Robert M. Price

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For other people named Robert Price, see Robert Price (disambiguation)


Robert McNair Price (born July 7, 1954 in Mississippi) is a Professor of Theology and Scriptural Studies at the Johnnie Colemon Theological Seminary in Miami Gardens, Florida. He is a religious skeptic, especially of orthodox Christian beliefs, a fellow of the controversial Jesus Seminar, and the author of many books and articles on religion. He has also written extensively about H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos and runs a user community for those interested in the history of Christianity.

Contents

[edit] Background

Price is a former Baptist Minister in New Jersey, (originally from Mississippi), with Doctorates in both Theology (Drew University, 1981), as well as in New Testament (Drew, 1993).[1]

A self-described humanist, he is a member of the Episcopal Church and is friendly with fundamentalist Christians outside of academia. He is also friends with the evangelical (but not fundamentalist) pastor and author Greg Boyd, with whom he has had numerous public debates concerning the historicity of Jesus.

[edit] Theology

In books like The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man, Deconstructing Jesus and Beyond Born Again: On Putting Away Childish Things, Price has challenged Biblical literalism and argued for a more skeptical and humanistic approach to Christianity. He has helped to popularize the Gnostic tradition and has questioned the idea of a historical Jesus. Interpretation of Price's theories can be taken into a pragmatic context.[clarify] In such places as the documentary “The God Who Wasn’t There,” and the encyclopedia article “New Testament Narrative as Old Testament Midrash,” he argues for a double movement of Christian copying from earlier sources. On the one hand, he suggests that there was a Christian adoption of general Mediterranean dying-rising savior myths (such as that of Dionysus) that were popular at the time in the figure of Jesus Christ. Then, the details of the savior were fleshed out by a Midrash rewriting of the Septuagint, Homer, Euripides' Bacchae, and Josephus. Price’s argument could be taken to imply[original research?] that if the entire tradition was simply fictive, the writers did what they did for political reasons. The parallel with Euripides' “Bacchae” and Dionysus, for instance, could point to the deception theme in the story. In the “Bacchae,” Cadmus says of Dionysus that “[f]or if, as you claim, this man is not a god, why not call him one? Why not tell a lie, a really good one? Then it will seem that some god has been born to Semele. We—and all our family—will win honor. (424-428).” If this is compared to Christ, it may be taken to suggest that the early Christian writers were deliberately perpetrating a fraud. Price acknowledges that there are a few ancient non-gospel sources that claim Jesus Christ was a real living person (such as Tacitus). However, Price points out that even if these references are taken as genuine (which many scholars contest), they at most refer to the claims of the contemporary Christians of the time about Jesus, and were never claims of Jesus as a contemporary of the ancient writers.

Price hosts a weekly call-in webcast, The Bible Geek in which he answers a wide range of questions pertaining to religion. He appeared in Brian Flemming's documentary film The God Who Wasn't There (2005). From 1994 until 2003, Price was the editor of The Journal of Higher Criticism. [1]

[edit] Cthulhu Mythos

As editor of the journal Crypt of Cthulhu (published by Necronomicon Press) and of a series of Cthulhu Mythos anthologies, Price has been a major figure in H. P. Lovecraft scholarship and fandom for many years. In essays that introduce the collections and the individual stories, Price traces the origins of Lovecraft's entities, motifs, and literary style. The Cthulhu Cycle, for example, saw the origins of the octopoid god in Alfred Lord Tennyson's "The Kraken" and particular passages from Lord Dunsany, while The Dunwich Cycle points to the influence of Arthur Machen on Lovecraft's "The Dunwich Horror".

Price's religious background often informs his Mythos criticism, seeing gnostic themes in Lovecraft's fictional god Azathoth and interpreting "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" as a kind of initiation ritual.

[edit] TheBibleGeek.org

Price runs a website, TheBibleGeek.org, that in addition to offering a number of his writings, also allows people to listen to audio recordings of a broadcast show that he runs that allows people to "ask the Bible Geek" questions that he will answer. The site also has a number of user oriented features that let people participate with him and with one another online.

[edit] Books

[edit] On religion

  • Beyond Born Again: Towards Evangelical Maturity. 
  • The Widow Traditions in Luke-Acts: A Feminist-Critical Scrutiny.  (ISBN 0788502247)
  • Deconstructing Jesus.  (ISBN 1573927589)
  • Mystic Rhythms: The Philosophical Vision of Rush (co-authored by his wife, Carol Selby Price).  (ISBN 1587151022)
  • The Pre-Nicene New Testament.  (ISBN 1560851945)
  • The Da Vinci Fraud: Why the Truth Is Stranger than Fiction.  (ISBN 1591023483)
  • The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man.  (ISBN 1591021219)
  • The Reason Driven Life: What Am I Here on Earth For?.  (ISBN 1591024765)
  • The Buddha and the Bible. [citation needed]
  • Jesus Christ Superstar: A Redactional Study of a Modern Gospel. 
  • Inerrant the Wind: The Evangelical Crisis of Biblical Authority (forthcoming). 
  • Paul as Text: The Apostle and the Apocrypha (forthcoming). 
  • The Paperback Apocalypse: How the Christian Church was Left Behind.  (ISBN 1591025834)
  • Paul: The Amazing Colossal Apostle (forthcoming). 
  • Jesus is Dead.  (ISBN 1578840007)
  • The Empty Tomb: Jesus Beyond The Grave (as editor).  (ISBN 159102286X)

[edit] On the Cthulhu Mythos (as editor)

[edit] References

  1. ^ Brief Biography of Robert M. Price

[edit] External links