “new Jacob. Jacob’s role was that of the great progenitor of Israel, but reproduction was hardly slack in Jesus’ day. Jacob also had no real role in establishing any sort of covenantal relations with Yahweh – all he did was reaffirm the Abrahamic status quo -- so there wouldn’t be any reason for Jesus to style himself “the new Jacob” on that account either.

        Price also says:

        The Dead Sea Scrolls sect was organized with the Teacher of Righteousness at the head, and below him Twelve men. Does Witherington imagine that the Teacher was supposed to be Jehovah God, too?

        Would he need to? Did the Teacher himself select these twelve, as Jesus did? Or did he claim that God ordained it (as Jesus did not)? By the way, there’s still not a lot of agreement as to who exactly the “Teacher of Righteousness” was ; iIt seems most think he was taken to be the founder of the Essene movement. And what about those Twelve? This says more:

        In the council of the community there shall be twelve men and three priests perfected in all that has been revealed from the whole Torah: --for practicing truth and righteousness, justice and loving kindness and walking humbly with each other; --for keeping faithfulness in the land with firm intention and contrite spirit; -for overcoming iniquity by deeds of justice and endurance of fiery trials; --and for walking in all things by the standard of truth and the regulation for the occasion. --- Dead Sea Scrolls, Community Rule (1QS) 8.1-4

        So actually, that Council of Twelve was more like a Consortium of Fifteen (12 +3) – and there’s really nothing to say that the Teacher of Righteousness was the one who put this august body together in the first place, much less (if he did) what he was thinking was his inspiration.

        In addition, another DSS text, the Damascus Document, offers a judicial body of only ten men; while a Cave 4 fragment does indicate a body of 12 consisting of 10 men and 2 priests. Josephus meanwhile says that the Essenes had a court with 100 members. There’s nothing therefore to suggest that “12” was given any particular significance in the way Price suggests.

      • Regarding where Jesus says of John the Baptist, that John was the greatest man born of women, Price says: “We have no right, as Witherington seems to think he does, to cram the whole gospel narrative into that one passage, to make it look as if Jesus was asserting or implying an unfavorable contrast between himself and John.”

        That is not what Witherington does, however. He isn’t restricting the contrast to “that one passage” – he’s encompassing the whole of Jesus’ career and ministry with respect to “that one passage”. He isn’t saying that Jesus was making any sort of contrast, either.

        Regarding that passage (Matt. 11:11 and parallels), however, Price says that “it’s obvious that Jesus thinks less of himself than of John!” For, he argues, “….there’s no way you can take Bill saying Sam is the greatest man in history by implying Bill thinks he is greater than Sam!” But there’s a couple of problems with that argument. For one thing, as Keener’s Matthew commentary notes [339], Matt. 11:11/pars fits a certain pattern of speech, which can’t be taken as blanket judgments. It’s the language of hyperbolic excess, and Price actually admits as much, even as he suggests that the hyperbole can’t show that Jesus didn’t in any way think himself better than John.

        Keener points to an example of the same document, the Mekhilta, which referred to both Joseph and Moses as being examples of “no one greater” among the Jews. Are we going to argue that the Mekhilta commits self-contradiction on that one (“Is it saying that Joseph was greatest, or Moses”)? Not at all. A more nuanced, contextualized reader would not take the hyperbole as seriously as Price does, and not read Jesus as though he were laying out a literal ranking system with John at the top.

      • Witherington points to where Jesus asserted his authority to abrogate the OT law (Mark 7:18-20). Price objects on multiple grounds,

        First, he objects that the quote from Mark 7:7 (11 verses earlier) uses an LXX (Greek Old Testament) version of Is. 29:13, for the Hebrew version “would not have established the desired point.” And since the LXX was a version “which Palestinian scribes loathed,” he argues, these words by Jesus must be fakes.

        Did Palestinians really “loathe” the LXX, though? Not at all. Glenn Miller has pointed out at http://www.christian-thinktank.com/alxx.php that even the Qumran texts – used by people who would resent foreign influences on Jewish religion – contain agreements with LXX traditions. And he says also:

        The LXX was cited as scripture by Diaspora Jewry consistently in pre-Christian times, was used in synagogues through the 6th century AD, and was used at Qumran in pre-Christian times similarly. Although it was consistently corrected and refined through its heyday (not without major protest from Diaspora Jewry), this was paralleled by Jewish efforts to define/determine the most precise Hebrew text. The disowning of the LXX was never "official", although it was highly disparaged in the later Rabbinical writings. –

        However, at the end of the first century C.E. many Jews ceased to use the LXX because the early Christians had adopted it as their own translation, and by then it was considered a Christian translation. This explains the negative attitude of many Rabbis towards the LXX

        See also http://www.christian-thinktank.com/baduseot.php

        So there’s no substance to this “Palestinians loathed the LXX” argument, not at the time Price needs it.

        What of that the Hebrew version of Is. 29:13 doesn’t get the point across that the LXX version does? Price doesn’t explain why this is so, so it’s hard to know how to answer this. Let’s compare and see if we can guess:

        Mark 7:7 Howbeit in vain do they worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men.

        Is. 29:13 Wherefore the Lord said, Forasmuch as this people draw near me with their mouth, and with their lips do honour me, but have removed their heart far from me, and their fear toward me is taught by the precept of men…

        So….what’s the problem exactly? Like I said, it’s never quite explained, though Price may later give a hint when he says, “the very passage cited condemns those who set aside the Torah commandments to replace them with their own! Jesus is shown here condemning the scribes for doing what Witherington thinks Jesus was bragging about doing! On Witherngton’s logic, Jesus should have recognized that the scribes were claiming divine nature and authority for themselves!”

        But that’s exactly the point! In effect, Jesus is saying, “Look at the way you guys play with the law. Who do you think you are, God?” Jesus is accusing them of going far past the lawyerly license they claimed for themselves as interpreters, to the point that they are so actively “interpreting” that they are effectively writing the law themselves, sort of like some criticize the Supreme Court for being legislators instead of just judges. Of course, the scribes would protest that they were doing no such thing, but that’s beside the point. Jesus says that these guys are “laying aside the commandment of God” – and who has the right to do that in reality, except God?

        More than that, Price says Jesus here “quotes” Is. 29:13, but it might be better to regard this as something more allusive, namely, an allusion. Allusions didn’t need to respect the context; if anything you’d be seen as a right clever (and honorable) fellow for knowing how to craft the tradition for your own usages. (See more on that here.)

        Next objection: Price wonders what Witherington can do with passages like Matt. 5:17-19/Luke 16:17, which says that “the cosmos itself will perish before the least bit of the Torah will be set aside”? That has already has been taken care of and not with the “all is fulfilled” argument Price supposes will be used.

        Next, Price objects that you won’t find Witherington referring to the “law-smashing Jesus” in other books where he talks about Jesus’ Jewishness. But Price earlier admitted in the chapter that he hasn’t read all of Witherington’s books, so how can he be sure of this? Not that it matters: This “law-smashing Jesus” is just Price’s caricature of what Witherington is saying in a single line of CFC.

        Finally, Price objects that founding a sect that invalidated kosher would have led to a “swift and merciless elimination” of his sect. I agree! And I could use this as an argument for the impossible faith line of persuasion. Actually, I did use similar ideas. So Price has provided me with some more ammo then: If it were not for the validating evidence of the Resurrection, I agree, we would have seen a “swift and merciless end” for Jesus – and for Christianity.

      • Price objects to what he thinks is an inconsistency in the way “conservatives” regard the criterion of dissimilarity – the idea that if something attributed to Jesus matches something we find in contemporary Jewish or early Christian practice, then Jesus may not have said it.

        I have always said that the criterion of dissimilarity is useless myself, and this is confirmed by the social science aspect of the picture: If anything, we would expect a teacher in Jesus’ social setting to reaffirm widely accepted teachings; hence, when Jesus is reported saying something that is also found in contemporary Jewish practice, it’s actually all the more reason to regard it as authentic, not less. As for Christian practice, I have also consistently dismissed that as a case of cart before the horse.

        So for me, at least, there has never been any problem of being inconsistent by saying Jesus said radical things on one hand, and affirmed traditional stuff on the other. That would just have been what we’d expect. I also doubt that Witherington would characterize his view as, “If Jesus is supposed to have said it, then it must have been radically new.” Price puts it in quotes, but that’s an illusion, a sleight-of-hand trick, as he puts it, since he’s only manufacturing by caricature, not producing, such a quote from Witherington.

      • Witherington points to Jesus’ “I say unto you” sayings as revolutionary; ordinarily two witnesses were required. Price charges “circular reasoning” and “absurd proof-texting” but his only actual argument is that the “two witnesses” rule was related to testifying in court, not to “making assertions of one’s opinions…” Price replies, doesn’t this just mean Jesus is “daring to assert his own ideas, anticipating the spirit of the Renaissance or the Enlightenment?”

        I think if I wore glasses I’d need to clean them to be sure I read that right! On the previous page, Price was all over Witherington for making, so he says, Jesus into “a man out of time, a divine insertion into the time stream with a perspective not conditioned by his place in ancient history and culture.” So what’s all this then about Jesus anticipating something 1000+ years before the fact? And no, it wouldn’t work, actually; such individualism would indeed have been greatly foreign to the thinking of that social world. Contrary to Price, it was a universal of the period that you DID need the “saved-up capital of the past” to speak with authority; the past was king, the past was the authority that gave the present its power. In any event Price here openly and blatantly self-contradicts within a few lines.

        So there’s no leap here, and we have more on the “I say unto you” verbiage that Price doesn’t address here. I might add that Price needs to substantiate the claim that Buddha is said to have done the same thing – and he might want to be careful; there’s a bit of a difference between presuming to speak for a deity of personal monolatry and a deity of impersonal pantheism.

      • Regarding what Witherington says about the use of “Abba” by Jesus: Actually we agree with Price that the whole “intimacy” angle of Abba is misguided; you can see more about that in the March 2010 issue of the E-Block (go here). The only thing we’ll argue with at all is Price’s gratuitous arguments that Mark 14:36 is part of a whole story that is “clearly the dramatic invention of the evangelist Mark.” You can see an answer to it here. No, Mark didn’t need to be an “omniscient narrator” to know what Jesus was praying, and we don’t need Jesus hastily whispering to his disciples.
      • Price dismisses Witherington’s contention that we wouldn’t see deification accorded to Jesus in such a short amount of time: He says, “[w]e know of other characters, some much nearer to us in history, of whom we can be quite sure that deification was accorded them in two decades or less, and without their say-so.” His examples to the contrary:

        Ali, adopted son of Muhammed, was regarded as an incarnation of Allah during his own lifetime; he was so embarrassed by this that he had many executed.

        African prophet Simon Kimbangu was regarded as “God of the Blacks” by an admiring sect, the Ngunzists. He was upset by their claims and tried to stop them, but could not.

        The Rabbi Schneerson was regarded as divine by followers even before his death

        But Price’s examples don’t quite match the point Witherington was making here. By Price’s own admission, what we have here is people who NEVER made claims of divinity, but had followers ascribe divinity TO them. Did any of these followers then go on to write documents in which they falsely portrayed the founding person as making claims to divinity that they never made? In other words, did any of the Ngunzinsts write a book titled “Simon Kimbangu: My Life!” in which they did NOT report all these places where Simon denied that he was divinity, and replaced it with him saying that he really was? They did not. The parallel is illicit.

        Beyond that, here’s the rub which Price’s argument never irons out: He hasn’t given us any way whereby a person could historically claim to be divine without him arguing that the person’s followers must have invented those claims and put them in that leader’s mouth.

      • On Witherington’s use of Mark 10:45, where Jesus says he gives his life as a ransom: Aside from some unargued gesturing in a footnote to the effect t that he apparently doesn’t think “son of man” was a self-referent by Jesus (see on that here), Price claims that these sentiments by Jesus are best interpreted in light of “ransoming” language in Maccabees, and later Rabbinic statements. He’d have a point, actually, if “Son of Man” were not actually a divine title. But it isn’t – it’s a very strong divine title; see link
      • Witherington also notes John 10:30,and Price merely denies that Jesus said what is in John 10:30. We don’t get told any actual reason why Jesus didn’t say what was recorded in John 10:30, though, so there’s nothing to answer.

      This chapter (8) is about the Trilemma, and Price decides to mostly bypass a direct address of CFC. He begins instead by arguing that we can’t accept the self-revelations of Jesus recorded by John. However, only one argument is given for why this is so: The fact that those self-revelation statements aren’t paralleled in the Synoptics.

      This is not a good reason to dismiss the record of John. The social world of the Bible made a distinction between the way you proclaimed your identity in private, among your own ingroup, and the way you proclaimed it in public, with strangers. With your ingroup, among people who acknowledged you and your identity, it was much more acceptable to make open statements about who you were.

      It is readily seen that most of the divine self-proclamations in John made by Jesus were in one of two places: The first place was among his disciples – his ingroup. We’d expect him to be more open there. The other place was in front of his opponents, the people who ended up wanting to stone him. There, since there Jesus’ honor was being challenged, we would also expect him to make brazen self-identifications – though you can see what happened as a result: They tried to stone him. That’s also what we’d expect from that social setting.

      As for the Synoptics, most of the talk Jesus did in those was in public. That’s exactly when we would expect him to be most ‘tactfully coy’ as Price puts it. So in the end: When Jesus proclaimed himself most openly, that is when he received the most hostile reactions. In other cases (the Samaritan woman) we see him using oblique language to speak of himself and allowing others to "gather data" first and reach a conclusion, so that, appropriate to that social setting, it is they who proclaim his identity rather than he. In this light Jesus in John is in the same social situation as Jesus in the Synoptics, and the portraits are completely consistent.

      After this Price discusses three passages in the Synoptics, though in reality, there’s lots more he needs to look at (see series here). The first is Matt. 11:27/Luke 10:22, which is a lot like John 1:18. Price’s only argument for why it is not authentic is that it “presupposes the resurrection and exaltation.” In other words, it can’t be true, because then it would be true – Price’s only argument is thus abjectly circular. The second passage is Mark 12:1-9, the Parable of the Wicked Tenants. Price says it is an “anachronism looking back on the career of Jesus” which is the same abjectly circular argument as the last one. He also adds that is can’t come from Jesus, because he cannot see why Jesus would depict God as a “rapacious absentee landlord and made the poor sharecroppers villains.”

      Well, for starters, as Mark 12:12 (cf. 11:27-33) makes clear, the “poor sharecroppers” were meant to represent the establishment, and Jesus would certainly do well to make that bunch out to be villains – and very few would have minded God doing that rapacious landlord bit on those guys. The Essenes probably would have done Jesus one better on that, in fact.

      Next, Price takes issue with Jesus’ use of “the Father” as significant of his identity. Actually we’re with him here, believe it or not: “The Father” we’d say does indicate some sort of relationship, but not anything that can be quantified by itself; after all, Roman Emperors were called “Fathers” of Rome. That said, Price’s dismissal of Jesus possibly using the term on the grounds of counting how many times it is used in each Gospel is rather off the mark, as we discussed here some time ago.

      Price’s next serious objection is that trhe Trilemma is a case of the “Bifurcation Fallacy” – “oversimplifying the options in order to manipulate the audience into choosing the option you favor.” Very well, then, what option would Price add to the mix? We asked that question before and the best option anyone could come up with was, “maybe Jesus was honestly mistaken about being God,” which is hardly workable. Price doesn’t do much better, as he offers the possibility of “gurus who viewed themselves as divine avatars,” but why this is an option on monolatrous Jewish Palestine is not explained. Please note that the Trilemma works with valid options in its context. “Jesus was actually one of those dyslexics and he was saying he was a dog, not God” is not made a valid option just because you throw it in the air, and neither is Price’s “guru” option. (His protest that it is, doesn’t address the point that it’s a non-Palestinian Jewish option; nor that it’s not entirely unrealistic, his attempt to suggest that it isn’t notwithstanding. Claiming to be breaking out of the Samsara wheel just isn’t that extraordinary.)

      At this point Price decides to address a bit of what Collins says in CFC. To the point that no one saw Jesus doing stuff crazy people do, Price replies, “True, but then again, what do they always say about serial killers before they go on their shooting sprees? They were the nicest guys, cared about people, never gave a hint of what they finally proved themselves capable of doing.”

      The analogy here is deeply flawed: Serial killers, generally, are not crazy. They’re evil. Same for Jim Jones. Price has fallen for the humanist view that people like Hitler, et al couldn’t possibly have done what they did in their right minds. But the issue here is psychological disorder – not bad behavior. Price is confusing the two.

      Collins says, “No normal, human brain may hold a belief in its own deity,” and Price replies with a theological objection that is most peculiar: “It means that Jesus must have been out of his mind even if he were correct about being God. Such a belief would have exploded any merely mortal mind, If the belief did not drive him mad, he must have had a qualitatively superhuman mind, and that, if I am not mistaken, amounts to the Apollinarian heresy.”

      There’s an irony here in that Price, a professed apostate, is acting out the role of heresy hunter. Still and all, is that indeed what’d we have? Not at all. Price is making the standard error many critics (and even Christians) do of imposing modern anthropological categories on the Chalcedonian definition. (See more on this in an article in the May 2010 E-Block.) Having a super-brain (or something that made his own brain capable of accepting his divine identity) would not have disqualified Jesus as “man” according to the ancient categories that mattered. What mattered there most was his human ancestry. That defined Jesus as “man” and nothing would change that. There is no need for any deeper theological solution.


      Chapter 9 is old home day for Price: It’s the same topic he tackled with Ch. 8 of McDowell, and neither his arguments nor his attitude (nor his jokes) have improved since we answered him on that. In fact they’re worse on all counts this time, as he chooses here to forego the details and just rail on about how Carson has allegedly misinterpreted texts. One is the “only God can forgive sin” text we have referred a link for in another chapter. Another is John 8:46, where Price thinks Jesus isn’t saying he is absolutely sinless, but merely that he has committed no crime worthy of death. Really? Unfortunately that’s nowhere in the text of John 8, and the word used is the standard hamartia, which doesn’t mean just things worthy of death. Price is pulling that explanation out of The Land of the Talmud of Jmannuel.

      Also featured: The standard canard that Jesus came to John, obviously to wash away his sins. Really? Part of the reason he thinks so is that same old Marcan priority humbug he hangs on to like a basketball covered with Gorilla Glue, but even under that rubric, Mark’s picture of Jesus as divine shows that he wasn’t in line at the Jordan for sin; the real purpose was the public recognition of his identity required in a collectivist society. And once again, the old Mark 10:18 canard. If Price ever comes up with a new argument, it’ll die of loneliness. And he has the nerve to say Carson isn’t respecting the “ancient context” of the passage? Price apparently knows as much about the “ancient context” (specifically the anthropology, but a lot else too) as he knows about the mating habits of Peruvian sand mites. If I were in his sneakers I’d get out of Bible scholarship and spend the rest of my life editing third-rate erotic/horror anthologies, as he is prone to do.

      More proof of this: Price is backwards enough that he thinks Colossians 1:15-18 “poses a major problem for the Nicene Christology...” Oh really? That’s what we’d expect from someone who apparently thinks “Son of God” was intended as a title for Jesus in pre-existence. (It wasn’t.) Sorry, though, no; Colossians reinforces the eternality of the Word, it does not “threaten” it. Price should be embarrassed to be this out of the loop. John 14:28 is properly read under the same considerations; Price like many critics has never grasped the difference between the ontological aspect of the Trinity and the functional aspect.

      There’s some raving about hell after that. If Price wants to deal with something other than “pat answers” maybe he can try this, but given his lack of anthropological prowess on Mark 10:18, I don’t think he’s prepared for it. Much less will he be prepared for a view that makes Gandhi’s “damnation” a fair and equitable one, since it doesn’t allow him to hold a pity party for persons he is only pretending to care about so he can act outraged.

      Last gasp has to do with slavery. For some reason, Price doesn’t think Jesus’ approach of undermining the premises of slavery was effective; so much for Gandhi, then, as well as Martin Luther King. But I’d also add to Carson’s comments that it is silly to expect Jesus to say anything about slavery since he wasn’t within hearing distance of people who held slaves during his formal teachings. As for the rest of Price’s complaints, see here/. It takes a naïve, narrow-minded, and angry person to fail to see the depth of moral vision in the NT: But that’s about what we’d expect from Price, a still-fundamentalist who thinks that only a direct approach will do, and can’t grasp the subtleties of a process that undermines by way of re-education.


      Regarding Chapter 10, on Biblical messianic prophecy, we’re in the unusual position of finding ourselves not agreeing with one of Strobel’s interviewees (while also not agreeing with Price as a critic). To put it in a nutshell, the nature of most of the “prophecy” concerned was not so much, “Jeremiah predicted X would happen, and it did” but, “Jeremiah described X event, and what Jesus did was a re-enactment of X.” In sum, the essence of such prophecy is not future prediction but recapitulation. (See related information here.) That includes the example Price notes of Is. 53.

      Price, rather surprisingly for a reputed scholar, is aware of none of this; he remains wedded to the same idea of prophecy-as-prediction-only that he had as a fundamentalist: Fair indication that apostasy is not a case of “enlightened” but rather “not enlightened enough.” In turn, his criticisms of Lapide become essentially irrelevant; he is chasing the wrong horse. It also adds irony to his dismissive remark, “If you want to be convinced of messianic prophecy, it helps to be as ignorant as possible, and to be sure to read the passages with no reference to historical or literary context.” Since the key was re-enactment, not prediction, “historical or literary context” becomes beside the point when it comes to fulfillment.

      Most of Price’s points from here assume the “future prediction” model, and err on the side of clumsiness from there. For the remainder, it is mostly that which has been had before:

      Other than that, Price could stand to educate himself on the nature of Biblical exegesis in the New Testament period. The Jews of the first century were not fundamentalists like Price was, either, and it is again ironic for Price to dismiss Lapide for not knowing of “momentous discoveries” when it is clear that his own scholarship is mostly stuck in the era of Baur. Who indeed is the “poor fundamentalist” in this picture?


      Offering a defense of something as fringe as the swoon theory requires a certain sort of fringe mindset, one that is not ashamed to make wild, speculative statements with enough gusto to act as though they were fact. It also requires not knowing a great deal about the arguments. In his defense of the swoon theory, Price engages none of the serious medical data (such as we engage here) and thus already disqualifies himself as a reputable source on the subject. His tactic instead is his usual “reading between the lines” in the New Testament, where he chooses to say some passages are reliable (those he needs to be true) while others were either interpolated or are misinformed (those he does not want to be true).

      The chapter begins with some quite harmless recitation of the history of the swoon theory, and its origins among Protestant Rationalists. We are certainly in no need of being convinced that their arguments were quite as bad and as contrived as Price’s are. The one point worthy of comment is where Price deigns to argue via analogy that it is illicit to extrapolate from available facts that the Resurrection is the best explanation for the evidence we have. In this Price shows a lamentable lack of knowledge of the procedures of evidence, particularly how circumstantial evidence is used to build a case. His analogy to the Emerald City of Oz is the sort of defense Johnny Cochran built out of Colombian drug lords; Price’s own explanations would do Cochran proud.

      For example, the common response to how the others heard of the Resurrection when the women were told to remain silent is the simple idea that the silence was never intended to be permanent, and obviously was not meant to be read that way since Mark is telling us the story. Price opts for a Colombian drug lord explanation: Mark “is the omniscient narrator”. However, his only evidence for this is sorrowful to the point of Jeremiac lament: He has no idea how otherwise Mark could know what was said by Jesus in Gethsemane (see here -- he considers this one of his best clues, which speaks for itself!), or what took place in the Sanhedrin (see here, atop). These are stale arguments that have been answered repeatedly, Price’s unidimensionality notwithstanding. There is no need to invoke an “omniscient narrator” explanation; it is gratuitous. However, Price seems to be most apt at leaving “gratuities” everywhere he goes – though I’d estimate it to be more in the sense of a cow in a pasture than a diner at a fine restaurant.

      His first address to Metherll is classically exemplary: Price submits that we can’t assume that what the Gospels report is accurate, and we also can’t assume that Jesus underwent what was typical of a crucifixion. The ghost of Cochran applauds mightily as Price abuses the strictures of Collingwood to fill in the blanks with his own contrived history, for which he requires no evidence himself: He assumes the Gospels are accurate when he needs them to be, otherwise, they are not; and he assumes that Jesus was treated atypically when it suits his purposes.

      Price seems aghast that someone would suggest that his hyper-skepticism would render newspaper accounts never believable, for he replies, that is his point: He was been misquoted by newspapers several times. Well, one is inclined to think Price himself is playing the victim role too much, but I too have had newspapers misreport things, so let’s acknowledge the point for the sake of argument and make it harder: If we adopted Price’s methodology, then no source, not even Price himself, could ever be believable. This would include for example excellent Civil War histories by modern professional historians with doctoral degrees. Price’s constant begging for exceptions, and inconsistent use of his source material, speaks for itself as a desperate ploy of one who has decided ahead of time what he wants to see He makes much of eg, Jesus expiring ahead of expectation (Mark 15:44) and takes that as a clue to the swoon theory. But why should we? Has Price shown that the early expiration is odd enough in the history of crucifixions that we ought to suspicious? Has he engaged the medical evidence for how crucifixion affects the body? (No, of course he hasn’t.) And why is it that he deigns to take Mark 15:44 at face value, while rejecting John 20:25? The only reasoning he offers is, “because that’s what I need to be true.” Price is not being a critical historian in any sense of the word: He is being a slick-mouthed Johnny Cochran who inserts a drug lord wherever he needs one.

      It will do Price no good to play the victim routine and assert that it is merely “dogma” to give the documents the benefit of the doubt – and not give any credence to his ruthless speculations. He needs to provide good arguments -- not just throw hay in the air. His further attempt to validate his Gethsemane routine might make excellent vaudeville, but does poorly as scholarship and critical thinking: His appeal to how “Christian readers” read this story as a type of Isaac (who went free – hence, he supposes, a support for the swoon theory!) fails to explain how and when this typology was recognized, and thus, why it should even be relevant – if “Christian readers” saw this typology hundreds of years later, so what? And since when does Price give any credence to typology, anyway? None, actually; in Ch. 10 he waves it off as nonsensical creativity. So why is he so intent on allowing a parallel to be forced now ?

      Price’s further appeal to the alleged ”irony” of those who mocked Jesus from the cross and told him to come down from it doesn’t make a great deal of sense either. The mockeries reflect the normal shaming of deviants in an agonistic society; there’s also no less “irony” in a Resurrection than there is in Jesus being drugged from the sponge, which in any event, per our medical consultant in the linked article, reflects a pharmaceutical fantasy on Price’s part, perhaps not the only one he has had in the course of composing his theories.

      Finally, Price’s appeal to two victims who did survive crucifixion neglects the point that the two victims referenced in Josephus had the benefit of being nursed – and a third person died even so. Of course, we assume Price will call those “dogmatic” who insist that it is impossible that there should have been a squad of EMTs hiding in the tomb of Joseph to take care of Jesus when he was placed there. (Price also appeals to the absurd ”Joseph was a fake character” thesis while he is at it.) The bottom line is that nothing Price offers has so much as a shred of evidence to deserve the title of “historical reconstruction” – the sort of construction Price does here would be most immediately found in the instruction manual for a set of Lincoln Logs.

      From here Price once again reaches back to Pilate’s surprise at Jesus’ death as some sort of “first shoe” which drops a clue; but his reasons for doing so are typically one-dimensional: He cannot see the point of such a thing being made note of unless the swoon theory has merit. Once again, Price’s poor imagination isn’t a good argument. As already noted, he has nothing to show that Pilate’s surprise was because it was that unusual for a man to die early from crucifixion. Perhaps it happened 1 in 100 times; that’s enough for Pilate to be surprised, but far from enough to go deviating off into Price’s Swoon Fantasy. If perhaps we could say, “unprecedented in Roman history,” Price might have a leg up, but even then, that would be a stretch: The surprise would most likely have to do with the fact that Pilate expected his professional executioners to have been more careful to be sure that a crucifixion victim was beaten and hauled off on “just right”, not so much that they would die; for the point of crucifixion of course was to prolong the shame as long as possible. In any event, Price’s desperate counsel that the Gospels “do not suggest that Jesus was that badly damaged” and that perhaps (contrary to all evidence of the Gospels, and normal Roman practice) he was excepted from the normal preliminaries of flogging, is so comic that if Price’s life is ever made into a movie, it seems quite likely that Jim Carrey will play the starring role. (Flogging of course was used as a status degradation ritual to initially destroy the honor of the victim; suggesting that maybe they skipped this part would require so much more than Price’s, “well, maybe they did, just for my convenience” theorizing.)

      Price then briefly appeals to a standard canard which we have addressed thusly before, regarding whether Jesus carried his own cross or not:


      Matthew says that Simon was met "as they were going out" (Matt. 27:32). Mark says Simon was just "passin' by," and they forced him to carry the cross (Mark 15:21). Luke says Simon was drafted "as they led (Jesus) away." (Luke 23:26)…it is well-established that it was the custom of the Romans to have the prisoner carry his own cross, and that they would have no compunction about forcing bystanders to do whatever they pleased.

      The obvious implication is that Simon was drafted at some point after the procession to Golgotha began, probably from among the massive crowd of Passover pilgrims, and the scenario above about John gives us a reasonable explanation for him not mentioning Simon: If John stayed behind to plead with the high priest, the last thing we would have seen was Jesus leaving the area, carrying the cross.


      So once again, Price does his best Marty McFly imitation as he refuses to think “fourth dimensionally.”

      On the other hand, I am not sure what to make of Price contrasting Metherell’s idea that “a nail in the wrist” would have induced unbearable pain with the Gospels’ report that Jesus’ fellow crucifixion victims were speaking on their crosses. Of course, ancient people were rather more hardy than we were, and much more accustomed (especially in an agonistic society) to shrugging off pain, whereas it appears from Price’s latest public photos that his latest and greatest pain has been missing the last 150 crullers from the Krispy Kreme box. I don’t think he has any place to object in terms of what a crucifixion victim might or might not be capable of. I certainly know of no medical or historical evidence that speech would be impossible for such a person.

      Price then quickly and conveniently disposes of pesky passages like John 20:25 as “subsequent additions to the text”; such things as textual evidence are apparently considered unnecessary when “Danger -- Historical Reconstruction” signage is posted. He hints at one argument with John 19:34-5, saying, “Verse 35 has them verify what they already knew in the previous verse. Which was it? Was his death plain to them or not?” Apparently Price has missed the words of Quintilian about this very subject: "As for those who die on the cross, the executioner does not forbid the burying of those who have been pierced." A redundancy? Perhaps so, but also a further bit of humiliation, far from beyond the conceptions of honor and shame. Really, making sure of death was not the only point here; there is no need for Price’s omnipresent redactor (who appears to have been clever enough to control the textual tradition universally, but not clever enough to have simply deleted the verses from which Price draws his hints).

      There’s not much need to be more specific from here. Price hints that perhaps something was stolen from the stories of Apollonius of Tyana, which deserves about as much credence (see here) as the swoon theory. The rest is simply yet more hypothesizing of convenience using Price’s omnipresent redactor as a tool. Price’s appeal to the possibility of grave robbers waking Jesus has its own problems, which we’ll look at in a forthcoming chapter of Defending the Resurrection.

      Price closes, after all this stomping mercilessly around for the swoon theory, by washing his hands cleaner than Pilate would: “I am presenting no theory of what happened to [Jesus]; I do not think, given the present state of our sources, that we will ever know.” Price’s historical epistemology is frankly such a disaster area that for all we know, Rome didn’t actually exist either; the city we think was Rome was actually called Bithlomania, and all of Tacitus’ works are heavily interpolated to hide the fact that it was mostly famous for Swedish massage parlors. Price’s railing about presupposing the accuracy of the Gospel accounts will not hide the fact that he has yet to fulfill the burden needed to show that we should not grant the benefit of the doubt.


      Ch. 12 contains little we have not already dealt with, so we’ll have a lot of bullet points here. Links will also have updated chapters in my next book, Defending the Resurrection, and since we’ll have a lot more in there, we’ll refer the reader there frequently for this chapter.

    • Price offers the usual canard in which we are told we can’t read 1 Cor. 15:3-10 in light of the Gospel narratives because – well, just because Price says so, that’s why. No actual argument is offered, though we can probably assume that a typical “Gospels are too late” canard would be offered given the chance (and Price offers little of worth on that either; see Ch. 1 reply).
    • Amazingly, though in Ch, 6 Price had gone on about “spiritual resurrection” in one direction, he now goes off on it in the opposite direction, as we mentioned he did in our Ch 6 reply. See article here for replies to this standard canard re “spiritual” resurrection in Paul, which includes some corrections to Price in a former life.
    • Price drags out the ptoma of the “Joseph of Arimathea was a fake” argument; see reply here. See also here. See Defending the Resurrection as well for material on the alleged “evolution” of Joseph across the Gospels; the reason Criag doesn’t take this idea seriously, as Price complains, is because it is a foolish argument. Price also badly overstates the problems of availability of information after 70 AD – there may have been no version of the Congressional Record, but there were certainly family members, and people who had lived long enough to know Joseph was not real, and people in Arimathea, and leaders like Paulus and Agrippa in a position to know. (And of course, Price neglects the honor-challenge dimension that would prompt rebuttals, and there’s no reason to date Mark past 70 AD, or even 55 AD, Price’s no-argument-to-the-contrary notwithstanding.)
    • Price also drags out Ronald McDonald’s ptoma -- no, not that one, though I sometimes mistake the two given the similarity of their scholarship. I mean here. Price also draws a lot of “pun parallels” with names in the Bible, but all are either simply Price stretching words to strain a parallel (eg, “Timaeus” somehow connects to “timyah,” or “beggar,”) or ignores the fact that names listed were in common use (so Jews named Zaccheus had to avoid giving alms to avoid people making a big deal about the pun?). These are no more meaningful than Price’s own name (he represents the “price” of being an ill-educated apostate from fundamentalism).
    • Despite Price – who thinks merely presenting them is an argument – there is no value to sources like The Apocryphon of James and the Toledeth Jesu as presenting “variant traditions” of Jesus’ burial. See DTR for the point on Acts 13:27-29, or August-September 2009 E-Block.
    • Further arguments assume Markan priority, which we deny, and so see no reason to answer further where Price depends on it. He certainly won’t be “interrogating” Marcan priority as a concept any time soon.
    • Price’s appeals to OT stories as sources for the NT reveal a manifest misunderstanding of NT literary composition. See the rebuttal to McDonald plus here for rebutting principles. Price is under the impression that if he can find a reason for the Gospels to be crafted or redacted a certain way, he has automatically proven ahistoricity, and that is simply a non sequitur.
    • Price’s dealings re the testimony of women are grossly misdirected and misinformed; see upcoming chapter in DTR. He also repeats the “Papias can’t be trusted because of what he said about Judas” canard we addressed in another chapter, and the “Ps. 22 meant animals” argument we also linked to a reference for elsewhere.
    • Price can’t help himself, even going so far as to resurrect the Abiathar canard and the John 18:13 ”that year” canard. Does Price think debate on this issues ended with Baur?
    • It is hard to understand why Price thinks the Gospel writers put words from the Psalms in Jesus’ mouth for the occasion. Does it never occur to him that a Jew educated in the Scriptures was just as capable of coming up with the right words from the Scriptures? Indeed, to be able to do so was a mark of honor. And again, Price erects a false dichotomy: Either it must be an “eyewitness account” or it was created wholesale out of the OT with no history. Price is too deadened by his former fundamentalism to see that these options are not mutually exclusive.
    • Price devotes a mere sentence or two each to defending various options for what happened to Jesus’ body. We refer the reader to chapter-length refutations in the upcoming DTR.

      Chapter 13 is about the post-Resurrection appearances of Jesus, and there’s a lot here we’ll cover more in Defending the Resurrection, with some earlier versions of DTR material we can link to here. From the start, Price raises the bar of evidence to stratospheric heights, claiming there just isn’t enough and there needs to be more. But Price doesn’t make the rules of evidence, and he also doesn’t use them. But more than that, most of the first part of the chapter is just a repeat of arguments Price used in his claim that the creed of 1 Cor. 15 is an interpolation. My response to this is no longer online, but is found in Trusting the New Testament; I’ll just summarize my answers here.

      First, Price objected that the 500 were not mentioned in the Gospels. Why not?

      • The purpose of the Gospels – they were ancient biographies for those already Christians, not missionary documents. Appeal to the 500 would not have been necessary for no one was trying to prove anything to anyone.
      • The lack of need for many witnesses. Two was sufficient in Jewish culture to prove the truth of a matter.
      • Quality appearances vs. quantity appearances. Even if we assume the Gospels were trying to prove something, the appearance to the 500 likely involved lesser quality experiences than eg, eating a meal with Jesus, and so would have less apologetic value for things that the Gospels might be indirectly addressing, such as docetism.
      • The lesser lifespan of humans in the first century. By the time of the Gospels, most of the 500 would be dead; the average lifespan was 35. Even in Paul’s day he had to make it clear that many had died; how much more so by the time of the Gospels, 5-10 years later?

      I answered this ages ago, but Price still hums along with it as one of his arguments for 1 Cor. 15 as an interpolation. The chapter on TNT offers multiple-angle debunking of this fringe idea, and we need say no more. Price closes the section asking how many of the Corinthians had the chance to sail off and check such things, and the answer, contrary to him, is more than enough: apparently Price has forgotten about Diaspora Jews who frequently went off to Palestine, and would have ample chance to look up witnesses and check facts. To those we can also add the occasional wealthy Gentile, of the sort that composed an unusual number of Christianity’s earliest converts.

      Regarding the conversion of James: I myself make little use of the argument that James was convinced as a Skeptic, though it is something that needs to be explained. Price has apparently realized the absurdity of his earlier answer to this argument, positing James as some sort of “in it for the money” televangelist, but still uses Luke 8:19-21 and Acts 1:14, which he says implies that “all the Holy Family embraced Jesus’ word from the start.” The full answer is again in TNT, as this was also in Price’s “interpolation” piece, but in sum: Acts 1:14 is from a time after the ascension, and so would have to be after the appearance to James as well, and therefore cannot be used; as for Luke 8:19-21, this is not at all a justifiable reading of the text., and note that Jesus' mother and brothers are notably absent from the listing of Jesus' supporters in Luke 8:1-3. Bottom line: Price's interpretation is naught but an exaggerated and tortuous act of eisegesis.

      Likewise, I tend not to make much of Paul’s conversion from enemy to friend, though it is stronger than that of James, given the nature of ancient personality, which was highly resistant to change compared to the modern individualist. Price, however, deals with the matter by simply waving off the story of Paul’s conversion in Acts as ahistorical, and denies that it has any relationship to what Paul records in Galatians. Arguments for why this is the case – none, really:

      • Somehow Price gets the idea that when, in Galatians, Paul says he was selected by God from birth, this means Paul had been a Christian all his life. That’s a tortuous act of exegesis all by itself, but has Price Philippians 2, as well as the fact that Paul says he persecuted the church, in Galatians? Fear not, he has a ready answer: Passages like that are late interpolations. You want evidence? Shame on you, Price says, for being so “dogmatic” in asking for such a thing.

        As we noted in the reply on 1 Cor. 15, you need good arguments for an interpolation sans textual evidence. Price offers the wild ideas of O’Neill to handle the relevant verses in Gal. 1, and we’ll get to those below.

      • Price hauls one of his standard bedraggled arguments of “this looks like that”, comparing Paul’s conversion accounts in Acts to a story in 2 Maccabees 3, and another in Eurpides. Just need to remind all again that this sort of reasoning is bogus.(And another example here; most of the prallels Price draws are as strained as those of MacDonald’s worst.)

      So now, what about arguments derived from O’Neill, trying to dispense with Gal. 1:13-14 and 22-24?

      • ”The argument is irrelevant and anachronistic…” It is? Why? Maybe O’Neill explains more, but Price doesn’t quote the reasons, which leads me to suspect they’re worthless and he knows it. (Hey, I’m just “interrogating” the source.)
      • ”…the concepts differ form Paul’s concepts, and the vocabulary and style are not his.” Uh HUH. Any idea that just those 5 verses are sufficient to make a judgment about style and vocabulary is just plain dumb, dumber than leaving 15 pegs on one of those Cracker Barrel games. It’s nowhere near enough of a data sample, period. The examples, apparently from O’Neill, are singularly unimpressive:
        1. References to “Judaism” are anachronistic, as though “implying that Christianity and Judaism are separate religions…” Um, no, sorry, I don’t get that “implied” from Paul at all. For one thing, Paul never even mentions “Christianity” or a separate movement – he calls it the “faith” (loyalty group), which is compatible as well with any sectarian movement, like the Essenes. O’Neil is just making mountains out of dust motes here.
        2. The use of “the faith” as a reference to a movement is anachronistic.? Note that this is the same argument used against the Pastorals, and our answer on that is good here too:

          However, Paul refers to "the faith" in a creedal way in other places (Rom. 4:12, 4:16; 1 Cor. 16:13, 2 Cor. 13:5, Gal. 1:23; 3:23, 6:10; Phil. 1:25, 27; Col. 2:7). It was therefore not a foreign usage to him; he simply uses it that way more often in the Pastorals, as we would expect if he were writing to church leaders whose job it was to safeguard creeds and traditions - and considering that he was near the end of his life, this would not be a bad idea [Town.PTPT, 312].

          Of course next Price will say that all of those are interpolations, too.

        3. Paul uses “church” as though to imply a universal congregation. Elsewhere he only uses it of local congregations. Are these guys smoking something illegal? The word used here indicates the assembly of YHWH, period. If the Jews of 700 BC converted a bunch of Native Americans, does that mean they were not part of the “assembly” because they were 10000 miles away? “Church” (ekklesia) does not have any semantic domain that restricts members by locale; this is merely a contrivance by O’Neill.
        4. There are five words not found in other Pauline letters. The point being what? Price only names the words in Greek, and its not hard to see why: If he gave us the English equivalents, we might “interrogate” and find out that he’s being a little goofy. The words in question are translated as, “the Jewish religion” (it’s merely a variation of the word “Judaism,” with a different suffix, and hardly beyond Paul’s capacity to use) “conversation,” (used also, Price admits, in Ephesians and 1 Timothy, but also found in Hebrews, James, and 1 and 2 Peter); “wasted” (found also in Acts); “my equals,” and “fathers”. Now the thing about this sort of argument from vocabulary is that it doesn’t mean a heck of a lot unless 1) you show that Paul did NOT use the words in places he absolutely should have – very hard to argue, especially because ancient writers were prone to vary vocabulary on purpose; 2) you have to show that other authors show statistically more meaningful use of those words (in other words, show that someone like Aristotle used “wasted” many more times per capita than Paul did, while also having just as many contexts to use it). Needless to say, that is not done. Price and O’Neill are playing the role of kindergarten statasticians who haven’t even mastered the fundamentals of discerning the meaningfulness of data – and when or if it is indeed meaningful.
        5. Paul uses pote (“in times past”) three times in just these few verses! That’s more often in such a short space than anywhere but the Pastorals. Again, for the same reasons – so what? Price admits that Paul uses the word in his other letters regarded as genuine, like Romans. Has it occurred to any of these guys that the reason Paul uses the word so frequently here is that he is having a slightly more extended than usual discussion of things that occurred “in times past”? I’m afraid such common-sense answers seldom commend themselves to those like Price whose understanding of statistics comes off of a Cracker Jack box.

      That’s all the specifics Price offers. He plunks down for a summary claim that the Pastorals are bogus (see here, and also makes vague reference to reasons why Philippians is inauthentic, which actually, no one credible today believes; that’s why he has to reach back to Baur’s badly dated ideas to support it. (Only a dinosaur like Baur could think that the hymn of Phil. 2:6-11has anything to do with “Gnosticizing kabbalism” – it’s got roots, rather, in the Jewish Wisdom tradition).

      Price also refers to the idea that Philippians “bishops and deacons” are anachronistic. He notes the answer that such offices are comparable to the “overseer” in Qumran. To this he replies that “apologists fail to see” that “such an ecclesiastical structure evolves again and again when new religious movements evolve from sect to church, and that this development is too late for Paul.” Sorry, no: This whole argument is plain goofy. New sects and such do SOMETIMES reinvent themselves compared to the parent movement, but they hardly engage a thorough revamping at all times; just look at how much Mormonism and the Jehovah’s Witnesses kept from mainstream Christendom. Those movements also make it clear that it just doesn’t take that long for such structure to “develop” – especially when other models are so readily at hand. (See more on this in Trusting the New Testament, in the chapter on the Pastorals.) Price is simply pulling the idea of repeated reinvention out of the air because he has no answer to the argument otherwise.

      The rest of the chapter is a confused pastiche of objections and rewritings of history, most of which depend on the logic of the Helms-MacDonald sort (see links above), so we’ll just draw out what’s left.

      • Price somehow gets out of John 20:17 that Jesus is saying “goodbye” and will never return. I can only say that to force such a meaning from the text requires the use of even more hallucinogenic substances:

        Jesus said, "Do not hold on to me, for I have not yet returned to the Father. Go instead to my brothers and tell them, 'I am returning to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.' "

        So...this means, “and I’m never coming back,” how? John himself obviously didn’t think it meant that, since he has plenty of appearances to go. Price of course would rattle on about the alleged “blinders” worn by apologists who harmonize the stories, but it is Price who is adding problems to the text, not the text itself that is the problem. At the same time, we can point out that if Price wants to hypothesize a later editor or redactor, it seems he must posit one too stupid to see that John 20:17 isn’t compatible with more appearances by Jesus, but also smart enough to fool generations into thinking the text was a seamless whole. How convenient.

      • Similarly, we are told that John 21:1-14 is “supposed to be the first resurrection appearance,” and this is a problem. Say what? Where does Price imagine this to come from? Uh, because, “[t]he disciples have dropped their delusions and have wearily returned to their mundane pursuits.” In other words, because Price is too much of a wuss to imagine that he might go fishing at a time when Jesus might be around to hand out a mission statement. Is he serious? Does he realize that, you know, people even back then had to eat? It sounds like someone here is importing their dry, dull, fundy past into the picture, reflecting a time when No Fun Allowed was the rule any time the church was planning a revival event. Sorry, no – that’s a non sequitur. There is no reason why Peter might not go back to his roots and do some fishing while waiting for Jesus to show up again. What does Price expect Peter to do while waiting? Bow down to his knees 24/7?
      • On Luke vs Acts, on the Ascension, see here. Also, Price declares the Acts story “fiction” because the disciples are “dense” for asking whether the Kingdom will be restored to Israel. What Price forgets to do there is show where Jesus answered that question in any prior teaching.

      And that’s all that is unique. Price is still riding dinosaurs while the rest of the world has moved on to speedboats.


      Ch. 14 reiterates many arguments from past chapters, and we will not rehash answers here; they’ll stay in the prior chapters. More generally, J. P Moreland offered a sort of miniature argument like my own impossible faith premise, one the reader will note Price responded to with his usual lack of rigor; and to that extent his own reactions to Moreland are more chasing the wrong horse and/or ineffectual, and we consider them already answered in our response there.

      Otherwise all I can say is that Price far better describes his own methods when he says: “If it might convince some idiot out there, then by all means use it.” Such words well describe someone who stumps for such lunacy as the Christ myth!