One wonders if Robert Price ever sleeps. His output has been prodigious, and his reach is a broad one. But it can rightly be said that The Pre-Nicene New Testament: Fifty-four Formative Texts is his magnum opus—so far. It is nothing less than a new, indeed revolutionary presentation, with his own translations and commentary, of all the essentials of the documentary record of early Christianity, a Christianity that encompassed much more than what came to form the canonical collection, and much more than what came to be adopted as properly “orthodox.” The richness and variety of the faith and salvation movement which evolved into the Western world’s dominant religion has only within the last several decades begun to emerge into the public eye, thanks to more open and critical New Testament scholarship. On the cutting edge of that scholarship today, if not at its very forefront, stands Robert Price, and as a bonus in all of his writings we get a generous helping of jargon-free clarity, humor, and illuminating ties to modern popular culture. Any serious student of the blinders-off realities of Christian origins should have his books in their collection, and especially this latest masterwork.

     The first innovation that strikes one in this 1200-page volume is the arrangement of the documents. All 27 books of the New Testament are included, along with 27 others as a neat counterbalance, but they are not arranged in the normal way. Rather, they are grouped by principles of provenance, orthodox alongside unorthodox. This provides us with a picture of the diversities of expression within limited areas or time-frames, tableaus of related thought and their development. Thus the second grouping, the “Matthean Cycle,” presents the Gospel of Mark followed by the Gospel of Matthew (the most immediate reworking of Mark), then the lost Gospel According to the Hebrews, which was basically a shorter version of Matthew but with elements that were considered heretical by the emerging orthodox Roman Church. Taking cues from ancient commentaries which quoted fragments of this Gospel, along with indications in the general body of other partially surviving Jewish-Christian Gospels such as that of the Ebionites and the Nazoreans (which were also variant editions of Matthew, though from an earlier stage of Matthew than we have it), Price breaks new ground by offering the first reconstruction of the Gospel According to the Hebrews. All those fragments we are used to seeing in collections devoted to lost works can now be read in a context that is probably quite close to the mark. 

     Further in this “Matthean cycle” we are given the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, which is a later—and thoroughly fanciful—work, taking the Matthean Nativity story as its jumping off point and spinning all manner of tales of Jesus’ boyhood (and what a nasty boy he could be!) in Egypt and Nazareth. This type of apocryphal invention in stories of both Jesus and many apostolic figures, filling in gaps and enlarging on biographical and narrative elements in earlier writings, became an industry in Christian literature from the mid 2^nd century on, designed not only to serve political and theological interests, but for sheer entertainment value. Price offers several documents of this nature, including the Gospel of Mary Magdalene and the Acts of Paul and Thecla.

     Quite imaginatively, the final offering in the “Matthean cycle” is the Jewish satirical effort known as the Toledoth Yeshu, or “The Generations of Jesus.” While its roots are obscure, by early medieval times it had become an underground anti-Gospel (in variant versions) circulating among Jews, a ‘nasty parody’ adulteration of the Christian version of Jesus’ career from birth to death. The former it bastardized and the latter it confirmed, having Jesus’ corpse dragged by a horse through the streets of Jerusalem —with no resurrection! 

     Similarly, the grouping “To Theophilus” includes the Gospel of Luke, the Acts of the Apostles, and the three Pastoral Epistles. Here we are on controversial but exciting ground, for Price subscribes to the view I too have espoused, and we have both derived its inspiration from the same seminal book: John Knox’s Marcion and the New Testament (1942). Marcion, the great Gnostic ‘heretic’ expelled from the Church of Rome around 144 who went on to form a rival religion, was known to have used a version of the Gospel of Luke for his own canon (which preceded the Catholic one). But was it our canonical version, which he drastically edited, or was it an earlier version of Luke, an “Ur-Luke” which was subsequently expanded by orthodox circles? Marcion’s Gospel is not extant, but can be largely recovered thanks to Christian apologetic writers (chiefly Tertullian) who argued in some detail against it. Based on earlier efforts, Price has reconstructed Marcion’s Gospel, one of the most interesting highlights of the book for what it contained and what it did not contain. But the important point here is that Price, like Knox and a few others similarly convinced by him, such as J. T. Townsend, sees Marcion as using an Ur-Luke with a few excisions which were unpalatable to Marcionite doctrine. Shortly therefore, in direct response to Marcion, revisions and additions by a “Lukan Ecclesiastical Redactor” who did his work sometime in the 140s and 150s created the now-canonical Luke, recasting the Gospel with a more pronounced “catholicizing” tone and content. 

     This view, quite naturally, has been generally resisted by mainstream scholarship, for it opens up a dangerous can of worms. It would mean that our Gospels, in their canonical form, enjoy no guarantee of being pristine, or anywhere near the original versions. It would mean that they passed through previous formative stages wherein significant changes could well have been made which were agenda-driven. To some extent, of course, we already know this, since Matthew and Luke are basically agenda-driven revisions of Mark; and mainstream scholarship has for a while acknowledged that John as we have it has passed through more than one stage of redaction. But a major revamping and expansion of one of our supposedly reliable Gospels as late as the mid-2^nd century is a particularly threatening scenario. And especially in this case, since a concomitant conclusion is that the same Ecclesiastical Redactor in the mid-2^nd century also wrote the Acts of the Apostles, this being another compelling aspect to the case presented by John Knox. This would be disastrous to the orthodox view of the history of early Christianity, for it would essentially reveal what many have already suspected: that Acts is a late, agenda-driven fiction, designed to further the interests of the 2^nd century Roman Church, again in response to Marcion and his co-opting of Paul, as well as to the factional rivalry within developing orthodox Christianity, between traditions which were rooted—at least in legend, if not in fact—in Petrine circles vs. Pauline circles.

     Over the years there has been a seesaw debate in critical scholarship as to whether Luke and Acts were really written by the same author. Between the two, says Price, there are some “striking differences in vocabulary” [p.496], suggesting different writers. Yet what they have in common is just as important: thematic consistency, a common agenda to get certain ideas and positions across. This suggests a single mind and purpose behind the two documents—those ideas and that purpose relating to 2^nd century issues. As Price suggests, the two observations can be reconciled by assigning the unique vocabulary to the original author of the Ur-Luke (which, by the way, was the stage at which Q was added), while a single writer was responsible for revamping the Gospel for mid-2^nd century Roman interests and at the same time creating the Acts of the Apostles to further those same interests. This writer-editor created a story arc embodying a soteriological process that spanned both documents. These common threads are highlighted throughout Price’s commentary and footnotes attached to his translations of Luke and Acts.

     The commonest justification (it goes back to Harnack) for dating the Acts of the Apostles to the 60s of the 1^st century is that the author ends the work with Paul’s arrival in Rome and says nothing about his death. Price offers several indicators within the text which suggest that the author did know of the death of Paul, such as the presence of large-scale parallels between the Passion of Jesus and that of Paul, necessitating a knowledge of Paul’s ultimate fate [p.483]. As well, the whole treatment of Paul throughout Acts speaks to a time when Paul was long gone and it was traditions about Paul and others in the early Christian movement and what was subsequently made of them that needed addressing and ‘spinning’. Prominent here is the obvious paramount concern of Acts to reconcile the two factions represented by Peter and Paul, to create a unity in the early movement which the epistolary record itself does not bear out. Acts subordinates a submissive Paul to the Jewish apostles. Peter and Paul are made two sides to a single harmonized coin. They perform similar miracles. The content of their speeches (all crafted by the author of Acts) are the same. Paul has been Petrinized and Peter Paulinized. These are not presentations which could have engaged a Christian writer—much less an actual companion of Paul—as early as Paul’s lifetime. Nor would such a companion or early writer have been likely to produce so many contradictions and irreconcilabilities between what Acts tells us about Paul and what Paul’s reputed epistles tell us about Paul. After all, as I pointed out in Challenging the Verdict [p.19], within Paul’s lifetime there would hardly have developed widespread traditions about his preaching and movements that would have been available to a writer to fashion the Acts story. He would have had to go to Paul himself for much of his information, in which case we would hardly see the significant anomalies that exist between Acts and the epistles. 

     Price offers several other reasons to reject Acts as the product of the 1^st century, including its treatment of apostolic tradition (something never appealed to in 1^st century writings), the use of the term “bishops” to refer to elders of the community, the treatment of Jews as beyond redemption, 2^nd century apologetic language, late Christology, and the presence of numerous anachronisms betraying 2^nd century features and concerns; all discrediting any early dating of this document. In one waggish heading, Price calls it “The Acts of the Apologists.”

     Both Luke and Acts “de-eschatologize” Mark, who pointed to signs of an imminent End. For the writer-redactor of Luke-Acts, too much time has now elapsed and even Jesus’ language has to be altered to dilute any expectations of immediacy for the Second Coming. It goes without saying that the Prologue to the canonical Luke—the address to “Theophilus” and the reference to “many accounts” that preceded the writer’s own—is the product of the 2^nd century Redactor, tied into the opening line of Acts. But it should be noted that even here, whether at an early or later date, no identification of a purported author is included for either the Gospel or Acts. It was only a generation after the Redactor did his work that we encounter any reference to “Luke, the companion of Paul” as the one who wrote these accounts: in Irenaeus around 180.

     The Gospel of John is widely regarded in critical scholarship as a layered work, and it is easy to understand why an orthodox Church of the latter 2^nd century would have considered it badly in need of revamping. Among its diverse trends of thought is a survival of what was probably its originally exclusive orientation: namely, Gnosticism. This is not of a specifically Marcionite brand, but encompasses the type we see in many of the recovered Nag Hammadi documents: the concept of a Revealer Son or divine force, sent by God, that bestows the envisioned gnosis/knowledge on the community. The Johannine Jesus is a transparent rendition of this spiritual entity, historicized and placed in a ministry on earth. That picture is modeled on some Synoptic source or sources—indeed, it was clearly inspired by them. But the resulting product is a hollow shell. Jesus in John preaches nothing but himself, and in the most pretentious terms. There is no human personality to the Johannine Jesus, unless it be one of monomania. He teaches no ethics (“love another” is an in-house directive to the sect), and no doctrine about a sacrificial atoning dimension to his death. Note that the marquee verse of John, 3:16, does not even speak in terms of the Son’s “death” but only that God “gave” his Son to be believed in, the mark of a Revealer Christ; this belief itself confers salvation. As a symbol of the community’s original theology about its spiritual Revealer Son, and how he enables salvation, all of this is understandable.

     That dependency on the Synoptics is something Price has argued in previous books, quite effectively, but here he adds further observations which discredit any denial of that fact, and any hesitancy on the part of mainstream scholarship to arrive at that conclusion. One of these is the clear repudiation by the Johannine author of features of the Synoptic narratives and their portrayal of Jesus. It cannot be a question of John drawing on different traditions, or happening by chance to parallel Synoptic features according to his own lights. Rather, in so many ways, he is reacting to the Synoptics and making his own preferred changes to them. Why did John leave out the establishment of the Eucharist by Jesus in the Last Supper scene? Because it spelled a sacrificial meaning to Jesus’ death, which was not in John’s books. Why did he discard the Gethsemane scene entirely? Not because no tradition about it had reached him, or he didn’t have space in his scroll. He simply didn’t like the implications of the Markan scene for his own portrait of Jesus and would have none of it. That is clear from the direct repudiation he places in Jesus’ mouth. Acknowledging that the hour has come for his glorification on the cross, Jesus says ( 12:27): “Should I say, Father save me from this hour? [No,] for it was for this purpose that I came to this hour!” And again in 18:11: “The cup the Father has given me: shall I not drink it?” It’s all a slap in the Synoptic face for their poor grace in portraying Jesus as having doubts and asking God, even if only momentarily, to remove the cup of suffering he is facing. John similarly repudiates the meek silence (determined by scripture) attributed to Jesus in the Synoptics when abused by the Sanhedrin. Instead, he has Jesus make defiant retorts, fearless in the face of pain and imminent ordeal. Nor does he require, through weakness, the aid of Simon of Cyrene on his way to Calvary. John makes sure to tell the reader ( 19:17) that Jesus “carried the cross by himself.” 

     One of the striking observations long made about the Gospel of John is its narrative discontinuity, “which has led many to suggest that early on, the text suffered reshuffling and clumsy restoration” [p.666]. Bultmann suggested that the pages were accidentally juggled. Price, drawing on an earlier approach, presents the text of John in a ‘restored original order’ which creates a better narrative coherence (though it does not rescue Jesus from his artificiality). This kind of innovation is characteristic of the book, bringing a fresh perspective on texts which have long fallen into mundane familiarity.

     But the most innovative and intriguing grouping in The Pre-Nicene New Testament is what Price has done with the Pauline corpus of epistles. I’ll back up a moment and look at the book’s Introduction. This is a discussion of the formation of the Christian canon of 27 documents—labeled as divinely inspired and containing the principles of proper doctrine. That doctrine, of course, eventually corresponded to the developing “orthodoxy” of the Roman Church through the course of the 2^nd century. But the idea of an official canon seems to have arisen in response to someone who had the idea first, namely the Gnostic Marcion whom the Roman Church had excommunicated for unacceptable ideas. The main ones were that the God of the Hebrew bible, the traditional Yahweh of the Jews, was not the highest God. In fact, he was an ‘evil’ demigod—a Demiurge—who had indeed been the Creator of the material world and the physical aspect of human beings, enslaving them in the process. But above him there was an ultimate God who was now revealing himself and offering to adopt those of humanity who were privileged to receive knowledge (gnosis) of their true divine nature and the salvation he was making available. Jesus (a docetic Jesus) had come—literally descended as an adult, he had no birth—to earth to reveal this God and this salvation. Unfortunately, his Jewish disciples had failed to understand his true mission and distorted his message. Christ had been forced to enlist the services of Paul to correct things and get it right. Thus Paul was co-opted as the apostle to the Marcionites, and to that end Marcion formed a canon of one Gospel (the Ur-Luke) and the ten known epistles attributed to Paul—the present corpus minus the three Pastorals. This “canon” he called the Apostolicon. 

     That Paul was enlisted on the side of the Gnostic movement early in the 2^nd century, thus acquiring a ‘heretical’ taint in developing orthodox circles, is not disputed in critical scholarship; nor the need for that Church, as the century progressed, to rehabilitate him and claim him for the side of orthodoxy. But here is where it gets interesting—and controversial. Were any of those Pauline epistles, especially those now-regarded “authentic” seven, original to Paul or at least to some kind of Pauline ‘school’ soon after his passing? There has long been a radical train of thought in minority New Testament scholarship which maintains that none of them are authentic, that Paul was a legendary obscure figure (assuming he existed at all) of the 1^st century to which certain circles in the 2^nd century attached pseudonymous writings. And the most popular candidate for the one who actually wrote the ‘original’ versions of the Pauline epistles is Marcion himself. Not in every detail as we have them now: some of that is the product of the orthodox ecclesiastical circles of the mid to late 2^nd century who took Marcion’s product and reworked it in the direction of their own interests. 

     Now, there is no denying that the Paulines as we have them are something of an unholy mess: inconsistencies and contradictions, apparent anachronisms catering to later interests, seams and awkward juxtapositions and non-sequiturs which betray additions and editing, a patchwork combining of smaller units from originally separate writings, and so on. 2 Corinthians has long been surmised to present such a mélange, and more of the same sort of thing is postulated for other epistles, such as 1 Corinthians and Romans. It is possible to see this process as a post-Pauline development in his own communities, building on originals crafted by the Apostle himself, an ongoing process of adapting these writings to evolving needs and beliefs, well into the 2^nd century. We see this very process in the evolution of successive Gospels and in other parts of the documentary record, both inside and outside the canon, so it is not outlandish to assume it here. Identifying these layers and assigning passages to this or that stratum of authenticity or revision is a complex and tricky business, and will probably never be fully settled. 

     But it is also possible to interpret those variegated elements in the Paulines in terms of an original Marcionite layer and a later activity of revision on the part of the ecclesiastical wing in the interests of reclaiming Paul. Such subsequent editing would have been imperfect, tinkering with the texts rather than overhauling them from scratch, and thus telltale signs of their Marcionite provenance were left in evidence, pointing to this scenario. (Such ecclesiastical editors may not have been aware that they were original to Marcion.) A certain amount of further editing within the Church would also have taken place before the texts were solidified. All of this lies back beyond our visible horizon, as we have no extant texts of the epistles (or the Gospels, for that matter, outside of a tiny fragment of John) until after the year 200. 

     Price is a subscriber to the Marcionite scenario, and that is why he has included the epistles of the Pauline corpus (except for the Pastorals) in a grouping with Marcion’s Gospel of Luke entitled “Marcion’s Apostolicon.” Yet his commentary on them is not all one-sided. While his sympathies are clear, he adopts a somewhat ‘equal-time’ approach, since elements of these epistles can lend themselves to interpretation on one or the other side of the authenticity fence. The value of Price’s grouping, however, and his focus on interpreting many passages as betraying Marcionite ideas and interests, is that we are given a fresh look at this radical interpretation of the epistles. Throughout his introductory commentaries and copious footnotes, Price presents these Marcionite indicators, and while I personally still feel that such evidence is sufficiently ambiguous and inconsistent to preclude ready commitment in that direction, this approach is a significant presentation of the case and is consequently of great interest. He certainly has convinced me, to an extent I had not enjoyed before, of the woeful lack of unity in ‘genuine’ epistles like 1 Corinthians, Romans and 1 Thessalonians. Most of the others are also good candidates for being compilations of separate epistles or epistle units. A representative paragraph in Price’s introduction to 1 Corinthians is worth quoting in full: 

     The letter, in any case, is a patchwork containing all manner of fragments representing different sides of the same arguments, no doubt because the text passed through the hands of scribes belonging to various factions (as with the evolution of the Gospel of John). Numerous hands “corrected” what had gone before. New topics were added here and there. As Darrell J. Doughty has pointed out, commentaries assuming it to be a unitary production from Paul’s own hand are taken up with elaborate, epicycles-within-epicycles, harmonizations of various passages with one another, synthesizing elements from different writers, “splitting the difference,” and otherwise sophistical results intended by none of the writers. It seems better to treat 1 Corinthians as we have learned to treat the synoptic gospels since the advent of form criticism: as layered deposits, distinguishing different strata of sedimentation by various writers. This way, we may have a chance to understand the text(s) for the first time, dropping the theologically biased, arbitrary demand that all the texts agree internally. [p.331] 

     Price’s footnotes to both epistles and Gospels are replete with insights into such incongruities and doctorings. The naivete once bestowed on these “divinely inspired” documents must finally and forever be abandoned.

     In an earlier book, The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man, Robert Price gave us a thorough picture of the Gospels as based on midrash—from start to finish. (“Midrash” being the reworking of earlier passages and themes in the Hebrew scriptures to create new renditions for instructional purposes.) That is, virtually all features of the Jesus story, from birth, through ministry and miracle-working, through his Passion and death, were modeled on or constructed out of Old Testament passages, with elements from popular literature and Greek mythology woven into the mix. What was not part of that mix was anything that could be separately identified as based on actual memories and traditions of Jesus’ own activities and experiences. 

     If I may offer an analogy, it is as if someone set about to write a biography of John F. Kennedy and fashioned a story which was put together out of elements of the life of Theodore Roosevelt, each incident of Kennedy’s alleged life being reworkings of the events of Roosevelt’s life. If Kennedy were portrayed as taking part in World War II, leading a charge up some hill on Guadalcanal in exactly the same terms and details as biographical reports of Roosevelt’s charge up the hill of San Juan in Cuba in the Spanish-American War of 1898, so that we could tell the Kennedy incident had been fashioned directly from reports relating to Roosevelt, we then could not say without independent corroboration that Kennedy had ever undergone such an experience. (In actual fact, he did not.) If every single incident in Kennedy’s alleged biography were similarly identified as fashioned out of Roosevelt’s career—and those of other older Presidents—could we even say that this was a biography in any sense of the word, that it had any factual relationship to Kennedy’s life experiences? And if we had no contemporary corroborative reports on the very fact of an individual named John F. Kennedy who was President of the United States , could we be sure from this ‘biography’ that such a man and President had existed at all? 

     We happen to know that John F. Kennedy was in World War II, and we know of some of his exploits, particularly the incident when he was the commanding Lieutenant of PT Boat 109. In that dramatic sinking of his ship in August of 1943 in the Solomon Islands , he distinguished himself with exceptional bravery and leadership, something well worth recording on its own terms. It would be a matter of great puzzlement to us if a biography of Kennedy did not include this incident, or if it was ‘described’ in terms that were identical or near-identical to some past naval exploit performed by some other figure, so that we could not distinguish any specific connection of it to John F. Kennedy. And we would be exceedingly puzzled if virtually every event in the biography of Kennedy could similarly not be distinguished as having any historical connection with him. ‘Explanations’ that so much respect for previous Presidents was in vogue that everything to do with Kennedy had to be presented in terms of those previous Presidents would hardly satisfy us, or make sense of the total absence of anything specific to Kennedy himself. 

     Yet this is exactly the situation we face in regard to the Jesus of the Gospels, for his “biography” is entirely made up of midrashic creations derived from the Hebrew bible (the “teachings,” especially in John, are a separate issue), with nothing that can be identified—beyond the known historical characters and settings which provide the story’s background—as factual, as “history remembered.” Such a situation would defy all logic and human instinct if such a writing were purported to be the biography of a real historical character who had made such an impact on his followers that he was turned into a part of the Godhead. On the other hand, it would make much better sense if this character and story were simply symbolic, someone who had not lived an actual life that would have contributed its own details and traditions to the formation of a story about him. The ‘explanation’ that nothing of an historical nature was known about this nevertheless historical figure, thus requiring an invention based on scripture, does not help, let alone make sense in itself, since we would have to question how such a figure about whom nothing was preserved could possibly have had the effect he allegedly had, and could possibly have been preached and embraced—especially as God—by countless others. 

     While it has been a quarter century or so since the pervasive midrashic content of the Passion portion of the Gospels was recognized—the scriptural derivation of everything from the entry of Jesus into Jerusalem on ‘Palm Sunday’ to the Cleansing of the Temple to minute features of the trial and crucifixion scenes—the realization was slower in coming that virtually everything in the pre-Passion part of Mark’s Gospel was likewise pulled from scripture and other ancient literature and myth. Robert Price in other books has been instrumental in making that clear. In this book, the footnotes to almost every page of the four Gospels and even Acts hang heavy with the fruit of those literary sources: such as Jesus’ calling of the disciples being a reworking of Elijah’s recruiting of Elisha in 1 Kings; the Transfiguration scene a recasting of the Exodus scene (24:12-16) of Moses and Joshua ascending the mountain and hearing the voice of God out of the clouds, with other features drawn from other passages; every miracle attributed to Jesus modeled on some miracle story of the Hebrew prophets, chiefly Elijah and Elisha. Sometimes even quite minor details are an identifiable echo of some scriptural precedent. Mary, in Luke’s fabrication of the angel’s Annunciation to her, objects to Gabriel’s announcement of her conception of a son by arguing that she has had no relations with a husband; Price points out [p.501, n.r] that this is a reflection of similar protest elements in the “commissioning stories” of Moses (Exodus 3:10-12) and Jeremiah (1:4-8). 

     Nothing here represents history, remembered scenes of Jesus’ own activities. If there were any such memories, there would have been no need to cast everything in terms of scriptural precedent; indeed, the force of such memories would have overridden any other consideration. Even if there were a desire to relate Jesus to certain hallowed Jewish mythology, it would have been impossible to exclude all elements of actual history at the same time, to never give us something that was not rooted in scripture. It is only in the absence of any historical traditions about Jesus to draw on (a situation which would make no sense in the context of an historical figure) that such exclusive use of scripture to create the Gospel story could feasibly come about. 

     Much the same situation exists in the Acts of the Apostles, almost none of which can be confidently regarded as history. One of its key scenes, the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the apostles at Pentecost (which Paul never mentions in his epistles), is derived in its entirety “from the descent of the Mosaic spirit upon the 70 elders in Numbers 11:16-17, 24-25” [p.566, n.m]. The scene of the stoning of Stephen (who appears nowhere else in the early Christian record and is undoubtedly a fictional character) is modeled on traditions about the stoning of James, accounts of which we find in Josephus and Eusebius. Peter’s arrest and escape from prison (Acts 12) and his return to his fellow apostles, who greet him with amazement at his escape, is a conscious literary parallel to the story of Jesus’ death and resurrection and his appearance to the disciples, part of a “tendency to make the apostles into another Christ” [p.594, n.s]—and also one of several cases of midrash on midrash!

     Related to the phenomenon of midrashic construction of the Jesus story is the nature of the redaction performed on Mark by the later evangelists. Often Matthew and Luke supplemented Mark by further midrashic invention of their own, but they also changed him in accordance with their own needs and agendas. This, too, is a factor which rules out history or any concerns for historical accuracy. If one evangelist consistently and without compunction changes another according to his own community’s particular beliefs and outlooks, then we know that it is all a literary exercise, the crafting of an ever-evolving symbolic creation with no connection to reality. If there is no sign of oral or written traditions rooted in history imposing themselves on this reworking of a previous source, no independent echo of events that have reached the evangelist’s ears by way of outside channels, then we are viewing literary fabrication. Any postulation otherwise is unsupported by the evidence, particularly when the non-Gospel record contains virtually none of the Gospel content. 

     In discussing the dating of Matthew, Price asks why the Gospel was written: 

     We have to picture Matthew or his predecessors using Mark for quite some time until, instead of merely copying it, they decided to make a new edition, probably to solve some of the problems posed by the original. We might be talking about twenty, forty, fifty years.
     In an inverse way, Matthew’s reliance on Mark explains some of the differences in the two gospels, especially the additional details in Matthew’s narrative. Many of the new portions seem to be answers to questions the teacher’s catechumens might have raised in their reading of Mark: Why would Judas betray Jesus? If for money, then how much? Why would Pilate have lifted a finger to rescue Jesus? What happened to Judas? And so on. For some of these answers, Matthew no doubt used his own narrative ingenuity; for others, he resorted to pesher clues and filled in the blanks with the Old Testament. [p.115]

     I might note here that one of the conundrums about Matthew is his post-crucifixion scene regarding the guards placed at the tomb. The Jewish leaders request that Pilate assign a guard of soldiers at the tomb site to prevent the disciples from stealing the body and declaring Jesus resurrected. The resurrection takes place to the astonishment of the guards, who are then bribed by the Jewish elders to say that the disciples had come and stolen the body while they were asleep. Critical scholarship tends to reject this whole scenario as invention by Matthew, not the least because it is witnessed to by no other evangelist. Yet they often seek to retain its final line, verse 28:15b: “And this story was widely spread among the Jews to this day.” Supposedly, the Jews had, by Matthew’s time, been circulating an accusation that the disciples had stolen the body, as an explanation for the reputed resurrection, but Matthew invented this scene of the guards as a way of discrediting it: presenting them as having been bribed to say so. But there are problems here. Not only does no other Christian source mention this type of Matthean apologetic, but there is no Jewish record of such an accusation that the disciples had stolen the body, not even in the Talmud. (The later Toledoth Yeshu does not present things this way, and only has the body transferred elsewhere temporarily, to be recovered and desecrated.) Thus we are entitled to regard the final line of Matthew’s scene as part of the invented scenario itself, even if on the surface it constitutes something of an appended authorial comment. (We do not necessarily have to accuse Matthew of deliberate lying, since his Gospel in total is not concerned with historical accuracy, being an allegorical creation.) It is sometimes objected that if there was no such Jewish ‘spin’ circulating about the disappearance of Jesus’ body, why would Matthew bother to insert this scene? But this brings us back to Price’s observations about the reason for Matthew’s gospel, as quoted above. Matthew is not countering an actual Jewish accusation in the outside world, he is ‘answering a question’ that could be raised in regard to the internal literary world of the story he and Mark have fashioned. Just as an audience member listening to a reading of Mark may have asked “Why would Judas betray Jesus?” it could also have occurred to someone to question whether a ‘hole’ in the resurrection plotline could have led to the claim that the disciples stole the body. Or it may have been a potential flaw in his expanded story that Matthew simply thought of himself; in either case, he moved to correct it, just as he had answered other questions that may have been raised in regard to Mark. (In rare fashion, ironically, this scene as a whole does not seem to be based on a scriptural precedent, though a couple of minor details echo Daniel.) 

     Price calls Matthew a work “composed as a church manual and catechism handbook. At the close of the book, the parting words of the risen Christ constitute a mission charge to the first readers, with the eleven pictured in the scene standing in for all” [p.116]. Having placed the Gospel’s origin in Antioch , he notes: “As it happens, we learn from Acts that Antioch was a hub for the gentile mission.” If we regard the Gospel Jesus, through successive evangelists’ revisions, as a convenient literary symbol to embody the activities and “catechism” of the community, we can understand why a writer like Matthew felt free to alter anything he found in Mark, and to create new material at will to serve that purpose. Mark required ‘correction’ in many places; gaps needed filling, explanations had to be provided. It wouldn’t do to suggest, as Mark did, that Jesus needed to be baptized by John, since this implied he needed forgiveness for sins committed. So Matthew inserts John’s objection that he, the Baptist, ought rather to be baptized by Jesus; still, Jesus insists, for the sake of appearances. Matthew softens Mark’s unalleviated denigration of the disciples, as something too extreme. He eliminates Jesus’ family thinking that he is insane, because this wouldn’t fit with his Nativity story which has portrayed Jesus’ parents as being in on God’s intentions and their son’s role. One of Matthew’s personal concerns is the intact preservation of the entire Jewish Law (5:18), and so Mark must be ‘corrected’ in his inference (7:19c, “Thus he declared all foods clean”) that the kosher dietary laws were now abolished; this was not in keeping with Matthew’s agenda and so he eliminated that clause in taking the passage over from Mark. A host of changes of this nature can be found throughout the later Gospels, agenda-driven alterations big and small that rule out any concern on the writers’ parts for creating accurate history or biography. Whether any of the evangelists may have believed that they were at least representing a figure they thought had existed may be a matter of debate, but that they were not telling the story of his actual life and teachings is virtually irrefutable.

     Aside from the familiar documents presented in the book, many are the unfamiliar. The Mandaean Book of John the Baptist seems to reach back beyond what Christians made of John and give us a glimpse into the sect of the Baptist which regarded him as the Messiah; the document is colored by the later Gnosticism of the Mandaeans and it excoriates Jesus through John’s mouth, representing, as Price puts it, “the ancient antipathy of the sect, resentful of the greater success of Christianity” [p.4]. The fascinating Gospel of Peter, or what remains of it from midway through the Passion, contains an actual depiction of the resurrection, the only one in all the Gospels, canonical or otherwise. The infamous exchange of letters between Jesus and King Abgarus of Edessa is presented in Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical History, something which he may actually have written himself; unfortunately, the effort is particularly uninspired, whoever wrote it. There is a set of hymns from the Dead Sea Scrolls, with some interesting speculation as to who the author may have been. Price has taken the translation of Wilfred Watson and, as he says, “tried to convey a sense of the poetry of the original, rendering it in iambic tetrameter and pentameter” [p.888]. Almost a hundred pages are devoted to the Shepherd of Hermas, which Price sees, quite reasonably, as “a piece of Christianized Hermetica” [p.1002]. This long document is a rather turgid read, but Price’s translation breathes some life into it. The same could be said of all the English renderings in this book which Price has put his stamp on: straightforward, readable language with refreshing turns of phrase, the occasional touch of humor. If slight liberties are sometimes taken, they are never misleading, but often enrich our response to and understanding of the verses. The little ‘parable’ in the Dialogue between Jesus and John (Luke/Q 7:32), 

They are like children sitting in the marketplace and calling to one another,
“We piped for you and you did not dance; we sang a dirge and you did not weep.”

is rendered, 

They are like children sitting idle in the marketplace taunting one another, the boys saying, “We played the pipe for you and you refused to dance!” And the girls reply, “That’s a boys’ game! We mourned, and you would not weep with us because it’s a girls’ game.”

     The footnotes, too, are replete with typically Pricean vernacular. In commenting on the story of Stephen’s stoning in Acts 7:58-59, he traces the midrashic bases of the scene’s elements, concluding with, “Luke carries this over into a detail about the young Saul of Tarsus checking coats for those in the stoning mob” [p.581, n.b]. 

     One of my favorite inclusions in the book is the “Sayings of Jesus” as preserved by the Sufi mystics of medieval Islam, who venerated Jesus as a messianic prophet, a forerunner of Mohammed. Price suggests that Sufis derived these from “their Syriac monkish forbears” who themselves had access to sayings attributed to Jesus which had roots in Cynic philosophy; they have a tone much like the earliest stratum of Q. “In large measure they present a pre-Christian, pre-Christological vision of Jesus as a Cynic-like ascetic, just as Mack, Downing, and others make him. It may be, rather than that the Christology has been trimmed from these sayings, the proto-orthodox theology has not yet been added” [p.48]. Says Price, in an introduction which discusses the controversial question of the Cynic roots of Jesus’ Gospel teaching, “If the historical Jesus were a Cynic, this is the sort of thing he would have said.” 

     On the whole, these 100 sayings, when compared to the sayings of the Q1 stratum, or to the related content of the Gospel of Thomas (also included in this book), while some of them echo both, are cleverer, more insightful, and even more instructional. One need not always agree with them, but they are certainly entertaining. I am going to be a bit self-indulgent here and quote several of my favorites: 

14. Jesus met a man who merely sat. He asked him, “What are you doing?” “I am devoting myself to God,” the man replied. Jesus asked, “And who is seeing to your needs?” “My brother,” replied the man. Jesus said, “I should say your brother is more devoted to God than you are.”

21. Jesus was asked, “Who was your teacher?” He answered, “No one taught me. I saw that the ignorance of the fool was a shame and I avoided it.”

78. Jesus used to take with him nothing but a comb and a pitcher. One day, noticing a man comb his beard with his fingers, he tossed away the comb; another day, seeing a man dip out of the river with his hands, he discarded the pitcher.

84. Jesus was asked, “Why do you not buy a donkey to ride?” He answered, “I am too precious to God for him to let a donkey interrupt my contemplation of him.”

93. Jesus said, “Actions are of three sorts: those which are plainly right, which you must imitate; those which are plainly wrong, which you must shun; and those which are doubtful, which you must refer to those wiser than you.”

And this lengthy gem…

57. A man once accompanied Jesus, saying to him, “Let me go with you and be your disciple.” They set out and got as far as the bank of a river, and they sat down to eat. They had with them three bread rolls. They ate two and a third was left. Jesus then rose and went to the river to drink.
     When he returned, he did not see the third roll, so he asked the man: “Who took the roll?”
     “I do not know,” the man replied.
     Jesus and his companion got underway again and he saw a doe with two fawns. Jesus called one of the two and it approached him. Then Jesus slaughtered it, roasted some of it, and shared it with the other. Then he said to the deer, “Rise, if God grants.” The deer did get up and left. Jesus then turned to his companion and said, “I ask you in the name of him who showed you this miracle, who took the roll?”
     “I do not know,” the man replied.
     The two of them next arrived at a lake in a valley. Jesus took the man by the hand and together they walked upon the water. When they had crossed over, Jesus said to him, “I ask you in the name of him who showed you this miracle, who took the roll?”
     “I do not know,” the man replied.
     Then they came to a parched desert and sat down on the ground. Jesus picked up some dirt and sand, then said, “Turn to gold, if God grants!” And it did. Jesus separated the gold into three portions, saying, “A third for me, a third for you, and a third for whoever took the roll.”
     The man said, “It was I who took the roll.”
     Jesus said, “The gold is all yours.”
     Jesus then left him. Two men overtook him [the man] in the desert, saw the gold, and wanted to rob and kill him. He said to them, “Why not split it three ways? Then one of you may go into town to buy us some food to eat.” One of them was sent off and then said to himself, “Why should I divide the gold with those two? I need only poison the food and I shall have all the gold for myself.” He went off and bought what he required.
     Meanwhile, the two who stayed behind said to each other, “Why should we give him a third of the gold? Instead, let us kill him when he returns and divide the money between the two of us.” When he got back, they fell upon him, ate the food, and died. The gold remained in the desert with three corpses beside it. Jesus passed by, found them that way, and said to his companions, “Such is the world. Beware of it.”

     Over half of the Sufi sayings are prefaced by the simple phrase “Jesus said:” Several others have little lead-ins, both much like those of the Gospel of Thomas. Since it is clear that few, if any, of the Sufi catalogue would be seriously attributed to Jesus by New Testament scholars, and that such prefaces have simply been added to the sayings however they may have developed, there is little reason to scoff at the idea that the “Jesus said” and other lead-in additions to the Gospel of Thomas sayings are of a similar nature, an attribution after the fact. The same can be said for the free-standing sayings of Q.

     Finally, Price concludes The Pre-Nicene New Testament with a look behind the academic curtain, a “bibliographic essay” in which he surveys over a century of scholars and their work who have contributed to the theory and knowledge contained in this book. (It doubles as a Bibliography.) This 40-page essay gives us a thumbnail picture of the early development of Christian thought and tradition through the prism of modern scholarly study of the documentary record. In discussing Walter Bauer’s pivotal Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity (1934), Price gives us this perceptive overview: 

     ....Walter Bauer looked over the landscape of second-century Christianity, closely examining virtually every scrap of surviving evidence, and what he saw was a world in which numerous competing Christianities existed side by side, a world in which the very word Christian might refer not to Catholics but to Marcionites or Gnostics, depending on which form of the faith had taken root first. He showed how Basilidean Gnosticism and Marcionism were the first form of the faith in Edessa , while various forms of Gnosticism constituted the first-fruits of Christianity in Egypt . Asia Minor venerated the apostle Paul as the founder of Gnosticism and Encratism. Catholicism was spreading outward from Rome and would manage to squeeze most everyone out in a century or two. Bauer thus called the bluff of the hitherto prevalent model of church history once set forth by second-century church historian Hegesippus, namely that Jesus had taught pristine Christian doctrine to the twelve apostles, who then taught it to their successors, the bishops of the various mission churches throughout the Mediterranean. This pure version of the faith was thought to have been crystallized in the Apostles’ Creed and other summations of “apostolic tradition” supplied by late second-century Catholics like Irenaeus and Tertullian. To disturb the peace, according to the traditional view, Satan had begun to plant heretical doctrines like weeds amid the wheat, whispering blasphemies into the ears, first of Simon Magus, father of all heresies, and then to his successors, including Apelles, Cerdo, and Marcion. Apparently Satan had already made preliminary sorties even in the Pauline churches since Paul, too, had opponents to correct, but the apostle must have been able to put out the fires. Heresy made its big debut and settled in for the long haul only in the second century, according to the scheme of Hegesippus, repeated by Eusebius, Constantine’s court theologian, a couple of centuries later. All this turned out to be revisionist propaganda penned by the theological winners, the church of Constantine ’s choosing. Scriptures of the kinds of Christianity that lost out were banned and burnt. Luckily the monks of the St. Pachomius monastery in Egypt thought to bury their library instead of destroying it. It was of course the Nag Hammadi collection, unearthed in 1945. Walter Bauer did not yet have these texts available, but they would have strengthened his case many-fold. Those documents attest to whole extinct branches of the Christian evolutionary tree, Christians who believed Jesus was the reincarnation of Seth, the Second Coming of Melchizedek, the reappearance of Zoroaster… [p.1157-8]

     This is not a book that directly addresses the question of the non-existence of the Gospel Jesus of Nazareth, although a few remarks taking into account that possibility do sprinkle the text (and some space is devoted in the bibliographic essay to those who have championed that viewpoint). But as the just-quoted passage might suggest, the picture of the multifarious movement known as Christianity which modern critical scholarship has revealed can only help further this most startling conclusion of all. Price concludes his bibliographic essay with a survey of the modern scholarly search for the historical founder of Christianity, however human and flawed such a figure could turn out to be. He begins with this observation: 

     It seems safe to say the quest to excavate the historical Jesus from beneath the cathedral of Christology that tradition had erected around him was motivated by a desire to free Western culture from the abuses of the institutional church. The name “Jesus Christ” had come to function as a corporate logo. He was an artificial character, like a fictive pitchman created by a company to give a personal face to its advertisements. Jesus was what theology and ecclesiastical politics needed him to be. [p.1169-70]

     Indeed, we might well conclude that the earthly Jesus was exactly this right from his beginnings: the artificial creation of those who found they needed such a figure. As for cathedrals, are they built to house the lowly and the mundane? Or are they labors of worship for the already-divine? Paul’s cathedral to his Christ Jesus sparkles with stained glass; its spires reach the clouds of heaven. Mystical choirs singing his praises echo through the lofty nave. Would Paul have erected such a structure to honor and deify a man he had never met, whose earthly life and teachings he and his fellow writers about the Christ show no interest in, a man who by the light of modern scholarship seems to have said and done very little of what has traditionally been imputed to him? Cathedrals, after all, are costly, challenging affairs. But once built, something less exalted may take up residence within them, to serve the needs of the communities that crowd their doorsteps. I suspect that Paul, had he lived long enough to encounter the Gospels, would have felt that the property values had been compromised. 

     Though an appendix (one of the most readable and entertaining things Price has yet written), this bibliographic essay is an ideal compact introduction to the principles, techniques, and celebrity stars of modern New Testament scholarship, and to its long, frustrating, and ultimately fruitless quest to uncover the real historical Jesus. Paul, too, has fared little better as the alleged ‘second founder’ of Christianity, moving in his own twilight of obscurity behind a corpus of writings that only confuses in its kaleidoscope of clashing colors and the patent fictions of Acts. Still, for Price, the New Testament is “a bottomless abyss of fascination” [p.1185]. Indeed it is, and it has also been a bottomless abyss of fantasy, generating the endless folly that arises when fantasy is taken for truth. 

     The Pre-Nicene New Testament is a rich and splendid book, and I wish Robert Price many more sleepless nights.