Pushing Guard's template of mimetic twins to the ultimate, P. runs various characters together: "If Judas Iscariot is Judas the Zealot, and if Simon Peter is Simon the Zealot; if Judas is one of the brothers of Jesus, and if Simon is another, then we might take another look at the epithet, `Judas of Simon Iscariot' (John 13:2), which could as easily denote `Judas, brother of Simon' as `Judas, son of Simon'"(p. 131). And Simon the leper who hosts Jesus is Simon Peter! Obviously, the texts are being reshuffled here to conform to a pre-established template. Caiphas is Peter accusing Jesus, and Jesus' own disciples put him to death. But Jesus' death may also have been faked, as in so many similar stories from the surrounding world (chap. 7). Finally, P. follows Earl Doherty in holding that the stories about Jesus are midrashic creations from OT precedents rather than actual events of Jesus' life that evoked the OT parallels. Jesus may not have been a historical person at all; in any case, the gospel story itself is pure legend.

Such a sweeping and idiosyncratic conclusion leads one to suspect a flawed methodology. P. is highly selective of the authors he cites, without seriously engaging those who hold opposing views. He piles hypothesis upon hypothesis, and while he repeatedly uses qualifiers like "I suspect," "my guess is that," "could very well have," "it is not difficult to imagine," it is obvious that he is committed to his conclusion that Jesus may never have existed. But this leaves many questions unanswered. If there were such "movements" at the beginning, why did they all claim Jesus? Was Galilee so Hellenized that there were no Pharisees there to engage Jesus prior to the fall of the temple? (Archaeology now indicates that the much-touted Sepphoris, four miles from Nazareth, was predominantly Jewish in the first century.) And why is it not equally possible that the later "orthodox" interpretation was, at least in part, a call to return to the original understanding (as seems to be the concern of Matthew in upholding the original disciples, over against emerging false prophets, as the ones who understood the master's teachings)? Why, indeed, would the first generation martyr-disciples have given their lives for a myth someone had concocted?

In passing, P. derides church-committed narrative critics whose "'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" (p. 224). For P. meaning is simply historical meaning-as he has understood it. For the questions it raises the book has value; but to recover the historical Jesus, to the limited extent that that is possible, it will not do to indulge in reductionism to pre-established models or exegesis by fantasy.