‘Deciphering the Gospels’, by R. G. Price, argues the case for Jesus mythicism, which is the view that Jesus never existed on earth in any real form but was an entirely mythical figure in the same way as Hercules or Dionysus. (The author is not the same person as Robert Price, also a Jesus mythicist author.) I’m an atheist who holds the opposing (and mainstream) view that Jesus was originally a human being of the 1st century about whom a later mythology grew up. I’m therefore reviewing Price’s book to discuss his arguments and my reasons for disagreeing.

The first post in this book review is here. Links to the posts on all subsequent chapters can be found at the end of that post.

Chapter 10: Non-Christian Accounts Of Jesus

First off, a small detail that is driving me nuts; I have corrected the capitalisation in the above chapter heading, but Price wrote it as ‘Non-christian Accounts Of Jesus’. ‘Christ’ is a proper noun and thus that, and words deriving from it, should be capitalised. Every time I open up the menu with the chapter list, that ‘Non-christian’ niggles at me and eats into my deeply pedantic soul. R.G., if you take nothing else on board from this entire critique, fer cry yi yi PLEASE at least get the grammar in the chapter headings correct in further editions.

Thank you. I feel better now.

In this chapter, Price goes along with a very common misconception among people who know little or nothing about ancient history; the idea that we could expect Jesus to have been mentioned in numerous surviving written works of the time, and therefore there’s something mysterious about the paucity of such mentions (a mystery which, you guessed it, can only be solved by assuming Jesus didn’t exist).

The overwhelming lack of commentary about Jesus in the historical sources
of his supposed time has troubled Christian scholars from the very beginning.

That might very well be true; after all, this lack of mention certainly should be a problem for Christian scholars. According to their beliefs, Jesus was God Incarnate, working dazzling miracles, arriving on earth to be the sole saviour of all humanity, rising from the dead and appearing to hundreds in his magically risen form, impacting upon the world like a thunderclap. The fact that none of this gets mentioned in any of the non-Christian sources of the time does indeed raise some major questions as to the validity of those claims. (Which, by the way, is a good anti-apologetic argument that mythicists tend to overlook and weaken in their insistence on focusing on claims that Jesus didn’t exist at all. The lack of surviving mentions in non-Christian sources actually is good evidence against the Christian claims about Jesus.)

However, the debate here is not over that Jesus. It’s over whether the Jesus in whom the movement originally believed was a real person who walked the earth a couple of millennia ago and had a following prior to being executed. And, as people who actually know their ancient history will tell you, such a Jesus wouldn’t be someone likely to get mentioned in contemporary works. He would have been one of many apocalyptic preachers and faith-healers of the time, and the many surviving works we have from authors of the time typically don’t bother mentioning people in those categories.

(One other important factor to bear in mind, of course, is that most things written at the time haven’t survived. The material typically used for paper at the time – papyrus – crumbles to dust after a few centuries, so the physical documents written at that time are long since dust on the winds. The writings we still have are the ones that someone at the time took the trouble to copy and then recopy over the centuries. The overlap between ‘writer important enough to have works copied and preserved in such a way’ and ‘writer who wanted to spend time recording the doings of some minor-league troublemaking Jewish preacher’ is, in practice, negligible.)

There are at least a couple of mentions of Jesus in the late 1st/early 2nd century, which we’ll get to in later posts. Before getting to those, however, Price first focuses on writers whose lifetime overlapped with Jesus’s estimated lifetime. (That specific requirement is one that tends to come up a lot among mythicists. It seems to be a combination of vague assumptions: a) that information that doesn’t come from a personal eyewitness is somehow useless, and b) that any author who lived in Jesus’s time would surely have not only heard about him but also introduced it into their written work, however irrelevant.)

Anyway, Price gives us a list of

[…] some of the primary persons who lived during the supposed lifetime of Jesus, whose works we do have and who we could reasonably expect would have mentioned Jesus had he existed… All of these people lived during roughly the same time that Jesus supposedly lived and are prime candidates for being potential witnesses to, and documenters of, the existence of Jesus.

Let’s start out by looking at that ‘prime candidates for being potential witnesses’ claim.

First off, realistically, none of the authors whose works have survived to the modern day are ‘prime candidates’ for having seen Jesus. From the scanty information we have, it seems Jesus spent most of his life in the backwater region of Galilee followed by less than a week in Jerusalem (already a large city with tens of thousands of people) during an unspecified year. We simply cannot pinpoint any supposed movements of either Jesus or of authors of the time with remotely the accuracy needed to pick out ‘prime candidates’ for having seen this one particular person at any particular time.

And, secondly, even allowing for that, Price seems to be stretching the definition of ‘prime candidates’ astonishingly. His list includes:

• Pliny the Elder, who was in fact born in North Italy in 23 CE and grew up there. Yes, his lifespan technically overlapped with that of Jesus, but at the time Jesus would have been executed Pliny was a child growing up hundreds of miles away. How is he a ‘prime candidate’ for having witnessed a rabbi in Galilee or Jerusalem?
• Velleius Paterculus, a former soldier who published a political and military history. We know nothing about his whereabouts in the later years of his life, and this includes the years that Jesus might have been preaching.
• Valerius Maximus: we know almost nothing of his life, and so can’t say where in the Roman Empire he was living at any given time.
• Seneca the Younger: born in Spain, lived in Rome. I can find nothing to say that he ever visited Galilee or Jerusalem.

Price does marginally better with the example of Justus of Tiberias, in that he did at least come from Galilee. The problem here is that – as even Price points out – he was probably born only after Jesus supposedly died, making him another very unlikely candidate for having seen Jesus. (By the way, Justus also doesn’t fit the ‘works we do have’ criterion; he’s known to have written at least two books, but neither of them have survived, so that’s another inaccuracy from Price.) And, while Philo of Alexandria probably did visit Jerusalem once in his life, the odds that that happened to be during the tiny window of time that Jesus was there are very low indeed. Price’s description of these people as ‘prime candidates’ for supposedly having witnessed Jesus is an unfortunate illustration of his stretching of facts and lack of critical thought on the matter.

Then, there’s the matter of what these writers wrote. Bear in mind again, here, that Price is saying that we would expect these authors to have written about Jesus:

• Justus of Tiberias, the author Price lists as second only to Philo of Alexandria as a candidate for someone who ‘should’ have mentioned Jesus in his work, wrote a history of the Jewish War (which took place decades after Jesus’s death) and an apparently brief history of Jewish kings. Price glosses over this last by simply describing it as ‘a well-preserved history of the region’, but the mention we have of it, in Photius’s Bibliotheca, does specify that it was a history of kings. In other words, hardly the kind of work that bothers to mention itinerant rabbis.
• Pliny the Elder’s most famous work, the one for which he is mainly known, was a book on natural history. According to the Britannica article about him, he is also known to have written works on ‘grammar, a biography of Pomponius Secundus, a history of Rome, a study of the Roman campaigns in Germany, and a book on hurling the lance’. That’s a laudably broad bibliography, but it’s hard to see how ‘rural rabbis’ or ‘Messianic wannabes’ would make it into any of those works as a subtopic.
• Seneca the Younger wrote about Stoic philosophy, which has nothing to do with alleged teachings of Jesus.
• And Velleius Paterculus wrote a Roman history that, according to Price’s own description, ‘covers history up to 14 CE’. I leave as an exercise for the reader why this might not have mentioned a rabbi whose best-known activities seem to have occurred in the early years of the 30s CE.

Valerius Maximus’s work seems potentially more promising at first sight, since the title translates as ‘Memorable Deeds and Sayings’, which at least might have covered deeds and/or sayings attributed to a rabbi. However, let’s look at what Valerius himself has to say in his opening lines, with emphasis mine:

I have resolved to collect together the deeds and sayings of most note, and most worthy to be remembered, of the most eminent persons both among the Romans and other nations, taken out of the most approved authors, where they lie scattered so widely, that makes them hard to be known; to save the trouble of a tedious search, for those who are willing to follow their examples. Yet I have not been over-desirous to comprehend everything. For who in a small volume is able to set down the deeds of many ages?

So, Valerius is looking for deeds and sayings of the people he’d consider ‘the most eminent persons’; in other words, not a Jewish preacher from a rural backwater. He’s looking for them in ‘the most approved authors’. Even if there had been any chance of him counting the anonymous authors of a strange religious cult in that category (which, let’s face it, there wasn’t), Valerius published his book in 30 CE, many years before the gospels would even be written; and, even on the small off-chance that Valerius might have lived in a part of the empire in which he’d have happened to hear about a Galilean preacher via word of mouth, that wouldn’t have interested someone who was specifically looking for sayings and deeds already thought worthy of recording by ‘approved authors’. And Valerius himself points out that he’s got no chance of covering every possible interesting deed or saying in this book and he’s not even going to try to do so. The result, not surprisingly, is a book that doesn’t seem to mention any rabbis, as far as I could see from skimming through the religion section.

That leaves Philo of Alexandria, who is Price’s top pick for Person Who Should Have Mentioned Jesus; ‘If Philo had known about Jesus, he surely would have written something about him’ Price insists with his usual seamless transition from might-have-happened to must-have-happened. And here he is, at least, dealing with a might-have-happened; he’s not as totally off base as he was when he was insisting that mentions of Jesus surely ‘should’ have been included in a very brief book about kings or in a work of natural history or in a history that covered a time period ending almost two decades before Jesus did anything even vaguely notable. Philo was a Jew writing about religious ideas and the occasional event of interest, he was an adult at the time Jesus was actively preaching, he did go to Jerusalem at one point, and so it’s not totally out of the question that he might have a) heard of Jesus and b) thought he was worth mentioning in one of his works. It’s just a massive exaggeration to declare this to be a definite.

Price’s certainty is, you might be unsurprised to hear, based on some fairly spurious reasoning. He declares that the gospel authors might well have used Philo’s writings, as though that somehow means that the reverse would have been true. He makes much of the fact that Philo writes about Pontius Pilate, as though this would have somehow meant Philo could have known (or cared) what the most famous scene of Pilate’s life would retrospectively, generations later, turn out to be. He claims that Philo personally lent money to Herod Agrippa I, the king of the Jewish population of Judea a decade after the time Jesus was supposedly executed; apart from the bizarrely tenuous nature of the attempted implication that this somehow makes it a certainty that Philo would have a) heard of and b) written about Jesus, this claim doesn’t even seem to be correct, since it was actually Philo’s brother who lent the money. Price seems to have misread his source article on that point.

All of this is piled on top of a description of Philo that’s downright skewed to start off with; Price describes him as a ‘historian’ who ‘reported on events throughout the Mediterranean world’ and that he ‘traveled throughout the Roman Empire’. In fact, nearly all of Philo’s works are commentaries on either the Torah or philosophy, his few historical accounts are about matters that were directly relevant to his life, and we only know of one trip that he made to Rome and one probable trip, of unknown date, to Jerusalem. So Price is considerably exaggerating some aspects of Philo’s known life story to make him sound more likely to have encountered/written about Jesus.

Stripping all of that away… was Philo someone who wrote about a comprehensive list of contemporary rabbis? This was difficult for me to answer as I’ve read almost none of his works and don’t realistically have the time to read through them, but I thought of a handy way to check. I downloaded the Kindle version of Philo’s complete works, which is quite cheap to do, and did a wordsearch on it for three names of rabbis who were particularly well known in the rabbinical world in that period of Judaism: Hillel, Shammai, and Gamaliel.

While Hillel’s name at first seemed to pop up several times, I rapidly ascertained that these mentions were in the modern-day commentary included with the book, not in anything Philo himself had written. As for Shammai and Gamaliel, I couldn’t find any mention of either name (even trying the alternative spelling of ‘Gamliel’, which I gather was sometimes used). So, if those search results were correct, Philo didn’t mention any of the three rabbis who were most famous in that time period. It seems extremely unlikely that an author of that time who actually was interested in citing rabbis contemporary to him wouldn’t mention any of those three. Therefore, even without having read Philo’s extensive body of work, I feel comfortable in deducing that Philo was not, in fact, someone who cited rabbis of his time.

If I’m wrong and Price is in fact aware of numerous such rabbis cited by Philo whom he simply neglected to mention in his list of Reasons Why Philo Would Definitely Have Written About Jesus, then I’m happy for him to give me the citations. But, from what I can currently see, it looks as though Philo simply wasn’t particularly interested in naming/citing particular rabbis, even those who were considerably more well-known in their time than Jesus was. So, unfortunately for Price’s argument, even his top candidate for Person Who Surely Would Have Mentioned Jesus seems, in practice, to be yet another person who wasn’t actually likely to have mentioned Jesus.

In future posts: a couple of other people who I agree probably also did not say anything helpful about Jesus… and a couple who did.