perfectpawn

I'm unable to find any threads which go into this book; please correct me and link them if I'm wrong. Anyway, I got this via ILL and read it over the past few weeks. What are the thoughts of others who've read it?

For one, I think Robert Price's introductions to each gospel are fantastic. Within just a few pages he throws down all of the relevant details, the theories of previous scholars, the muddled histories of each document itself. His translations are, I think, a bit dry, however.

It seems to me Price isn't beloved here -- I've noted he's dismissed due to his support of Eisenmann? And that did turn me away from parts of the book. Like Eisenmann, Price states casually that the Dead Sea Scrolls are concurrent with the New Testament, with Paul appearing in them as the "Wicked Priest," etc. Not once does he mention that only Eisenmann claims this, and that the Scrolls have been carbon dated to before the times in which the NT books were written.

He also makes too many assumptions with his footnotes. And, like most scholars, he misses the actual esoteric meaning in the more, well, esoteric books. For example, he dismisses the Apocalypse of John (aka "Revelations") as a midrash of Hebrew Apocalypses, missing the metaphysical doctrine hidden within the gobbledygook (which James Morgan Pryse discovered in the early 20th Century -- see his "Apocalypse Unsealed").

The reconstruction of Marcion's Gospel is pretty good. Price even inserts Morton Smith's alleged "Secret Gospel" in Mark -- though Price very sneakily also included "naked man with naked man" in his translation, something which Clement (in the letter Smith found) most vociferously claims was NOT in the actual Secret Gospel of Mark, only the Carpocratian version! Now, I've read Price doesn't buy the Secret Mark business (I read this in "Mark's Other Gospel"), so maybe this is him "taking the piss out of it," as it were? Because nowhere does he mention that the "naked man with naked man" line was denied by Clement...he presents it as part of Secret Mark itself.

Zeichman

I think Price has a large contingent on this board, it's just that there are some vocal opponents on this board.

I didn't notice the Secret Mark thing, here's a link for those curious: http://www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com/art_secret.htm

It was definitely a departure from some of his previous work; his claims are more radical than I've seen previously from, especially with Paul's letters. I was kind of surprised that Q wasn't in there, nor some of the fragmentary gospels, like that of the Ebionites or the Egerton gospel. That said, given that his gospels are all full-text in the book, their omission is understandable (further taking into account his reconstruction of Q1 in Deconstructing Jesus).

I was also kind of surprised that he moved to see Thomas as a document dependent on the canonical tradition.

Were I to conjecture reasons for his changes, my guess is that he's moving away from a form-critical approach and trying to abandon issues such as "tradition" altogether, and the quickest way to do this is to eliminate multiple attestation. That said, I'm kind of confused as to why he buys into patristic and rabbinic testimonies about early Chrsitianity, but does not buy into canonical ones.

All in all, it's nice to have all of these documents in one book, especially ones like Marcion and the gospel of the Hebrews (iirc) reconstructed fully in a literarily-coherent manner. He is a bit more optimistic than I am in terms of some pre-gospel sources (ur-Lukas), our ability to reconstruct a vibrant image of early Christianity, and our ability to identify documents with known church communities or leaders (I'm thinking of his controversies between Paul and his Ebionite opponents). I was surprised by the price until I saw how thick the book actually was. It's certainly interesting to see him apply his higher-critical theories in an complete way within a single work. I don't think it would be a big stretch to say that Deconstructing Jesus read more as a collection of essay than a single book, and The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man was by no means as exhaustive as this book is.

Those're my thoughts.

Did anyone here go to the SBL reception for this book last month?