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Robert M. Price

Brief Biography of

Robert M. Price

Name: Robert M. Price

Author's Website: robertmprice.mindvendor.com

Degrees:

  • Doctor of Philosophy, New Testament; Drew University, Madison NJ; May 1993
  • Master of Philosophy, New Testament; Drew University, Madison NJ; October 1992
  • Doctor of Philosophy, Systematic Theology; Drew University, Madison NJ; May, 1981
  • Master of Theological Studies, New Testament; Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, South Hamilton MA; May 1978
  • Bachelor of Arts, Philosophy and Religion; History; Montclair State College, Upper Montclair NJ; May 1976

Affiliations:

  • Society of Biblical Literature
  • The Westar Institute (Jesus Seminar; Paul Seminar; Canon Seminar)
  • Member, Schleiermacher Colloquium (AAR)
  • Editor, The Journal of Higher Criticism
  • Member of the Editorial Staff editorial staff for Free Inquiry, The Humanist, and Secular Nation.
  • Professor of Biblical Criticism for The Center for Inquiry Institute
  • Professor of Scriptural Studies at Johnnie Colemon Theological Seminary

Books:

Publications:


Published on the Secular Web


Modern Library

Robert Price Beyond Born Again Chap5

________________________________________ 62 Beyond Born Again Section II– The Evangelical Apologists: Are They Reliable? Chapter 5: Evidences That Demands A Mistrial “My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, so that your faith might not rest of man’s wisdom, but on God’s power.” — […]

Robert Price Beyond Born Again Chap6

________________________________________ 75 Beyond Born Again Section II– The Evangelical Apologists: Are They Reliable? Chapter 6: Guarding An Empty Tomb In Chapter 5, I dealt with the most common arguments for the reliability of the gospels. Now I want to discuss a special case, the arguments advanced for the resurrection of Jesus Christ. At the outset […]

Robert Price Beyond Born Again Chap7

________________________________________ 89 Beyond Born Again Section II– The Evangelical Apologists: Are They Reliable? Chapter 7: A False Trilemma Once Evangelical apologists feel they have practically proven the resurrection, they attempt to get all the mileage out of it they can. The resurrection itself must be defended anyway. But wouldn’t it be helpful to be able […]

Robert Price Beyond Born Again Chap8

________________________________________ 97 Beyond Born Again Section III– Can Evangelical Theology be Born Again? Chapter 8: Biblical Ventriloquism ________________________________________ 98 “Beloved, now we are the children of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be….” — I John 3:2a “Watch what you say They’ll be calling you a radical, A liberal, oh fanatical, […]

Robert Price Beyond Born Again Chap9

________________________________________ 109 Beyond Born Again Section III– Can Evangelical Theology be Born Again? Chapter 9: Theological Rhetoric In the last chapter we saw the ineffectiveness of the Evangelical attempt to disqualify Liberal theology as “unscriptural.” We noted that, contra J. I. Packer and company, it is not self-evident that the only way to take scripture […]

Robert Price Beyond Born Again Footnote

________________________________________ 143 Beyond Born Again Footnote References Introduction Malcolm Boyd, Christian, Its Meanings in an Age of Future Shock (New York: Hawthorn Bokos, 1975), p. 70. Clark H. Pinnock, Biblical Revelation– The Foundation of Christian Theology (Chicago: Moody Press, 1976), p. 14. Carl F. H. Henry, Frontiers in Modern Theology (Chicago: Moody Press, 1968), pp. […]

Robert Price Beyond Born Again Chap1

________________________________________ 9 Beyond Born Again Section I– The Born Again Experience: A Brave New World? ________________________________________ 10 Chapter 1: A Might Fortress Is Our Mentality “Hey, wouldn’t you like to be born again Live a new life that’s free Without sin, no ties to philosophy.” — Anne Herring and Matthew Ward, “Learn a Curtsey” “You’ll […]

Robert Price Beyond Born Again Intro

________________________________________ 1 Beyond Born Again Introduction: Testimony Time “Wishes and hopes can also mature with men. They can lose their infantile form… and their youthful enthusiasm without being given up.” — Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God “I know you better now And I don’t fall for all your tricks And you’ve lost the one advantage […]

Robert Price Beyond Born Again Chap10

________________________________________ 127 Beyond Born Again Section III– Can Evangelical Theology be Born Again? Chapter 10: Toward Evangelical Maturity Never has Evangelical biblical scholarship been so mercilessly run through the wringers as it was in James Barr’s Fundamentalism (1977). Many of his reviewers criticized Barr for not offering any alternative to what he tore down. This […]

Robert Price Beyond Born Again Chap2

________________________________________ 33 Beyond Born Again Section I– The Born Again Experience: A Brave New World? Chapter 2: The Evangelical Subculture In the last chapter, I tried to explain and critique some important aspects of the way Evangelicals interpret and cope with their experiences. Now I want to turn to a slightly different aspect of Evangelical […]

Robert Price Beyond Born Again Chap3

________________________________________ 48 Beyond Born Again Section I– The Born Again Experience: A Brave New World? Chapter 3: Devil’s Advocates In Chapter 1, I had occasion to mention the common Evangelical belief in the reality of Satan and his demons. I showed how this belief fit into the set of “combat” coping mechanisms that are part […]

Robert Price Beyond Born Again Chap4

________________________________________ 53 Beyond Born Again Section I– The Born Again Experience: A Brave New World? Chapter 4: The Personal Savior “I have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.” If you are an Evangelical Christian you can remember saying these words probably more times than you can count. If on the other hand you are not […]
Kiosk Article

By This Time He Stinketh: The Attempts of William Lane Craig to Exhume Jesus

How can we know that Christianity, and particularly the alleged Resurrection, are true if Craig and other Christian apologists cannot show that they are true? For anyone to ask us to accept such on faith would be like a vacuum-cleaner salesman demonstrating his product in your living room: when the machine fails to suck up any dust, he asks you not to think ill of the vacuum; it's just that he, the salesman, can't get straight how to operate it properly--but he tells you that you ought to buy it anyway!

Jewish Law, the Burial of Jesus, and the Third Day

Carrier discusses several Jewish laws regarding burial in first century Palestine that illuminate the Gospel stories, revealing that perhaps, by law, Jesus had to be taken down Friday night, and had to be buried in a special graveyard reserved for criminals Saturday night. Also discussed are some examples of the "third day" motif in Jewish law and tradition.
Kiosk Book

Killing History: Jesus in the No-Spin Zone


Amazon

Description Killing Jesus, the bestselling blockbuster by Bill O’Reilly, claims to be a purely historical account of the events in the life of Jesus leading up to his crucifixion. New Testament scholar Robert M. Price (a member of the Jesus Seminar) shows how unfounded this claim is in this critical review of O’Reilly’s work. In […]

Deconstructing Jesus

Deconstructing Jesus
Amazon

Arguing that perhaps Jesus never existed as a historical figure, Price maintains an agnostic stance, while putting many puzzles and scholarly debates in a new light. He also incorporates neglected parallels from Islam, the Baha’i Faith, and Buddhism. Deconstructing Jesus provides a valuable bridge between New Testament scholarship and early freethinkers in a refreshing cross-fertilization […]

The Empty Tomb: Jesus Beyond the Grave

The Empty Tomb: Jesus Beyond the Grave
Amazon

Did Jesus rise from the dead? Although 19th and early 20th century Biblical scholarship dismissed the resurrection narratives as late, legendary accounts, Christian apologists in the late 20th century revived historical apologetics for the resurrection of Jesus with increasingly sophisticated arguments. A few critics have directly addressed some of the new arguments, but their response […]

The Reason Driven Life: What Am I Here on Earth For?

The Reason Driven Life: What Am I Here on Earth For?
Amazon

Book Description With more than 25,000,000 copies sold, Pastor Rick Warren’s The Purpose-Driven Life has been both a commercially successful best-seller and a widely influential book in the Christian community. In The Reason Driven Life Price offers the first parody and critique of Warren’s bestseller. Warren’s God, Price says, is a “Frankenstein Monster, a divine […]
Kiosk Video

Interview with Robert M. Price on Predestination, the New Testament, & the Qur’an

Join host Edouard Tahmizian for a fifty-minute interview with long-time biblical scholar and Jesus mythicist Robert M. Price on whether the concept of predestination or determinism can be found in the Book of Acts, whether open theism is plausible, and whether some of the more miraculous events depicted in the Qur'an are credible. Tahmizian proposes a number of questions about these topics to Price. For example, given that a word sometimes translated as "predetermined" crops up in a discussion of events to come, did the author of Acts believe that God causally determined/necessitated Jesus' murder, or that those who brought about his death had the freedom to have done other than what they did do? What do open theists think about the possibility that God doesn't know the future exactly, but just knows about what might happen? Is the open theist position on this question biblically plausible? Tahmizian also asks Price about the origin of the story of Muhammad splitting the Moon in the Qu'ran, whether or not there was a historical Muhammad, and how and when the texts of the Qu'ran came to be put together. Tune in for a wide-ranging discussion about these and other intriguing issues with a noted biblical scholar!

Interview with Robert M. Price on Revelation, Luke, & the Qur’an

Join host Edouard Tahmizian for a nearly ninety-minute interview with Jesus mythicist and biblical scholar Robert M. Price on the Book of Revelation, the Gospel of Luke, and the Qur'an. Price fields a number of novel questions from Tahmizian, including whether Christian apologetic rebuttals to the idea that the book of Revelation falsely predicted that the Second Coming of Christ would occur within the lifetimes of Jesus' disciples have any credibility at all, such as the rebuttal that John's relevant Greek wording doesn't necessary translate to "soon" in duration, but can simply mean something more like "without delay," or perhaps "soon in God's time" even if far off on human timescales. The discussion then turns to whether Luke can be profitably read as a historian, and if so, how well or poorly Luke investigated the historical validity of early Christian claims. Finally, the discussion wraps up with a consideration of whether Papias had any knowledge of the teachings of a historical Jesus at all before turning to whether Muslim scholars have any legitimate claim to perfect textual transmission as seen through the absence of variations in translations of the Qur'an, far superior to that of the Old and New Testaments. Check out this wide-ranging interview shedding light on parallels between Christian and Islamic apologetics!

Interview with Robert M. Price on Paul, Lying Spirits, and Acts

Check out Edouard Tahmizian's latest just over an hour interview with long-time biblical scholar Robert M. Price on Price's reasons for thinking that St. Paul was actually Simon Magnus and why Price does not believe that Paul wrote any of the thirteen letters attributed to him, among other things. After Price outlines his grounds for these conclusions, the interlocutors turn the discussion to how far back Price dates the Pre-Pauline Creed in 1 Corinthians 15, how he interprets 1 Kings 22's apparent reference to God working with evil spirits, why God allows demonic possession to occur at all if he wants to eliminate sin, which account provides the clearest example of New Testament mimesis, whether we should date 2 Peter to the 2nd century CE, whether it makes any sense to think that Jesus would've "abolished" the 650 laws of the Jewish Torah, and much more. Tune in for an in-depth discussion of Price's insights into what contemporary biblical scholarship tells us about these fascinating issues!

Interview with Robert M. Price on Old Testament Prophesying, Qur’anic Variations, & Josephusian Miracles

Check out Edouard Tahmizian's about roughly hour-long interview with Christ myth biblical scholar Robert M. Price on Old Testament prophecy, variations in Qur'anic translations, I Clement, and early historical accounts of miraculous events. In this twelfth interview the interlocutors discuss whether Psalm 22:16 is genuinely prophetic of a coming messiah, why Muslims believe that the Devil acted as if Jesus was resurrected while simultaneously believing that Jesus never prophesized that he would rise from the dead, how textual variance in the Qur'an compares to that in the canonical Gospels, when the letter to the Corinthians in the First Epistle of Clement was written and whether we have any clue as to its authorship, and naturalistic explanations for Flavius Josephus' accounts of miraculous events. Tune in for a far-reaching interview with a noted biblical scholar!

Interview with Robert M. Price on Christian & Islamic Apologetics

Tune in to Edouard Tahmizian's over half-an-hour interview with returning biblical scholar Robert M. Price about Christian and Islamic apologetics. In this interview the interlocutors canvass the Christian apologetic claim that St. Paul would have been dismissed by his contemporaries had he made up the existence of 500 witnesses to the resurrected Jesus, how Christian apologists square Gospel claims that Jesus wanted to be baptized by John the Baptist with Jesus' status as the sinless son of God, whether the alleged reference to John the Baptist by Josephus is genuine, why Jesus would curse a fig tree when it was not in season for bearing figs, whether the appearance of the angel Gabriel to Muhammad was a genuine historical event, and why the Hebrews in the first five books of the Old Testament referred to the Abrahamic God as Yahweh rather than Allah if Allah was the true name of God. Check out the rapid fire discussion in just over 30 minutes!

Interview with Robert M. Price on Old Testament Canon & Miracles

Check out Edouard Tahmizian's roughly hour-and-fifteen-minute interview with legendary biblical scholar Robert M. Price about Price's ongoing participation in Bishop Ray Taylor's Wise as a Serpent! podcast and his forthcoming The Heresy of Paraphrase and Houses of the Holy: A Higher-Critical Survey of World Religions before the interlocutors turn to Price's view on how much (or how little) we can know about what Old Testament books would have been considered part of the Old Testament canon to Jews living during the period in which Jesus would've lived, how the apocrypha were never intended to be understood as disavowed books, the non-Old-Testament origin of the exorcism tradition from contemporaneous faith healers and magicians, whether Jesus was asked to perform miracles (provide signs from God) on demand by nonbelievers to embarrass him in an instance of nonbelievers' confirmation bias, whether there was really a hypothesized oral tradition connecting the time of Jesus to the much later time when the Gospels were written, and more! Tune in for an enlightening discussion of the bewildering relationship between sacred texts and the "history" that is supposed to ground them!

Interview with Robert M. Price on New Testament Questions

Tune in for about an hour as host Edouard Tahmizian queries biblical scholar and Jesus mythicist Robert M. Price about topics ranging from how the Trinity doctrine's identification of Jesus and the Holy Spirit with God sits with the New Testament corpus, to whether or not Erasmus' Textus Receptus—or the 1611 King James Version of the Bible based on it—comes closest to the original biblical writings in light of subsequent historical discoveries. The discussion canvasses a number of different issues, such as Price's take on whether the story of Samson in the Book of Judges merely copies and recontextualizes the myth of Hercules for a Jewish audience, why the Gospel of Mark has four different endings (and whether any of these are faithful to the original Mark), the reasons for the contradictions in the different accounts of the death of Judas, why Matthew says that no one (apart from God) knows the day or hour of Jesus' second coming, and whether the author of Acts intentionally made a memetic parallel between a demon and the spirit of divination within the ancient Greek oracle at Delphi. Check out this wide-ranging interview with an long-time synthesizer of biblical scholarship!

Interview with Robert M. Price on Mimesis & the Gospels

Tune in to this roughly hour-long discussion between host Edouard Tahmizian and biblical scholar Robert M. Price as they discuss Robyn Faith Walsh's suggestion that the Gospels were written by elite cultural producers working within a dynamic cadre of literate specialists, specialists who may not even have been Christians, in light of Richard Carrier's response that the Gospel authors were clearly concerned missionaries. The discussion then turns to why the Gospel authors would do mimesis (mythologizing Jesus) if a significant proportion of their non-literary audience would not pick up on what they were doing, whether Price finds it plausible that early Christians believed (as Carrier maintains) that Jesus was crucified by sky demons in other realms (or that Jesus was a celestial mythical being that was eventually historicized for polemical purposes, as perhaps suggested in the Book of Revelation), whether Church Father Irenaeus was correct that the Book of Revelation was written circa 90-100 CE, whether Papias' account can be trusted as a historically accurate account of the early Gospel authors, whether first-century Israelites would've needed permission from Roman authorities to kill a suspected false prophet (typically by stoning, not Roman crucifixion), and why Gospel miracle accounts would be done in private among people who knew Jesus rather than out in public for everyone to see. Check out this novel overview of some of these debates with a seasoned biblical scholar!

Interview with Robert M. Price on Adversarial Exchanges on Mythicism

Check out this roughly 45-minute talk between host Edouard Tahmizian and long-time biblical scholar Robert M. Price on Price's take on Dennis R. MacDonald's view that it's a misunderstanding to characterize the Book of Luke as a history (as Richard Carrier does in his 2006 Secular Web online book Was Christianity Too Improbable to be False?), the conflation of what some Jesus mythicists have said with what Carrier, Price, and others specifically have said, how mainstream biblical scholarship might become more open to mythicism in the future (as Thomas L. Thompson's stance that Moses and Abraham were not historical persons eventually became the consensus view), and the reality of the Q source. The discussion then turns to the mythical personage of Judas and Peter, what we can know about how long an oral tradition inventing a mythical Jesus would need to develop, ancient Jesus mythicists like Celsus, Robyn Faith Walsh's view that the empty tomb story was a legendary trope borrowed from pagan works, Dennis R. MacDonald's view that none of the Gospels were written to evangelize/convert people to Christianity, and much more! Tune in for a wide-ranging interview with a legendary biblical scholar!

Interview with Robert M. Price on Scriptural Inerrancy

Tune in to this roughly one-hour discussion between host Edouard Tahmizian and esteemed biblical scholar Robert M. Price as they discuss how biblical inerrantists try to deal with textual evidence of New Testament contradictions. The interlocutors canvas how inerrantists deal with an apparent misquote of Jeremiah by supposedly God-inspired Matthew in Matthew 27:7-10 (whose actual source seems to be Zacharias)—with Calvinists attributing it to copyist error, and others sometimes claiming that it refers to an unwritten prophecy by Jeremiah and so is not erroneous—solid evidence that the longer ending of Mark after Mark 16:1-8 was interpolated by someone other than Mark (someone who wanted to compile details from other Gospels about the risen Jesus to avoid an awkward ending to Mark's empty tomb narrative and give more "evidence" of the resurrected Christ via his resurrection appearances), and Price's take on whether Robyn Faith Walsh's reasons for thinking that Jesus mythicism is implausible stand up to scrutiny. Check out this novel interview with an indefatigable biblical scholar!

Interview with Robert M. Price on Mythicism as Scholarship

In a June 2022 interview with Edouard Tahmizian, New Testament scholar Dennis R. MacDonald admonished Richard Carrier for misappropriating his work in the service of Jesus mythicism. In a responding interview on August 1, Carrier disputed MacDonald's characterization, and published a longer missive titled "Dennis MacDonald's Change of Position" on his website on August 23. In this 40-minute interview with esteemed biblical scholar Robert M. Price on the same day, Price argues that while MacDonald himself is certainly no mythicist, nevertheless MacDonald's work is not merely compatible with Jesus mythicism, but suggestive of it. The discussion then turns to whether Jesus' disciples really had any understanding that Jesus would be resurrected from the dead on the third day, and if not, whether there could be any historicity to the account of guards being stationed to look after Jesus' tomb (as argued by D. A. Carson). Further issues concern the evolution of the understanding of whether Jesus is said to have had a spiritual or physical resurrection, how mythicists explain 1 Corinthians 2:6-8 (in part by interpreting to the archons of this age to refer to spiritual entities, not human leaders), and what central point Justin Martyr is trying to drive home, among other things. Tune in for this wide-ranging interview with a scholar of scholars!

Interview with Robert M. Price on Jesus Mythicism (Part II)

Pick up where you left off at the end of Part I and return to host Edouard Tahmizian in the second 20-minute part of his two-part follow-up interview with esteemed biblical scholar Robert M. Price. The interlocutors go on to discuss whether the earliest Christians also believed in something like Calvinist predestination and which New Testament typologies (correspondences between Old Testament figures and New Testament one), if any, Price prefers. The discussion then turns to Price's forthcoming book The Gospels Behind the Gospels, his response to C. S. Lewis titled Merely Christianity, his When Gospels Collide on contradictions between the Gospel accounts, his Judaizing Jesus, his forthcoming Not Peace, But a Sword, his dabbling in writing fiction, and much more!

Interview with Robert M. Price on Jesus Mythicism (Part I)

In this first half-hour of a two-part follow-up interview with esteemed biblical scholar Robert M. Price, host Edouard Tahmizian queries Price about his recent anthology edited with John W. Loftus, Varieties of Jesus Mythicism: Did He Even Exist? They canvass the role of Jungian mythical archetypes as a kind of script for rituals/rites of passage, Price's take on the scholarship of Robyn Faith Walsh and the historical plausibility of her thesis that educated Hellenistic writers composed the New Testament, whether there were pre-Gospel narratives that were more consistent than the canonical Gospels and exploited by them (in themes like Jesus as the returned Elijah, Jesus as the new Moses, Jesus as a magician, and so on, and by portraying competitors to Jesus as servants of him), and the Gnostic understanding of salvation. Tune in to this animated conversation about fascinating ideas, and then be sure to tune in to Part II, too!

Interview with Robert M. Price

Join host Edouard Tahmizian in this hour-long interview with esteemed biblical scholar Robert M. Price as they discuss Price's early realization that the amount of effort needed to fill in the gaps between the ancient concerns of the biblical writers and the unaddressed modern concerns of today would not be expected of a straightforward revelation from God. Their discussion goes on to consider how the Haggadic midrash, a way to interpret the Old Testament used in the parables attributed to Jesus, undermines the historicity of any Gospel story (as virtually all of them just repurpose an Old Testament story), before finally turning to the ahistoricity of the New Testament characterization of Paul (even if the literary Paul had been inspired by the historical person Simon Magus), the case for Jesus mythicism and the absence of contemporaneous references to Jesus, the implausibility of the penal substitutionary model of atonement, and much more. Check out this fascinating interview with a biblical scholar who became a legend himself!