Category: Biblical Studies

Continuing a series of responses to Dunn’s response to Price’s chapter on Jesus mythicism. (See Historical Jesus: Five Views for all related posts.)

It is quite “interesting” to regularly run across remarks in web-land about how “spot on” Dunn’s criticism of Price’s chapter is, and how so many “fully agree with everything Dunn says.”

I can only imagine most readers who say these sorts of things never read Price’s chapter and Dunn’s together. Or if they did, they are swayed by Dunn’s status as a scholar — and their own eagerness to find anything to rebut a Christ-Myth argument — to swallow everything he says and forget the many many instances where Price’s own words belie so much of what Dunn writes.

In this post I look at

1. an instance of Dunn saying that Price “ignores” evidence that he does not ignore at all but discusses explicitly
2. an instance of Dunn leading readers to think Price resorts to ad hoc claims of interpolation to sidestep contrary evidence, when in fact he does not
3. where Dunn argues that the Bible’s claims of supernatural appearances are evidence for the historical Jesus
4. and where Dunn even manages to argue that the absence of a detailed description for a supernatural appearance of Jesus strengthens the case for the historicity of Jesus against Jesus mythicism.

Continue reading “Dunn on Price (5)”

Continuing with a few more comments on Dunn’s response to Price in The Historical Jesus: Five Views . . .

Dunn attempts to rebut Price’s assertion that there is “no mention of a miracle-working Jesus in secular sources” (p. 62):

Now to make this claim, [Price] must dismiss the evidence that Josephus gives as well as the Jewish tradition, which marked Jesus as a sorcerer — evidence he does not discuss but that shows up in major second-century sources that debate Jesus. (p. 101)

The two sources footnoted are the Babylonian Talmud‘s Sandhedrin tractate folio 43 (3 separate links here) and Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho, 69.

I don’t know how Dunn defines “secular sources” but I thought secular refers to something nonreligious. I would not have thought of the Babylonian Talmud or Justin Martyr’s writings as “secular”. But leaving that aside, I fail to see how anyone could be impressed by Dunn’s reply to Price here. Continue reading “Dunn on Price (4)”

Scholars are very busy people so we can surely forgive them when they write reviews that indicate they haven’t taken the time to read attentively what they are reviewing.

One instance of this is James D. G. Dunn’s review of Robert Price’s chapter questioning the historicity of Jesus in The Historical Jesus: Five Views. Dunn faults Price for irritating him by “ignoring what everyone else in the business regards as primary data”.

Where I begin to become irritated by Price’s thesis, as with those of his predecessors, is his ignoring what everyone else in the business regards as primary data . . . . Why no mention of 1 Corinthians 15:3 — generally reckoned to be an account of the faith that Paul received when he was converted, that is, within two or three years of the putative events — “that Christ died. . . .” Why no reference to Paul’s preaching of Christ crucified (1 Cor 1:23), his preaching as openly portraying Christ as crucified (Gal 3:1)?

When I read or hear what others say about such and such, I have learned it generally pays to read such and such for myself before taking anyone else’s perceptions and accounts on board. Anyone reading Dunn’s criticism here would, on the civil assumption he is accurately indicating what Price failed to address, tend to think Price a bit of a dunce for ignoring such obvious data. Continue reading “Dunn on Price (2)”