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ROBERT M. PRICE, Deconstructing Jesus (Amherst/New York: Prometheus Books, 2000). Pp. 285. $31.95.
Robert M. Price has found that some recent NT historical criticism comes close to the conclusions of much earlier work, especially that of the history of religions school, in terms of Christian origins and the historical Jesus. After reviewing positively the work of F. C. Baur, Walter Bauer, Helmut Koester, and James M. Robinson (chap. 1), he builds on Burton Mack's classification of pre-gospel communities and distinguishes the following: Q, the Pillars (James, Peter, John), the "heirs of Jesus" (the brothers of Jesus and James), the "community of Israel" (believing in Jesus as the new Moses and new Elijah), the synagogue reform movement, and the "Christ cults" (chaps. 2 and 3). These movements, detectable in the canonical gospels and supported by extracanonical sources, had little if anything to do with one another, and the picture of Jesus we find in the gospels is a reworked quilt of them, with orthodox suppression of evidence of such original diversity. The commonly held "big bang" theory-the resurrection eventually giving rise to multiple heterodox interpretations-is not what happened. Rather, the various movements, some of which had no interest in the death or resurrection of Jesus, were there from the beginning and were eventually suppressed and/or absorbed by the canonically orthodox gospels into a consistent picture of origins. Following a pattern similar to...