discordant

I'm currently about a quarter of the way through The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man. I have a few comments, and I'd like to know if others agree or not.

I bought this book because I've been impressed by articles Price has written, and on the strength of reviews. Generally, there's a lot of interesting material in the book, so I'm glad I bought it. But I do have two big quibbles with it.

(1) I find the paucity of footnotes irritating. A good example is Price's half-page discussion of solar mythology that begins with "As scholars have long noted", but doesn't name a single scholar or provide any citations. I really believe that a minority position needs to be defended rigorously. When it isn't, people are surely justified in writing it off as speculation.

(2) He addresses apologists far too often for my liking. Apologists are too easy -- they're low-hanging fruit. I'd rather he spent that time addressing the mainstream, which would at least give the impression that he knows what more reasonable people are saying (I'm sure that he does, but he leaves himself open to this criticism).

Does anybody feel similarly about Price's work? I've learned plenty from him, but reading this book feels like a guilty pleasure.

ApostateAbe

I don't think Robert Price would defend his ideas as any more than speculation, actually. His whole tack is to criticize the popular or the established ideas that are out there, not to offer up better alternative hypotheses, and he doesn't think that he needs any more than speculation to achieve that end. It may serve a rhetorical purpose for an audience made entirely of negative-oriented skeptics and critics of religion, but I think that a successful case is made by providing theories that are more probable, not just by picking apart the opposition. It is an approach that is somewhat unique to Robert Price. He doesn't seem to hide his postmodernist outlook (i.e. in the title of his other book, Deconstructing Jesus), which other historians and scholars would tend to find at least a little embarrassing.

I made a transcript sometime ago of an interview of Richard Carrier by the Infidel Guy, because I found it to be somewhat agreeable. Richard Carrier is asked by a caller about what he thinks of Robert M. Price.

Q: Hi, Reggie, my name is Lennie. Hey, um, I have a question for Richard. Myself along with other people that are probably listening are a fan of Dr. Bob Price, but also Richard Carrier. My question is that I wanted to know what Richard thinks of Bob's work--because I know he is critical of some of it--what he thinks is untenable about his Christ myth theory and specifically what he has as a problem with as far as the Dutch Radical school of non-Pauline authorship is.

Richard Carrier answers:

A: Yeah, um, well, I, you know, I have mixed views on all that. I mean, to begin with, uh, Bob Price doesn't defend just one theory. I mean he basically advances like half a dozen to a dozen alternative theories and says, well, any one of these can be true and therefore we can't maintain historicity. That's the general argument of his career so far. I mean, if you take for example, his Pre-Nicene New Testament, which is a book he came out, which has basically all of the books of the Bible if no one discriminated about what gets in, and then he has commentary and he has a lot of introductory notes on that, and he has his footnotes as well which basically interject his interpretation of what's going on. And you'll have a lot of different contrary theories. There's another one, Jesus is Dead, which is a collection of essays, where you see him taking a lot of different positions that together they're contradictory, they can't all be be true, which he fully well knows, his point is, these different things can be true, he has one theory for example that John the Baptist is actually Jesus and that the gospels are sort of a parable about the sort of fictional resurrection of John the Baptist. He shows how the evidence can support that theory. He does that a lot.

In a sense, the entire field does that for historicity. You have different particular historians, Bart Ehrman, for example, will line up against Justin Nugget or Dennis McDonald or Bruce Chilton. They all have different views of the historical Jesus. So, you know, if you look at the whole field as one sort of unified element, you get the exact same thing as you get from Bob Price, you get like a dozen different contradictory theories for the historicity of Jesus, any one of which could be true. And this is a problem, and it is a problem for the field; I also find it sort of a problem of Bob Price if his intent is to argue for any particular theory. I think his aim is to argue for agnosticism, ultimately, and in that sense that's fine. But to the extent that he argues that any one of these things can be possible, and therefore historicity is not, that, there's no logical rigor to that argument, and that's part of the point of my advancing sort of Bayesian theorem, we need to start looking at theories like this, these myth theories, as well as the theories of historicity, because there's a dozen of these theories of historicity, and they all contradict each other, and there are different ones, different scholars are you know putting their bets behind different horses. We need to figure out which ones of these are actually more supportable than others, and we really can't know, and we need sort of a rigorous way to work that out. Bob Price has never done that, and I don't know what his view is of the idea of doing it. I think he's very positive, hopeful that I can develop and actually educate people on a method to do this. I think that idea is missing from his work, but its also missing from the entire field of New Testament studies, so it's not necessarily...

Q: What do you mean, basically, a conclusion?

A: Just a means to determine... just the mere fact that you can get the evidence to fit the particular theory is useless information. That's the ultimate thing. There are tons of people who do that. You have have like, who was it, Atwill, for example, has Caesar's Messiah. He can develop this completely bizarre outrageous theory and show how all the evidence supports it, and then you have someone like Eisenman come along and do exactly the same thing in exactly the reverse direction. Atwill is kind of arguing that the gospels in the New Testament documents are sort of spoofed by Josephus and his cronies, whereas Eisenman is arguing that the New Testament stuff is sort of spoof composed by enemies of the Qumran movement, you know, it's, it's, there these really wild, their reinterpreting entirely what these... but they can get at lot of these amazing coincidences, they find tons of these amazing coincidences to support their theory, but they're not asking, well, are there alternative ways to explain the evidence that are actually more probable, so they're not seriously considering the alternatives, and that's what we need to start doing, is start working out, methodologically... I mean when you take it from the beginning, if you can get dozens of contradictory theories that all fit the evidence perfectly well, then there is something wrong with your method. I mean, if your method is doing that, then your method is clearly bankrupt, and so there's something wrong. You need to fix that thing, whatever that thing is. And then you make progress, and that's what needs to be done.

Q: Yeah, and so there are so many ways to make this fit any kind of good scenario ... you never know because there is so much of this going on.

A: Well that, I think, is taking it too far, because I think the fact that you get all of these seemingly, seemingly contradictory theories, each one of them seeming fits the evidence so well, makes me deeply suspicious of the very methodology of saying: the evidence fits the theory therefore we can advance this theory. This suggests to me that you can make the evidence fit any theory. And which means that there may still be a more arguable theory, a more probable theory, we are just not using a method that's capable of discovering it. We are using some other methods that are just making us find these amazing coincidences, that can end up proving any theory, which is useless. And so I think the problem is in fact any theory will work, therefore we can't believe any theory, I think it's probable there's something that is more probable that the evidence supports more than anything else, we're just not using the correct method to get to it.

And that's the view I am taking in the matter.

Toto

I think that Price thinks that the apologists have captured the mainstream or at least forced it to accommodate their beliefs, so they are his main target.

Toto

The methodology that Carrier finds to be bankrupt is the criterion of embarrassment, which is what Abe uses.

ApostateAbe

I give a full explanation of my preferred historiographical methodology and its relationship with the criterion of embarrassment here:

http://www.freeratio.org/showthread....90#post6796990

discordant

Abe, I got the impression elsewhere that you've read one of Price's books. Was it the same one as I'm reading?

You seem to be saying that he only criticises, and doesn't suggest alternatives. Anyone familiar with him knows this isn't true. Maybe what you mean is you don't think his alternative hypotheses are better? But wouldn't that be debatable? Or are all of his suggestions slam-dunk wrong?

It would be okay if you said he doesn't offer any more than speculation, since that's arguable. But it's patently untrue to say that Price thinks his positions are mere speculation. He's fully convinced of a number of things, insofar as he thinks we can be certain of anything in ancient history.

I definitely get the feeling the book is preaching to the choir. I try to play devil's advocate no matter who I'm reading, and from an outside perspective Price sounds practically incoherent. It's possible he had no real conception of who his audience might be, but we can safely assume it wasn't written for other scholars (even though it's very technical).

On the other hand, are you saying his work only serves a rhetorical purpose? Do you find none of it worthwhile?

I'm getting the opposite impression. He seems mostly to be having a conversation with himself. (Though, admittedly, I'm not anywhere near the end.)

I've heard him say he's open to post-modernist ideas. Is that really a problem? I take it you reject post-modernism, but does that mean that any book applying post-modernism to biblical scholarship is worthless? (If indeed that's what he does.) Maybe such a book shows how reliant our conclusions are on our starting assumptions.

I haven't read this yet. I'll comment on it later.

Ted Hoffman

I think Carrier finds the entire approach that the mainstream scholarship uses, with or without the embarrassment criterion, to be defective and that is why he is proposing the Bayesian way of evaluating evidence.
Back to the OP, Carrier doesn't want to run Bob the wrong way so he doesn't say it outright (compare that to how he calls R.J. Hoffman a *ick in his blog). But generally, Price is glib and commits several mistakes in his works. But he is still a walking encyclopaedia by all accounts.

ApostateAbe

Yes, it was, though I think I got only a third of the way through.
Price most certainly suggests alternatives--a bunch of them, in fact, but he doesn't seem to ever pick a position and defend its probability. You'll notice that the concluding note for each topic is something negative. "Therefore, this is something else we don't know."
I have no disagreement.
Price is, at the very least, a resourced and prolific researcher, and he will dig up scholarly ideas from dark recesses.
I think my impression is actually the same. I was stating my own opinion when I said, "I think that a successful case is made by providing theories that are more probable, not just by picking apart the opposition."
Postmodernism generally is a tool and a philosophy for rhetoric, tearing down the established ideas, and building only uncertainty. It is not a robust tool set, because it works against even the ideas that really are highly probable.

discordant

If two or more explanations seem equally possible, it would be dishonest to decide on one in particular. In fact, this is along the lines of what Carrier has written recently about the use of dates in mainstream scholarship: "But in New Testament studies, the fact that the evidence only establishes termini for Matthew between A.D. 70 and 130 isn't something you will hear about in the references." His objection is precisely that scholars "pick a position" when there's nothing solid to work with, and give the impression that an issue has been settled when it hasn't been.

Then again, I don't really know what specifics you have in mind.

Which is the appropriate thing to say if the evidence is inconclusive, right?

hjalti

I didn't notice a single footnote in that book! There are some endnotes though. :Cheeky:

Hmm.... I remember pointing to an example of that the other day. Do you want me to find more examples?

N. T. Wright was the head of the Historical Jesus section of the Society of Biblical Literature from 1998-2001. QED