Ben C Smith

If you are just starting out, getting yourself acquainted with biblical history, I do not recommend either Price or Mack as the first thing you read. By all means read them, but not first. They are reacting to previous scholarship, and you might end up lost without knowing what that previous scholarship had to say.

Get yourself a good, basic NT introduction, such as the one by Raymond Brown (or via: amazon.co.uk). This will situate you pretty much in the mainstream of contemporary scholarship, and you will see what exactly Price and Mack, whenever you do read them, are drawing from and reacting to (both positively and negatively). Make no mistake; I think you should feel free to reject the mainstream view if you see fit; that is exactly what Price and Mack are doing in many cases, and a basic introduction will help you to see why they are doing so.

Ben.

militant agnostic

Those are good places to start but you might find it more exciting to just start plunging through online articles and papers written by people like price and his opposition. I did this for a while before taking the plunge and reading a dedicated book about it, but it worked out fairly well. If you can find them their are sites online that offer basic overviews of time lines and important figures in Biblical history.

Obviously you will need to look up concrete explanations info as well. But learning about history by examining certain controversies and then looking for the info to fill them all in is a the way we learn about history for most of us, along with some disiplined instruction. Reading a book like his and not getting it the first time and then learning to grasp whats going on may be a fun experience.

I recomend you look at his articles and papers on his web site and on other websites he writes for (along with people like Doherty) to begin with though.