Robert McNair Price (born July 7, 1954) is an American New Testament scholar who argues in favor of the Christ myth theorythe claim that a historical Jesus did not exist. Price is the author of a number of books on biblical studies and the historicity of Jesus.
A former Baptist minister, Price was a fellow of the Jesus Project, a group of 150 individuals who studied the historicity of Jesus and the Gospels, the organizer of a Web community for those interested in the history of Christianity,Tokasz, Jay. Scholars to explore existence of Jesus , The Buffalo News, November 30, 2008, accessed February 22, 2009. and a member of the advisory board of the Secular Student Alliance.Advisory Board Secular Student Alliance, accessed April 15, 2010. He is a religious skeptic, especially of orthodox Christian beliefs, occasionally describing himself as a Christian atheist. Price eventually espoused the Christ myth theory, believing Jesus did not exist in Roman Galilee.
Price is also a writer, editor, and critic in the field of speculative fiction. He has written about the Cthulhu Mythos, a shared universe created by the writer H. P. Lovecraft.Journal of Higher Criticism, accessed April 9, 2010; Joshi, S. T. and Schultz, David E. An H.P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia. Hippocampus Press, p. 217. Price was appointed executor of Lin Carter's literary estate. In 2020, an inflammatory introduction he wrote to Lin Carter's Flashing Swords! 6 anthology caused multiple authors to withdraw their work in protest. He co-wrote a book on the rock band Rush with his wife, Carol Selby Price, Mystic Rhythms: The Philosophical Vision of Rush (1999).
Price is currently the editor of the Journal of Higher Criticism.
Background Price was born in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1954 and moved to New Jersey in 1964. He received a Master of Theological Studies in New Testament from Gordon–Conwell Theological Seminary in 1978. At Drew University, he was awarded one Ph.D. in Systematic Theology in 1981 and another in New Testament in 1991. Price was pastor of the First Baptist Church in Montclair, New Jersey. He has served as Professor of Religion at Mount Olive College. He additionally did some work at minor institutions, including professorships at nonaccredited schools Johnnie Colemon Theological Seminary and the Center for Inquiry Institute..
Christ myth theory
Price challenges biblical literalism and argues for a more skeptical and humanistic approach to Christianity. Price questioned the historicity of Jesus in a series of books, including Deconstructing Jesus (2000), The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man (2003), Jesus Is Dead (2007), and The Christ-Myth Theory and Its Problems (2012), as well as in Jesus at the Vanishing Point, a contribution to The Historical Jesus: Five Views (2009).
Methodology Price uses critical-historical methods, but also uses "history-of-religions parallel[s]," or the "Principle of Analogy," to show similarities between Gospel narratives and non-Christian Middle Eastern myths. Price criticizes some of the criteria of critical Bible research, such as the criterion of dissimilarity and the criterion of embarrassment. Price further notes that "consensus is no criterion" for the historicity of Jesus. In Jesus at the Vanishing Point, Price acknowledges that he stands against the majority view of scholars, but cautions against attempting to settle the issue by appeal to the majority.
Key arguments for the Christ myth theory In Jesus at the Vanishing Point (2010), Price gives three key points for the traditional Christ myth theory, which originated with Bruno Bauer and the Dutch Radical School: There is no mention of a miracle-working Jesus in secular sources; Price asserts that Eusebius fabricated the Testimonium Flavianum. The epistles, written earlier than the gospels, provide no evidence of a recent historical Jesus; all that can be taken from the epistles, Price argues, is that a Jesus Christ, son of God, lived in a heavenly realm, there died as a sacrifice for human sin, was raised by God, and enthroned in heaven. The Jesus narrative is paralleled in Middle Eastern myths about dying and rising gods; Price names Baal, Osiris, Attis, Adonis, and Dumuzi/Tammuz as examples, all of which, he writes, survived into the Hellenistic and Roman periods and thereby influenced Early Christianity. Price alleges that Christian apologists have tried to downplay these parallels.
In The Christ-Myth Theory and Its Problems (2011), Price maintains that the Christ myth theory is the most likely explanation for the origin of Christianity, giving another overview of arguments: "almost every story in the Gospels (and Acts) can be plausibly argued to be borrowed from the Greek Old Testament, Homer, or Euripides." "every detail of the narrated life of Jesus fits the outlines of the Mythic Hero archetype present in all cultures." "the epistles, regardless of their dates as earlier or later than the gospels, seem to enshrine a different vein of early Christian faith which lacked an earthly Jesus, a Christianity that understood "Jesus" as an honorific throne-name bestowed on a spiritual savior who had been ambushed and killed by the Archons who rule the universe before he rose triumphant over them [...] Christianity eventually rewrote Jesus into an historical incarnation who suffered at the hands of earthly institutions of religion and government."
Jesus-agnosticism Price argues that if critical methodology is applied with ruthless consistency, one is left in complete agnosticism regarding Jesus's historicity. Price is quoted saying, "There might have been a historical Jesus, but unless someone discovers his diary or his skeleton, we'll never know." He also similarly declared in a 1997 public debate:
Price notes that historians of classical antiquity approached mythical figures such as Heracles by rejecting supernatural tales while doggedly assuming that "a genuine historical figure" could be identified at the root of the legend. He describes this general approach as Euhemerism, and argues that most historical Jesus research today is also Euhemerist. Price argues that Jesus is like other ancient mythic figures, in that no mundane, secular information seems to have survived. Accordingly, Jesus also should be regarded as a mythic figure, but Price admits to some uncertainty in this regard. He writes at the conclusion of his 2000 book Deconstructing Jesus: "There may have been a real figure there, but there is simply no longer any way of being sure."
Mythological origins Price believes that Christianity is a historicized synthesis of mainly Egyptian, Jewish, and Greek mythologies,Price, Robert M. "Jesus at the Vanishing Point" in James K. Beilby & Paul Rhodes Eddy (eds.) The Historical Jesus: Five Views. InterVarsity, 2009, pp. 55ffPrice, Robert M. Book review of "Christ in Egypt: The Horus-Jesus Connection". 2009. Retrieved 2010-08-04. viewing Jesus of Nazareth as an invented figure conforming to the Rank-Raglan mythotype.
Price argues that the early Christians adopted the model for the figure of Jesus from the popular Mediterranean dying-rising saviour myths of the time, such as that of Dionysus. He argues that the comparisons were known at the time, as early church father Justin Martyr had admitted the similarities. Price suggests that Christianity simply adopted themes from the dying-rising god stories of the day and supplemented them with themes (escaping crosses, empty tombs, children being persecuted by tyrants, etc.) from contemporaneous popular stories in order to come up with the narratives about Christ.
Gospels as midrash Price asserts that there was an almost complete fleshing out of the details of the gospels by a midrashic rewriting of the Septuagint, Josephus, Homer, and Euripides' The Bacchae. According to Price, "virtually every story in the gospels and Acts can be shown to be very likely a Christian rewrite of material" from those sources and "virtually every case of New Testament narrative" can be traced back to a literary prototype, so that there is "virtually nothing left."
Influences of Greek Cynicism Price does not see in the Q document a reliable source for the historical Jesus, simply because Q shows everywhere a Cynic flavor, representing a school of thought rather than necessarily the teaching of a single person. Price acknowledges that outside the New Testament there are a small number of ancient sources (Tacitus, for example) who would testify that Jesus was a person who really lived. However, Price points out that, even assuming the authenticity of these references, they relate more to the claims of the Christians who lived at that time on Jesus, and do not prove that Jesus was a contemporary of the writers of antiquity.
Historicising the myth Citing accounts that have Jesus being crucified under Alexander Jannaeus (83 BCE) or in his 50s by Herod Agrippa I under the rule of Claudius Caesar (41–54 CE), Price argues that these "varying dates are the residue of various attempts to anchor an originally mythic or legendary Jesus in more or less recent history."Irenaeus (c. 180 CE). Demonstration (74) .
Price also propounds the belief that the town of Nazareth did not exist during the first half of the first century CE, and is a pseudo-historical invention. Price and Bart Ehrman disputed this issue in the dueling works Did Jesus Exist? and Price's Bart Ehrman and the Quest of Historical Jesus of Nazareth: An Evaluation of Ehrman's Did Jesus Exist?
H. P. Lovecraft scholarship
Price has been a figure in H. P. Lovecraft scholarship and fandom for many years. He is the editor of the journal Crypt of Cthulhu. (published by Necronomicon Press) and of a series of Cthulhu Mythos anthologies.Shannon Appelcline, A Brief History of Game #3: Chaosium: 1975–present on RPG.net In essays that introduce the anthologies and the individual stories, Price traces the origins of Lovecraft's entities, motifs, and literary style. The Cthulhu Cycle, for example, saw the origins of Cthulhu the octopoid entity in Alfred, Lord Tennyson's "The Kraken" (1830) and particular passages from Lord Dunsany, while The Dunwich Cycle points to the influence of Arthur Machen on Lovecraft's "The Dunwich Horror."
Price's religious background often informs his Mythos criticism, seeing gnostic themes in Lovecraft's fictional god Azathoth and interpreting "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" as a kind of initiation ritual.
Price was in charge of the majority of the early Cthulhu anthologies by Chaosium; his first book published by Chaosium was The Hastur Cycle (1993), a short story anthology about a single element of Lovecraftian stories, and following this was Mysteries of the Worm (1993), a collection Cthulhu Mythos fiction by Robert Bloch.
Journal of Higher Criticism The Journal of Higher Criticism is an academic journal covering issues "dealing with historical, literary, and history-of-religion issues from the perspective of higher criticism", initially published by the Institute for Higher Critical Studies. Price is the editor-in-chief. The periodical is held in the Library of Congress and other research libraries.
In the introductory article, the editor criticized modern biblical scholarship as "a toothless tiger or worse yet, covert apologetics wearing the Esau-mask of criticism" and advocated a return to the "golden era of bold hypotheses and daring reconstructions associated with the great names of F. C. Baur and Tübingen".
During the journal's first decade, it was sponsored by The Theological School at Drew University, where associate editor Darrell J. Doughty taught. The final issue before Doughty's retirement (volume 10, no. 2) appeared in Fall, 2003. It continued for two more issues independently of an institution with volumes 11 and 12, each with two issues before ending.