I'm familiar with Price, who is not a historian (although he is an expert on H. P. Lovecraft). Carrier has a history degree, but is not a scholarly historian (afaik he has never held an academic post). I know nothing of David Fitzgerald.
Robert M. Price. He holds two PhDs; one in Systematic Theology and one in New Testament. He was pastor of the First Baptist Church in Montclair, New Jersey; a Professor of Religion at Mount Olive College; Professor of Theology and Scriptural Studies at the Jonnie Coleman Theological Seminary; and Professor of Biblical Criticism for the Centre for Inquiry Institute. I guess that qualifies him for the title ‘biblical scholar’.
Price believes that the Yeshua (ʿalayhi as-salām) of the Bible is an invented figure.
In Chapter 7 of his book ‘Deconstructing Jesus’ (the chapter is entitled ‘The Cruci-fiction?’) Price writes:
‘As Charles H. Talbert has shown, the canonical gospels, even in their present form, would not have been hard for an ancient reader to recognize as official (and fictive) hero biographies compiled by a philosophical movement to glorify their founder.
‘It seems to me that Mack, Koester, and Robinson would all shy away from such a conclusion, given the prominence of the Passion story in the canonical gospels. The notion of an atoning death does not seem to fit the picture of the philosophical aretalogy. But it is hardly clear, at least in Mark and Luke, that the idea of an atonement has much to do with it. It may be Helmut Koester's Lutheran background that tempts him to read a theology of the cross into Mark, when only two brief texts could even possibly be read that way (Mark 10:45 and 14:24), and Luke chops even these (compare his versions, Luke 22:27 and 22:18)!
‘As Mack notes (in company with John Dominic Crossan and others), the story of Jesus' arrest, humiliation, and crucifixion seems to be derived from a whole different cluster of ideas than that of an atonement theology. Rather, the story is probably intended as a typical story of the wise man who endures all the depredations of the wicked, to whose sin he is a living rebuke. Such a righteous one is always either saved in the nick of time or glorified after death. It is easy to see Jesus' crucifixion account in these terms. And this is the sort of thing we would expect to find in a community like the Q partisans, as Mack understands them. The Q community could easily have produced such a hero biography, such a novelistic aretalogy, issuing in the persecution and deliverance of their hero, the wise man/sophist Jesus, without actually knowing what had happened to the historical Jesus, a question the Q sayings, after all, leave wide open.’
Price goes on:
‘What if an earlier version of the Passion narrative pursued the logic of the tale of the wise sufferer to the letter – and had Jesus survive crucifixion, appearing still alive, not alive again? Even in the canonical gospels there are striking hints of a barely erased precanonical version that must have read precisely this way. Muslim interpreters of the gospels have seen some of these hints (my emphasis), but it is only with the advent of modern narrative criticism that the clues have become visible to any of the rest of us.
‘For instance, why does Mark 14:35-36 show Jesus asking his father to allow him to escape death on the cross in Gethsemane? This is an exceedingly odd, even an offensive, thing to write if the goal of this narrative is to have Jesus die after all. But I suspect the writer is planting a seed that will blossom rather differently later in the story. Likewise, for Mark 15:34 to have Jesus repeating Psalm 22, a prayer anticipating final deliverance even at the last moment (Ps. 22:22-24), creates all manner of problems unless this prayer, too, is to be answered by story's end. Did Jesus think his God had forsaken him? No, of course not. As Heb. 5:7 says, his loud cries and tears were heard, his prayer for deliverance from death answered.
‘The irony of the bystanders' taunt, "Let the Christ, the King of Israel, come down now from the cross, that we may see and believe" (Mark 15:32), lies in the fact that this is precisely what is about to happen, though they will not recognize it. And, otherwise, what is the point of the strange detail of Pilate marvelling that Jesus was dead after a mere six hours (Mark 15:44), when it ought to take days for the cross to kill? As Chekov said, if a writer says somebody drove a nail into the wall, he'd better make sure to hang something from it later in the story! And, obviously, the payoff would have been that Jesus had fallen into a coma*, which ironically, providentially, resulted in his being removed from the cross in time for him to survive.’
* My emphasis. However, the notion that Yeshua (ʿalayhi as-salām) fell into a coma is denied by default in the Qur’an, which states that he was not crucified at all.
Price continues:
‘And why does Matthew have Joseph of Arimathea bury Jesus in Joseph's own tomb (Matt. 27:57-60)? And why does Matthew add the note that Joseph was rich (27:57)? Why, simply to provide narrative motivation for tomb robbers to come and open the tomb, as in the ancient romances, and find Jesus alive! The fainting of Matthew's guards (27:4) probably reflects the terror of the superstitious tomb robbers, finding a living man but no treasure. And then, in Luke 24:36-43, when Jesus appears to his bereaved disciples who assume he is dead and cannot believe their eyes, what does he say to reassure them? Like Apollonius of Tyana says in a similar scene, after a miraculous escape from the treacherous designs of Domitian, he bids his friends to behold his living physical body, to convince themselves that he has not risen from the realm of the dead, he is no ghost, but rather, as his solid corporeality attests, he is still alive.
‘John knew that people understood the story of Jesus' passion, this way, which is why he adds two items unprecedented in any other gospel: the nailing of Jesus to the cross (often people were simply tied to the cross), not narrated but assumed in John 20:25, and the spear-thrust in John 19:34. He protests too much (John 19:35), in the style of the writers of apocrypha (cf. 2 Pet. 1:16-18), that he was there and saw the blood flow. In his version, Jesus shows not his solid hands and feet (as in Luke 24:39), but rather his wounded hands and side (John 20:20). John doesn't want anyone thinking Jesus survived the cross and went to preach among the Greeks (John 7:35).
‘But the original tellers of the aretalogical tale had no concern for an atoning death. And Q, remember, does not even say that Jesus died! In the conspicuous absence of any statement that he died, one can well imagine that the Q-sophists or the communities that revered them would make Jesus shrewdly avoid death. Once a belief in the martyr death of Jesus entered the picture from another quarter of the patchwork quilt of Jesus movements, the aretalogy was reedited to make Jesus good and dead.
‘The Passion predictions in Mark (8:31; 9:12, 31; 10:33-34) are obviously artificial "prolepses" (flash-forwards)" ruining the narrative tension of the original, pre-Markan version, which craftily dropped hints of what would happen to Jesus and kept the reader guessing. The result, in the gospels as we now read them, is a wooden "plot of predestination," whereby narrative suspense is exorcised and each successive episode is a redundant rehearsal of the one before, as all alike seek to drive home a single monotonous point to the reader viewed as a catechumen. "Did you get it last time? Just in case, here it is again: Jesus died in Jerusalem; everything was leading up to that, nothing else matters much." The so-called Narrative Critics, New Testament scholars like Jack Dean Kingsbury, Werner Kelber, and Mark Allan Powell, for all their self-professed expertise in narratology, fail to perceive that the narrative of the gospels works best only when one uncovers its original, theologically obscured outlines.
‘But it is no surprise, because in the hands of these churchmen-scholars, the “literary” study of the gospels has served from the first as a diversionary route of escape from engagement with the troubling questions of genuine historical criticism.’
As far a Price is concerned the Gospels are works of fiction, ‘…….hero biographies compiled by a philosophical movement to glorify their founder.’ There are, of course, others who claim that Yeshua never existed – or, if he did, had little or nothing to do with New Testament accounts. I have suggested that you study the works of Richard Carrier and David Fitzgerald. Add Thomas Paine; Paul-Louis Couchoud; and John W.Loftus. You will discover – quite quickly – that one does not have to be a Muslim in order to deny the crucifixion!
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