Decade

Yup; today is this blog’s tenth anniversary. Ten years ago, at home with an eight-year-old who was off school with a sore throat, I checked my email and found I’d been accepted onto FreeThoughtBlogs. It remains something of which I’m deeply proud.

I’m reluctant to write a ‘how things have changed’ post because of very obvious factors in the way things in the world have changed. In my life, however, the change has been positive. I’m very lucky and I know it. Here’s to the next ten years, and to hoping that we’re all better off by Pi Day 2036.

‘The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari’, Chapter One

Well, readers, here we are: it’s finally time for a new book! (In this case, a very old new book; my copy is practically falling apart.) As planned, this next book is my long-postponed review of Robin Sharma’s ‘The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari’.

 

Background  

The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari is a book in the self-help meaning-of-life genre and was written in Canada back in the ’90s. I believe it was pretty big in North America, but that might for all I know just be the cover blurbs talking it up. I don’t recall it making any kind of splash in the UK, but it’s hard to tell because I don’t normally check out self-help sections; that said, I spend enough time in bookshops and libraries that I think at the very least it probably wasn’t put in massive front-of-shop displays (I think I’d have noticed the title). 

It is apparently (very) loosely based on the author’s own experience of giving up a legal career to go into the self-help industry. So that’s kind of meta. 

I discovered this particular copy when browsing a shelf of second-hand books in a small general store, and picked it up because it looked like something that might be worth a blog post. As I read the first few chapters I realised that I’d been wrong; this wasn’t worth a blog post, it was worth a full-on chapter-by-chapter booksnarking. This, as I’ve said, then got delayed for many years when two other booksnarking projects jumped the queue… but the time has finally come. 

I got several chapters into it (can’t remember how many) but then decided it would be better to leave the rest until the actual review so that I could report my reactions to it as I went along. This means that I still haven’t read most of the actual self-help bits, so for all I know they might turn out to be really good once I get there. We shall see! Anyway, this means that for the first few chapters I’ll be going over distantly familiar ground (‘distantly’ because it’s years since I read even the part that I did read), and after that I’ll be on unknown territory.

It seems to be quite a bit shorter than the last few books I’ve read, so I’m hoping I can get through it relatively quickly. Relatively. Maybe several months instead of several years? We can hope.

Aaaaand here we go! 

 

Chapter One: The Wake-Up Call 

He collapsed right in the middle of a packed courtroom. 

Well, apart from anything else, absolutely full marks for a gripping opener.  

The rest of this paragraph gives us some background info: the ‘he’ in question is a nationally-recognised top lawyer by the name of Julian Mantle who buys really expensive suits. Julian Mantle is now: 

 squirming on the ground like a helpless infant, shaking and shivering and sweating like a maniac. 

So, quick mention that words like ‘maniac’ are now known to be ablist slurs (because of a whole load of anti-mental-health prejudice that comes with them) but it’s also fair to note that Robin Sharma wouldn’t have realised this was an issue in 1999. 

Everyone freaks out. The bailiff starts doing CPR, which irked me because it doesn’t sound as though Julian had actually stopped breathing (since he was described just above as ‘squirming’) and so it’s not medically appropriate, but that’s just me and my annoying habit of actually knowing medical stuff. Meanwhile, we go into a flashback for the narrator to fill us in on some background: 

  • Julian is a workaholic (‘willing to work eighteen-hour days for the success he believed was his destiny’ who also likes living it up (‘Late-night visits to the city’s finest restaurants with sexy young fashion models, or reckless driving escapades with the rowdy band of brokers he called his ‘demolition team’ became the stuff of legend at the firm’). These two descriptions sound somewhat contradictory to me, but maybe he alternates between the two ways of doing things. 
  • He comes from money and success, and has plenty of both himself. We hear about ‘the three-thousand-dollar Italian suits that draped his well-fed frame’, his ‘Armani-clad shoulders’, ‘income in seven figures’, ‘spectacular mansion’, ‘private jet’, ‘summer home on a tropical island’, and, of course, the titular Ferrari. I’m guessing there’ll be a major theme coming up about material things not really mattering at all. (Which, to be fair, we can also deduce just from the title.) 
  • The narrator is a lawyer at the same firm as Julian who was picked out by him as an intern to work on a ‘sensational’ case defending a wife-murderer, which Julian wins, although it’s hinted that Narrator (I don’t know whether we ever get his name, but I can’t see it in this chapter) thinks the accused was actually guilty. So, apparently Julian’s pre-change-of-heart backstory involves being the sort of lawyer that works for rich people to get them off the hook. Narrator was then invited to stay on as a lawyer, and did so.
  • Julian is not the easiest person to work with, as he’s a ‘his way or the highway’ type who gets into ‘late night shouting matches’ with the narrator, and possibly other colleagues. However, we’re assured that he has a heart of gold underneath this, as evidenced by the fact that he always remembered to ask about Narrator’s wife and, more importantly, he helped Narrator out of a financial hole by arranging a financial scholarship for him.
  • Although we’re told again that Julian ‘loved to have a wild time’ and also that he ‘never neglected his friends’, Sharma leans heavily into the workaholic narrative at this point, describing Julian (and, as a result, the narrator) as working longer and longer hours, with Julian taking on more and more cases and forever obsessing over not having prepared enough. This reads as if Sharma was trying to advise simultaneously against devoting yourself to work and devoting yourself to wild living, and didn’t realise (or maybe didn’t care) that it didn’t quite make sense to use one example for both narratives.
  • Julian’s obsessed workaholic life (and the long restaurant meals he’s supposedly also finding time for) takes its toll: his marriage fails, he stops talking to his father, and at the age of 53 he looks to be ‘in his late seventies’. Ironically, this is also messing up his professional abilities: ‘Where he would once dazzle all those present with an eloquent and airtight closing argument, he now droned on for hours, rambling about obscure cases that had little or no bearing on the matter before the Court.’ (Sigh. When I first read this, my reaction was ‘so… wouldn’t people stop giving him important cases?’ and now it’s ‘so… he’s now qualified to be POTUS?’)
  • He has some dreadful tragic backstory. Narrator knows this exists, but no-one will tell him what it is because they’re sworn to secrecy (though that apparently didn’t stop someone from letting slip the existence of said tragedy even though whoever-it-was did manage to keep shtum about the details).

And all that brings Narrator back to the events of the first paragraph, whereupon we learn that Julian’s medical issue was ‘a massive heart attack’. Really? From the description, I’d thought it was going to be epilepsy. (The description actually reminded me more of acute hypoglycaemia, but no way was that going to be the diagnosis in a non-medical book, and epilepsy would have fitted reasonably well.) I mean, I know this isn’t a medical book, but even pre-Internet it was fairly easy to find descriptions of how heart attacks present. Couldn’t Sharma have taken a few minutes at the library to look this up? Oh, well; from what I remember of the part of the book I did read, realism isn’t its strongest point.

Anyway, that’s the end of the first chapter, so we’re off to a good start here. This is definitely more readable than the last few books. As per my usual practice, I’ll link all further posts on this book back to this one when I post them.

Thoughts and plans for future book reviews

Having finally finished one of my two ongoing book reviews (pause for cheering), I can now pick a new review to start. Also, I now seem to be only a few chapters from the end of Walking Disaster, which, even at the rate I go, means that at some point in the just-about-foreseeable future I should (hey, let’s think positive here) also finish that one and be able to pick a second new one to review. So… what should be next on the agenda?

The first one’s simple enough; years ago, I came across a second-hand copy of The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari, and decided that this absolutely needed a full-on snarkreview. Then Walking Disaster came up as an option because I had the idea of doing it in parallel with Jenny Trout’s review of the companion book, and Deciphering The Gospels because Price donated me a free copy, and so both of those ended up jumping the queue. Having finished one of those, I can now finally start TMWSHF, so that’s the one that’s next up.

As to which book should replace Walking Disaster when the joyous time comes that I complete that as well, I have an entire list of options in mind. Here, as best I can remember (and no doubt I’ll remember something else after hitting ‘publish’), is the list of books I’d potentially like to deconstruct/snarkreview at some point:

  • Midwives – Chris Bohjalian (about homebirth/midwifery in the US)
  • Lila – Robert Persig (sequel to his more famous Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance, and not nearly as good)
  • The Little Voice – Josh Sheldon (supposed to be about self-actualisation or some such, seems to be largely ‘privileged guy whinges about stuff he doesn’t want to do’)
  • Suzanne’s Diary for Nicholas – James Patterson (badly-thought-out romance novel)
  • Beyond Choice – Don Baker (dreadful and fortunately obsolete anti-abortion book)
  • The Daughter Of Time – Josephine Tey (a re-examination of the Princes in the Tower case which, while a vastly better book than some of the drek on this list, could definitely do with some re-examining of its own)
  • The Surrendered Wife – Laura Doyle (never actually read this, but it looks worth a takedown)
  • On The Historicity Of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason For Doubt – Richard Carrier (self-explanatory, but do note that this one is not going to be any time soon, as I definitely need a change of pace at this point)
  • Too Good To Be False – Tom Gilson (apologetics book)
  • The Unexpected Legacy Of Divorce – Judith Wallerstein (a research project on the effects of divorce on children; I want to write about why I disagree with her widely-cited conclusions)

Readers, I would love to hear what thoughts you might have here. It’s not a vote; I’ll pick when the time comes based largely on convenience/practicality/how I feel at the time. But there’s some wiggle room there and I’d still be interested to know if anyone has any thoughts on any of the above. And I’d also be interested to know if any of you have had moments of looking at a book and thinking ‘If only some skeptic would volunteer to take this book’s argument apart; I would so like to read that!’ because, well, I make no promises, but I’m at least somewhat open to suggestions. What say you?

‘Deciphering The Gospels Proves Jesus Never Existed’: Questions, part 3

‘Deciphering the Gospels’, by R. G. Price, argues the case for Jesus mythicism, which is the view that Jesus never existed on earth in any real form but was an entirely mythical figure in the same way as Hercules or Dionysus. (The author is not the same person as Robert Price, also a Jesus mythicist author.) I’m an atheist who holds the opposing (and mainstream) view that Christianity started with a human Jesus. In other words, the Jesus referred to as the founder of Christianity was originally a 1st-century human being, about whom a later mythology grew up, whose followers became the original group that would mutate over time into Christianity. I’m therefore reviewing Price’s book to discuss his arguments and my reasons for disagreeing.

The first post in this book review is here. Links to the posts on all subsequent chapters can be found at the end of that post.

 

Readers, we’re nearly there; we made it to the last post on this book. I noticed a few weeks ago that the first post I published on this book was on the 17th Feb 2019, and since then I’ve secretly hoped to be able to get finished by what’s about to be the seventh anniversary of that date… and here we are with the end in sight. The realisation that I’ve spent seven years on this has indeed made me question some of my life choices (especially when I also realised that this means I’ve spent even longer on Walking Disaster), but, nope, I like taking this sort of stuff apart and I have, at least on this subject, no regrets. But I’ll still be glad to tick this one off my list and move on.

So! Home stretch. Four more questions from Price’s list, four more from my list, and we’re done. Let’s get going.

 

Questions from Price

9.
Why would Paul insist that his knowledge of Jesus was superior because it came from revelation, if Paul knew that other apostles had direct knowledge of Jesus the person and were taught directly from the mouth of Jesus?

Paul believed that Jesus actually had appeared to him, so he and his followers believed that Paul had heard directly from Jesus, and he thought that was better than getting information second-hand from the apostles. (This would have no doubt been fuelled by the fact that Paul’s beliefs about what Jesus had told him fitted a lot better with what he wanted to hear, meaning he was pretty well motivated to hang onto this belief.)

10.
If a real Jesus were worshiped and executed, then why was his real grave unknown and unvenerated?

His followers were so reluctant to accept his death that they started believing he’d miraculously come back to life. I very much doubt they wanted to think about his body rotting away in a criminal’s graveyard when they could keep believing that he’d magically risen from the dead instead.

11.
If the “Q” teachings come from a separate independent source, then why does the “Q” dialog fit so neatly into the Markan narrative, using elements of language that are unique to the Gospels?

The problem with this question is that Price hasn’t demonstrated his premise here. I went back to what Price wrote about Q earlier in the book as I’d skimmed over it before, but I hadn’t missed much.

Price’s claim (from back in Chapter 6) is that the Q material (material shared by both Matthew and Luke but not Mark) is too well integrated with the Markan material to have been added later, from which he concludes that Matthew and Luke originally copied a longer form of Mark that also contained the Q material. However, although Price claims there are ‘dozens of examples’ showing this, the only one he gives is the temptation scene (the scene in which Jesus is fasting in the desert and is tempted by the devil). And… looking at that, I’m hard-pressed to see how else Matthew and Luke would have integrated the material.

Mark gives us a very brief account; Jesus went into the desert and fasted for forty days, the devil tempted him, angels ministered to him. Matthew and Luke both add a more detailed account of the devil’s temptations. Not surprisingly, they both add this just after the bit about Jesus fasting in the desert and just before the bit about angels ministering to him. Looking at the three accounts side by side, I’m at a loss as to where else Price thinks the extra details would have been added. And, while I’m sure he’s convinced himself that he does indeed have ‘dozens’ of other examples, my seven-year experience with reading Price has not left me with any reason to trust that those examples will stand up any better. So, again, if Price wants to claim that the Q material is integrated in such a way, he’s going to have to show his working.

Meanwhile, I’m still wondering how on earth Price hasn’t spotted the problem this whole theory causes for the rest of his argument. Price’s original claim, if you recall, was that every single important scene in gMark could be shown to be derived from somewhere else, and, despite the flaws in his argument, he did at least put a lot of effort into going through gMark sequentially trying to hit every scene and come up with some kind of explanation. Yet he somehow doesn’t seem to have noticed the glaring contradiction between ‘I have demonstrated this for every important scene in gMark’ and ‘gMark also had a lot of extra material that I haven’t previously mentioned’. I honestly wonder whether Price has ever thought critically about his own arguments at any point.

12.
If Paul knew that Jesus was a real person who was recently on earth, then why did he never talk about him “returning” or “coming back”?

I can’t say one way or the other whether this is even true, as I don’t know Koine Greek. However, Price doesn’t either, and at this point I don’t think it’s unwarranted for me to be somewhat suspicious about whether he’s actually correct or not. Oh, well, if you want to think about whether it means anything whatsoever even if Price is right about it… I doubt it. Discussed it a bit further in this post.

And that’s it for Price’s twelve questions and for Price’s first book. Just my last four questions for Price here:

 

Questions for Price

9. If Jesus was thought of by his original followers as a purely heavenly being, why were specific members of the group (who weren’t even the apostles) referred to as his brothers? If this was meant metaphorically, in what way would it make any sense to think of humans as being even metaphorically the brothers of a heavenly being, especially when this designation was given only to a few men who weren’t even apostles?

10. Why is it that there’s no sign at all, amongst all the diversity of opinion in existing writings, of anyone believing that Jesus lived and died entirely in the heavens? We have mention of beliefs that Jesus was originally a heavenly figure before being born to a woman on earth, we have mention of beliefs that Jesus only appeared to be leading a human life on earth but his flesh wasn’t really real flesh. But we have absolutely no record – not even in the form of anyone attempting to refute the belief as heresy – about anyone having believed that Jesus lived entirely in heaven. If this was really what the group believed at their origins, why would they have no record of it at all?

11. New religious sects are typically started by charismatic and inspiring individuals who become indelibly part of the records of the movement (as the great divine prophet who taught the true wishes of God, that kind of thing). In our records of Christianity’s beginning, we certainly seem to see such an individual in Jesus. If the first group wasn’t started by a historical Jesus, then why is there no record at all of whomever did start it?

12. Given the evidence we do have for a historical Jesus, plus the fact that none of your arguments or evidence have actually stood up to examination, plus the difficulties you yourself have had in explaining parts of your case that don’t make sense… can you think of any reason at all why we should believe your claims instead of the much simpler explanation that Christianity started with a historical Jesus?

 

That’s it; this book review is officially over. I look forward to seeing whether anyone wants to join in with further discussion in any of the comment threads (if you do, just remember to keep it civil). But for this post, it remains only for me to indulge in my habit of misquoting Richard Ayoade each time I finish a book review, by saying: Thank you for reading, if indeed you still are.

‘Deciphering The Gospels Proves Jesus Never Existed’: Questions, Part 2

‘Deciphering the Gospels’, by R. G. Price, argues the case for Jesus mythicism, which is the view that Jesus never existed on earth in any real form but was an entirely mythical figure in the same way as Hercules or Dionysus. (The author is not the same person as Robert Price, also a Jesus mythicist author.) I’m an atheist who holds the opposing (and mainstream) view that Christianity started with a human Jesus. In other words, the Jesus referred to as the founder of Christianity was originally a 1st-century human being, about whom a later mythology grew up, whose followers became the original group that would mutate over time into Christianity. I’m therefore reviewing Price’s book to discuss his arguments and my reasons for disagreeing.

The first post in this book review is here. Links to the posts on all subsequent chapters can be found at the end of that post.

 

Second part of the question list with which Price finishes the book, and second part of my question list for him. I just want to start this post with a shout-out to the four Ifs that start these four questions for the amount of heavy lifting they’re doing; it certainly puts my gym regime to shame.

 

Questions from Price

5.
If we can conclude that the “cleansing of the temple” is a truly fictional
event based on literary allusions, what then would explain why a real
Jesus would have been executed?

I’ve already disagreed that we can conclude that, but I’m also very puzzled that the second part of this (the query as to why Jesus would have been executed) is even something Price finds worth questioning.

The story we’re given is that Jesus was gathering an increasing crowd of Jewish followers that thought he was the Messiah and were proclaiming him as such. ‘Messiah’, to the Jews, meant the king who would rule over Israel in a time when their oppressors and enemies (who at that time were the Romans) had been overthrown, and plenty of Jews believed that the Messiah would play a direct role in the overthrowing. There had already been incidents in which Jewish attempts at rebellion against the Romans had had to be forcibly put down with execution of the leader. This is, therefore, exactly the sort of scenario that the Romans would want to nip in the bud, and execution of the troublemaker thought to be the Messiah was exactly the sort of action a governor like Pilate would have found it appropriate to take. All of this is well accepted among scholars. How on earth does Price not know that?

6.
If we can conclude that the crucifixion of Jesus during the Passover
festival is not credible, then what would account for the fact that every
description of his execution follows the narrative from Mark, other than
that no one had any knowledge of the actual event?

This seems to be more of a problem for Price. Since Matthew and Luke clearly did think Mark’s account worth using as a source, that suggests that they had some reason to do so that was good enough to convince them. Such as, say, being part of a group that was handing this and other stories down as being real stories of a real Jesus.

7.
If the events of the Gospels are indeed a purely fictional postwar
narrative, then what could explain why a real human Jesus would have
been worshiped as such a powerful divine being? If the “real Jesus” didn’t
perform miracles, didn’t actually rise from the dead, didn’t have teachings
that were cited by either Paul or James, then what would cause people to
worship this real human Jesus who had no deeds or teachings worth
noting by the earliest writers about him?

Addressed here. The tl;dr version is that I don’t think the original human Jesus was worshipped; he was followed, which is not the same thing.

As for ‘the earliest writers about him’, the earliest surviving writings we have about him are those of Paul, whose lack of interest in a human Jesus we’ve already discussed, and the next earliest are those of Mark, who does indeed spend most of the gospel noting Jesus’s deeds or teachings. As per my answer to question 4, we don’t know whether or not there were earlier writers and thus can’t make any assumptions about what any writers before Paul might have written. So this claim of Price’s doesn’t stand up at all.

8.
If the earliest worshipers of Jesus believed that the material world was
corrupt and needed to be destroyed, then why would they worship a
material human being? The only theological explanation for why a Jesus
of the flesh would be worshiped is that by becoming flesh and
“overcoming death” Jesus transcended the corruption of the material
world. But if we can conclude that a real-life Jesus wouldn’t have actually
“overcome death,” then why would a real-life Jesus be worshiped?

I’m baffled by this one because Price seems to be asking us to explain the very problem that his theory sets up.

Price is the one claiming that the earliest followers of Jesus were worshippers who believed the material world was corrupt and needed to be destroyed and that the Messiah therefore had to be heavenly. All of that is a theory that came from Price. And yet he’s now pointing out to us exactly what I’ve been trying to point out to him; that this doesn’t fit with the known fact that within the next couple of generations Jesus’s followers believed him to have been a material human being. Yes, Price, that is indeed a major contradiction, and it seems to me that the obvious way to resolve it is by working with the vastly more plausible theory that in fact Jesus’s followers didn’t believe that at all, but instead were following an actual human Jesus.

 

Questions for Price

Questions 5 – 8 from my list:

5. The original sect belonged to a culture that overwhelmingly believed holy sacrifice to be by throat-cutting. How would they have spontaneously come up with the idea that Jesus’s sacrifice was by the completely different and (under their beliefs) accursed method of crucifixion?

6. The entire reason that Jews eagerly hoped for the Messiah was because he was supposed to usher in a wondrous age of freedom, peace, and plenty for Jews on earth. Why would a group have taken such a sideways swerve into believing the Messiah was a divine being whose sacrifice was needed to wipe out all sin?

7. If gMark was a fictional account written for a small sect who believed in a heavenly Jesus rather than an earthly Jesus, why would multiple authors write expanded accounts adding all sorts of extra stories and details and go on to form a religion based on this earthly Jesus, all apparently without noticing that this earthly Jesus had never existed, and without being corrected on this extremely obvious point by the existing sect?

8. If Jesus’s life on earth never happened, how is it that within less than 50 years things could go from ‘one little-known and anonymous author wrote a fictional story about his life on earth’ to ‘ it’s so widely believed that this person was real and was really executed at Pilate’s order that Tacitus reports this as an unquestioned fact’?

‘Deciphering The Gospels Proves Jesus Never Existed’: Questions, part 1

‘Deciphering the Gospels’, by R. G. Price, argues the case for Jesus mythicism, which is the view that Jesus never existed on earth in any real form but was an entirely mythical figure in the same way as Hercules or Dionysus. (The author is not the same person as Robert Price, also a Jesus mythicist author.) I’m an atheist who holds the opposing (and mainstream) view that Christianity started with a human Jesus. In other words, the Jesus referred to as the founder of Christianity was originally a 1st-century human being, about whom a later mythology grew up, whose followers became the original group that would mutate over time into Christianity. I’m therefore reviewing Price’s book to discuss his arguments and my reasons for disagreeing.

The first post in this book review is here. Links to the posts on all subsequent chapters can be found at the end of that post.

 

This is the first part of the list of questions that finishes off Price’s book. It’s a twelve-question list and I’ve decided to divide it into three posts of four each, which works out rather nicely. I’ve also collected my own list of questions for Price, which I was originally going to list at the very end but which I’ve decided also to split up between the three posts to avoid getting one huge long post at the very end. Here we go:

 

Questions from Price

1.
If Jesus were a real person, then why do neither the letters of Paul nor the
epistle of James provide any description of him?

Probably the main reason is that they’re religious writings and not celebrity biographies. Why would they provide any description of him? On top of that, there’s the fact that Paul never met Jesus and we have no idea who the James was that wrote the epistle of James and so have no idea whether he ever met Jesus.

2.
If Jesus were a real person and his brother James became a prominent
leader of the Christian community, then why didn’t James provide any
account of the life of his brother Jesus?

Since we don’t know what accounts James did or didn’t provide of his brother’s life during his own lifetime, I’m going to assume that Price means that James didn’t provide any written account. Given how poor literacy levels were at that time, I’m going to guess that the reason was that James just wasn’t good enough at writing, plus the fact that, again, this was not a celebrity biography situation and people probably weren’t as interested in getting some kind of inside scoop as Price seems to be assuming.

3.
The epistle of James goes into an extensive discussion of the importance
of works, yet uses examples of figures from the Jewish scriptures to show
the importance of works. Why wouldn’t this letter have used Jesus’s deeds
as an example of the importance of works if the writer were someone who
knew of Jesus or thought that Jesus was a real person?

With thanks to GakuseiDon for his work on this one: Because this was a time when tradition and the scriptures were the sources considered important as roadmaps of how to act. Jewish followers thought Jesus was important as the king who was going to bring forth the awaited Messianic age, and Paul and his recruits believed Jesus was important as a sin sacrifice. But the concept of Jesus being the ultimate ideal example of how people should behave was more of a later development.

4.
If the narrative of Jesus’s life and death were developed before the First
Jewish-Roman War and maintained by a community of Jesus worshipers,
why was it not recorded until after the war?

We don’t know when it was first recorded, and have no way of knowing whether or not it was recorded before the war, so this question is based on a premise that can’t be demonstrated.

Having done the tl;dr, I will now go into (quite a bit) more detail about this:

The usual reason for believing that the gospels weren’t written until after the war is that they show Jesus giving predictions of coming disaster, and thus it’s assumed that these refer retrospectively to the Jewish-Roman War and that the gospels were all written after this. And this is, to be fair, a belief very widely accepted by scholars. In fact, this is perhaps the only occasion on which I’m arguing against a mainstream belief held by Price.

However, for some time now I haven’t believed that this particular claim stands up. What gMark actually gives us is a very vague generalised prophecy of disaster. (In fact, even in its vagueness, it doesn’t match the details of the Jewish-Roman War; Jesus is shown as prophesying that the Temple will be thrown down and ‘Not one stone will be left upon another‘, but in actual fact a) the Temple was burned rather than knocked down and b) one wall has remained to this day. So it’s hard to see this as an after-the-fact prophecy.)

Bear in mind that this was a culture in which it seems to have been fairly normal to make fatalistic proclamations about the doom and destruction that were awaiting people for supposed sins, and, of course, it was a time of considerable unrest and upheaval for the Jews; the Jewish-Roman war was not out of a clear blue sky. So, it strikes me as well within the bounds of probability that someone of the time could have made a vague doom-and-destruction prophecy that ended up approximating actual events out of sheer coincidence, and I find it perfectly plausible that that could be what happened here.

(To add to that, there’s also the possibility that Mark could have been reacting to some event other than the War. I’ve seen a theory that these passages were in fact a reaction to Caligula’s plan to put a statue of himself in the Temple in 39 CE, which would make Mark a few decades earlier than thought; I don’t know enough to comment on how well this stands up, but I’m not aware of any reason to dismiss it as at least a possibility.)

And, on top of all this, there’s the fact that we don’t know what was or wasn’t done about recording the story prior to Mark. I’ve been reading some of Maurice Casey’s work, and his claims include a) that Mark worked from various rough notes that were written by followers in Jesus’s time, and b) that the Q material was a collection of similar rough notes in various languages. He’s got some interesting arguments for these claims, but this isn’t the time to go into them; the question in this context is whether we can exclude this as being at least a possibility. Since it seems perfectly plausible that devoted followers of a travelling rural preacher would make these sorts of notes and that, once the content of the notes had been written up properly and coherently as the gospels, the growing church wouldn’t put that much care into keeping the original notes (remember that we don’t even have to picture a scenario in which they were thrown out, just one in which they were put in a drawer somewhere and not checked or recopied; time and entropy would have taken care of the rest), I can’t see any reason to dismiss this possibility. So, since we don’t know what notes were made in or shortly after Jesus’s time, that’s another reason why we can’t just go with Price’s claim that Jesus’s life and death were ‘not recorded until after the war’.

Lastly, there’s the question of why it would be an issue if gMark were written after the War. Christianity started out as a small group of whom most of the members were probably illiterate or very poorly literate, and who believed that Jesus’s return and the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth were imminent. They were spreading their teachings to a population of whom the majority were also illiterate. It seems perfectly plausible that they’d focus on oral teaching for a good while before they got to the point of realising they needed more of a written record. On the whole, thinking it over, I do think it’s less likely that they’d take forty years to get to that point and so I do lean more to believing that gMark was earlier and possibly that written notes were earlier than that, but I can’t rule out the possibility that the followers did leave it that late to write an account.

 

Right, my turn:

Questions for Price

  1. A significant part of your argument is around the similarities between gMark and other writings of the culture (the Jewish scriptures) or of the proto-church (Paul’s letters). How have you decided which of these similarities are likely to be due to derivation from other sources and which are more likely to be due to coincidence?
  2. Since we know that it was normal for biographies of real people of the time to embellish and mythologise their subjects (as per your statement in Chapter 4), why do you feel that the mythological embellishments and scriptural references in gMark are evidence that this isn’t a biography of a real person?
  3. If Mark believed Jesus was actually a heavenly being, why is one of his main messages that the Jews were being punished for killing Jesus along with other prophets?
  4. Mark and the other gospel writers had no need to name a specific executioner in their accounts, would have probably found it politically better not to do so, and clearly weren’t happy about doing so, given all the attempts in the gospels to excuse and explain away Pilate’s involvement. That being so, why would they have all brought Pilate’s name into it if the scene was a fiction that they could write any way they wanted?

‘Deciphering The Gospels Proves Jesus Never Existed’: Chapter 12, Part 3

‘Deciphering the Gospels’, by R. G. Price, argues the case for Jesus mythicism, which is the view that Jesus never existed on earth in any real form but was an entirely mythical figure in the same way as Hercules or Dionysus. (The author is not the same person as Robert Price, also a Jesus mythicist author.) I’m an atheist who holds the opposing (and mainstream) view that Christianity started with a human Jesus. In other words, the Jesus referred to as the founder of Christianity was originally a 1st-century human being, about whom a later mythology grew up, whose followers became the original group that would mutate over time into Christianity. I’m therefore reviewing Price’s book to discuss his arguments and my reasons for disagreeing.

The first post in this book review is here. Links to the posts on all subsequent chapters can be found at the end of that post.

 

Hoo boy, nearly at the end… I’m going to try to finish off this chapter in this post, then use three posts to cover the final list of questions.

Content warning for ablism regarding mental illness.

Paul

We can see that the vast majority of teachings Christians have attributed to Jesus actually come from Paul, not Jesus.

While I will certainly buy that some such teachings did, if Price wants to claim ‘vast majority’ he needs to break it down and show his workings here.

Who was Paul? Nothing is known about him other than what is recorded in his writings, but
any objective assessment of his writings reveals Paul to have essentially been a raving lunatic.

(facepalm)

‘Raving lunatic’ is what’s known as an ablist insult; in this case, one using stereotypes and prejudice about mental illness. Ablist insults don’t work well for anything, but they certainly don’t work as a substitute for knowing what you’re talking about.

OK, I’m going to try to break it down… ‘Raving lunatic’ is a term used to dismiss someone by evoking the false stereotype that people with any form of mental illness and/or psychotic experience can’t possibly be a reliable witness on any other subject. Oh, and mixed in there we frequently get a huge dollop of assumption that beliefs based on religious or cultural differences can be taken as a sign of mental illness, which they can’t.

Meanwhile, these stereotypes can be deeply harmful to people who do have some type of mental illness and as a result can’t get taken seriously in other areas of life. Price, if you take nothing else away from this entire critique – which I’m suspecting will be the case – please, please, in future, think twice about this careless use of terms like ‘raving lunatic’ to dismiss those with whom you disagree.

As for Paul, an ‘objective assessment of his writings’ actually shows him to have been a man who could write articulately and fluently, and teach a rather complex theology which he seems to have also worked out himself. So, no, dismissing him as a ‘raving lunatic’ is not only offensive, it’s inaccurate. And, yes, you can take that as my medical opinion as a qualified and experienced GP.

Ablism aside, how much weight should we give to Paul’s writings as any sort of evidence about Jesus? Well, I do think it’s fair to say that on the subject of Jesus he is not particularly reliable; he didn’t know Jesus, he’s tried to minimise his contacts with people who did know Jesus, and he’s driven by the theology he’s worked out around who he thinks Jesus is. So, although Paul did in fact clearly believe Jesus had lived a human life on earth, I don’t think that’s particularly good evidence for whether Jesus did have a human life on earth. However, when it comes to more basic prosaic stuff such as whether he met such-and-such a person or whether he knew of particular people within the church, I do think he was perfectly capable of commenting on what happened. So, his two comments about brothers of Jesus are in fact strong evidence for the existence of people referred to as Jesus’s brothers.

 

Other Abrahamic religions (alternative subheading: ‘Seriously, WTF, Price’?)

The legitimacy of Islam is every bit as dependent on the historical existence of Jesus as Christianity is. Likewise, it is reasonable to conclude that Judaism itself would either no longer exist today or would have a significantly diminished status and following if not for the rise of Christianity. The preservation of Jewish works and culture occurred to a large degree because of the relationship between Judaism and the dominant religions of Christianity and Islam, despite paradoxical hostility toward the ancestral religion by its descendants.

Hoo boy.

I can’t speak for Islam, although I very much doubt that ‘every bit as dependent’ claim; I’m guessing that ‘we’re wrong about the existence of somebody else’s prophet’ would blow at least somewhat less of a hole through a religion than ‘we’re wrong about the existence of our own leader and founder whose willing death was supposedly absolutely necessary for erasing our sins’. However, as far as Judaism’s concerned, Price seems to be overlooking the very obvious fact that Jews have done a good job of preserving Jewish works and culture over the centuries, and have been far more motivated to do so than Christians, who’ve tended to be somewhat more interested in retconning Jewish history and a lot more interested in changing Jewish future by converting and/or persecuting Jews.

So, excuse me, but I am absolutely not giving the credit for preservation of those works to the very group who’ve done so much to destroy Judaism. As someone who’s ethnically part Jewish and still cares deeply about it from the cultural point of view, I can tell you that this had a very uncomfortable white saviour vibe to it (in this case, Gentile saviour). Don’t do that, Price.

 

Conclusion (Price’s)

Price has a couple more paragraphs at this point to wrap up. He tells us that the ‘Jesus of Christianity’ was just a hallucination of Paul’s, which is… actually not too far off correct, since the concept of Jesus as a deliberate sin sacrifice certainly seems to have been an invention of Paul’s. However, that still leaves us with the question of who Jesus was before Paul retconned him this way. Despite Price’s exhortations in the final paragraph that we ‘have to’ recognise that Jesus never existed, Price has still failed to give us any convincing evidence that Jesus was originally an imagined divine being rather than a human preacher who founded the group that became Christianity.

 

Conclusion (mine)

Well… looks like I made it through Price’s argument. Which, as far as I can see, breaks down to the following claims:

And I think that’s it. Did I miss any? As far as I can see, those are all the arguments Price has made that are actually pro-mythicism rather than rearguard attempts to explain away the various bits of evidence for historicity. And, on going through them, none of them have stood up to examination. Deciphering the gospels hasn’t come out with the answer Price wanted, and deciphering Price’s work has left us with no valid arguments for his case.

 

Well, that was the end of the last chapter! As I’ve said, this leaves us with a list of twelve questions for mythicists which Price has included as a sort of epilogue. I plan to split those up into three groups of four, just to manage post length. I’ve also taken the opportunity to come up with my own list of questions for Price and other mythicists that haven’t been answered properly (or, in most cases, at all) through this debate, so I’ll include those as well. And then – after a mere seven years – we will finally be done with the book! See you guys soon.

 

‘Deciphering The Gospels Proves Jesus Never Existed’: Chapter 12, Part 2

‘Deciphering the Gospels’, by R. G. Price, argues the case for Jesus mythicism, which is the view that Jesus never existed on earth in any real form but was an entirely mythical figure in the same way as Hercules or Dionysus. (The author is not the same person as Robert Price, also a Jesus mythicist author.) I’m an atheist who holds the opposing (and mainstream) view that Christianity started with a human Jesus. In other words, the Jesus referred to as the founder of Christianity was originally a 1st-century human being, about whom a later mythology grew up, whose followers became the original group that would mutate over time into Christianity. I’m therefore reviewing Price’s book to discuss his arguments and my reasons for disagreeing.

The first post in this book review is here. Links to the posts on all subsequent chapters can be found at the end of that post.

I’d optimistically planned for this post to finish off Chapter 12, but of course it got longer than I’d expected, so there will be at least one more post after this one addressing points in Chapter 12 (plus the planned posts for the question list at the end).

 

The Gospels

Price, having cobbled together his supposed proof about gMark being fictional, builds on this for the next stage of his argument:

The Gospels do not corroborate each other. In fact, the only thing that the Gospels do corroborate is that none of their authors could possibly have had any knowledge of a real Jesus, because every single Gospel, canonical and noncanonical, shows dependence on the fictional story that we call the Gospel of Mark. The only way that every single writing about the life of Jesus would be based on a single fictional story is if no one had any knowledge of a real Jesus.

…which, of course, falls down at the premise, since Price’s attempts to show that gMark is fictional have been so utterly unsuccessful, so that’s that. However, there is something further I wanted to say here:

This argument seems to be based on the assumption that the other gospel writers were casting around for the best account they could find of this Jesus person of whom they were writing. But this seems like yet another thing that doesn’t fit with the rest of Price’s argument, because Price also believes that this whole shebang started out with one fictional account written for a group who actually believed Jesus was a heavenly being, and that the people writing embroidered versions of that account somehow completely failed to find this out at any point.

Well… you can’t have it both ways. You can’t simultaneously claim that Matthew and the rest would be so colossally undiscerning that they never asked even basic questions like ‘hey, this Jesus sounds really interesting, can you tell us a bit more?’ and that they would also want to look round to see whether any better or more detailed accounts were available before opting for gMark as their source. Price, once again, doesn’t seem to have thought about how any of this would have happened in practice.

Meanwhile, Price has still completely failed to explain why on earth all these gospel writers would be putting so much effort into writing expanded versions of a fictional story. I mean, imagine someone reading gMark with no knowledge whatsoever of the background, just as a random manuscript they’d come across. Yes, some people would believe it. Yes, some might even have wanted to find out more about this Jesus person and whether he really had risen from the dead as the ending claimed. But Price’s theory seems to require a situation where multiple people would decide to start proclaiming this gospel as fact and rewriting it with a load of extra detail… but all without making any effort at all to check whether the existing group had any extra detail. There’s no realistic way in which I can see any of that happening.

By the way, while I think of it, let’s also not forget the unlikelihood of someone reading gMark with no context or background in the first place. Again: all manuscripts at that point were handwritten. No-one was going to be running off extra copies in a print run or keeping them on the shelves of a local bookshop. Mark would have been passing his copies around himself, because that was what happened in those days. Anyone who acquired one would be getting it from someone they knew (if not Mark directly, then someone else who was passing it on). So… did whoever passed a copy on to Matthew not give him any kind of explanation as to what this book was? Did Matthew not go back to that person to ask them any questions before writing an expanded version and spreading it as a new belief? How on earth does Price picture this as having worked?

 

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means…

Furthermore, if we accept that the Gospels do not actually describe the life of Jesus, nor do any of the early epistles, then what could possibly explain why a real Jesus person would have been worshiped as an eternal heavenly being capable of overcoming death, destroying the world, and saving the souls of the righteous? If one acknowledges that a real-life Jesus wouldn’t have performed miracles, risen from the dead, or fulfilled prophecies, then why would this real-life Jesus have been worshiped? Clearly, later Christians worshiped the Jesus character from the Gospels, precisely because they believed that he had performed miracles, risen from the dead, and fulfilled prophecies. Those are, explicitly, the reasons why Jesus is worshiped by Christians. But if those are the reasons that Christians worship Jesus, and a real-life Jesus wouldn’t have done any of those things, then why would the real-life Jesus be worshiped at all?

A couple of notes: Firstly, can we note that the actual explicit reason why Jesus is worshipped by Christians is that they believe he was part of God. Secondly, I’m slightly amused by how unaware Price seems that in fact quite a few real-life people have been worshipped by others over the centuries. Being worshipped certainly isn’t a sign of being fictional.

That said, I think the main point to make here is that I don’t think the real-life Jesus was worshipped by his original followers. I think that he was followed, not worshipped; in other words, his followers saw him as a human leader rather than as a divinity. And beliefs then changed over the years so that he came to be seen first as a divine being probably more on the level of an angel, and eventually (after what seems to have been some centuries and quite a bit of controversy) as a part of Yahweh himself.

As to why people would have followed a real-life Jesus, there are obvious reasons for that. He was apparently charismatic and a good preacher, and and he was what we would call a faith-healer (which does not involve actually performing miracles but has more to do with what your followers/the people you’re healing believe you can do). In addition, his followers were looking for someone who might be the prophecied king who would usher in the Messianic age, and Jesus looked like he might fit the bill. Wishful thinking did the rest.

It actually makes far less sense that worship of a powerful celestial being who had overcome death would have started with the worship of a mere mortal, than for it to have started with the worship of a celestial deity to begin with.

This gives Price a much greater problem which he still hasn’t solved: how would this belief take the reverse journey? How would worship of a powerful celestial being turn into a belief that this celestial being lived a mortal life? According to Price, all that was needed was for one person to write a fanfic. Multiple people then believed this so strongly and unquestioningly that they formed a whole belief system with even more detailed accounts of this imaginary life, completely obliterating the original belief in Jesus as a heavenly being, all without these people ever noticing that everyone else who believed in Jesus (including the original author of the fanfic that started the whole thing) believed that he had in fact been a heavenly being. Just how does Price think all that happened? He’s yet to explain.

There is absolutely no evidence of belief in a real human Jesus prior to the writing of the Gospel stories.

… you mean, other than Paul repeatedly writing about Jesus in human terms and mentioning having met his brother?

 

Price still misunderstands Docetism

When faced with opposition to the belief that Jesus was actually human, or had ever been on earth, even the earliest believers in “the flesh” of Jesus could do nothing more than cite scripture to support their beliefs […] Within two hundred years of his supposed life, the only evidence that could be produced to show that God, or God’s son, had come to earth and taken
human form was four written accounts that supposedly corroborated each other and corroborated the divine prophecies that predicted his life, deeds, and death.

Yes, because there is no evidence of anyone disputing that Jesus had been on earth. There was plenty of argument over whether he was human, a divine being cunningly disguised as human, or a divine being that had become human… but you know what all those beliefs have in common? The belief that this Jesus person had showed every indication of having been on earth as a human. And what would be the most likely reason why everyone would believe this? That Jesus actually was on earth as a human.

On which note, I’ll split the chapter here and hope to get the last of it dealt with in one more post.

‘Deciphering The Gospels Proves Jesus Never Existed’, Chapter 12, Part 1

‘Deciphering the Gospels’, by R. G. Price, argues the case for Jesus mythicism, which is the view that Jesus never existed on earth in any real form but was an entirely mythical figure in the same way as Hercules or Dionysus. (The author is not the same person as Robert Price, also a Jesus mythicist author.) I’m an atheist who holds the opposing (and mainstream) view that Christianity started with a human Jesus. In other words, the Jesus referred to as the founder of Christianity was originally a 1st-century human being, about whom a later mythology grew up, whose followers became the original group that would mutate over time into Christianity. I’m therefore reviewing Price’s book to discuss his arguments and my reasons for disagreeing.

The first post in this book review is here. Links to the posts on all subsequent chapters can be found at the end of that post.

 

Chapter 12: Conclusion and Commentary

Hooray! As you probably deduced from the title, we are actually at the final chapter. This won’t quite be the end because there’s then a list of questions from Price, but we are definitely in the home stretch here.

Price starts this chapter with telling us ‘Let’s review the case that has been presented’, although in fact he doesn’t review much of it. However, he does summarise the original part that has been the cornerstone of all the rest of his argument; his theory about gMark. So, let’s go over this.

 

The gospel of Mark: Price’s views and the reality

The case I have presented shows that a story we now call the Gospel of Mark was the first narrative that portrayed the life and deeds of Jesus on earth. […] It is clear that whoever wrote the Gospel called Mark intended that the story would be understood as fictional.

So clear, in fact, that almost every single person who’s read it from the time it was written until now has interpreted it as being about a real person who really lived on earth and had followers who became the origin of Christianity. Whatever Price’s thoughts on what gMark really did mean, I think he might do well to rethink that ‘clear’.

Of course, the reason Price believes in the face of all evidence that this is ‘clear’ is because he’s convinced that gMark was meant as fictional. So he now takes a minute to summarise his basic argument:

We can prove that the story is fictional because of the abundant use of literary references within the story. Virtually every scene in the Gospel called Mark is based on literary references to either the Hebrew scriptures or to the letters of Paul.

And on his firm belief in this claim, Price has piled all the rest of his argument. So let’s look at it.

Firstly, that ‘virtually every scene’ is a huge exaggeration. And when I say ‘exaggeration’, I do want to be clear that I mean just that. I am not trying to say that gMark doesn’t contain any literary references to the Hebrew scriptures; it’s long-since been well accepted by scholars that many passages in gMark absolutely are scriptural references. That much isn’t controversial at all. I also think it’s fair to say that the early church, Mark among it, was heavily and disproportionately influenced by Paul and that this also accounts for parts of the teaching in gMark. So, if Price had stuck with ‘Quite a bit of gMark is based on either the Jewish scriptures or or Paul’s letters’ then I would have no disagreement with that claim whatsoever. What I am disagreeing with, here, is the claim that these derivations account for not just some parts of gMark, but for ‘virtually every scene’.

The problem here is that Price’s requirements for the level of similarity needed for him to declare a scene to be based on a literary reference have been so slight and flimsy. For example, he’s claimed that the calling of the apostles is derived from Jeremiah 16, solely because both passages mention fishing and hunting. He’s claimed that Jesus’s teaching in Mark 7:20 – 23 must be derived from Galatians 5:16 – 21 just because both passages have a list of sins… even though it’s an almost completely different list of sins in a completely contradictory context.

When you look for similarities this minor between writings, of course you find them! Especially when the writings come from approximately the same cultural background, and the body of work in which you’re looking for these similarities is a very large one covering a wide range of topics. The fatal flaw in this argument of Price’s is that he shows no sign of having at any point considered the possibility of the similarities being coincidental; yet he’s set up comparisons so broad and vague that they make it virtually certain that we are, in fact, going to get coincidental similarities.

What we have, then, is a gospel in which some scenes are clearly derived from Hebrew scriptures, or arguably from things Paul has written. And Price and I do agree on that much; there is at least some derivation there. So, is that enough to ‘prove’ that gMark is entirely fictional?

Not even close… because, as Price himself has pointed out, it was normal at the time for biography writers to embellish the facts in their writings. Here’s what Price wrote back in Chapter 4:

These types of pseudo-historical mythologized accounts of people’s lives and deeds were not at all uncommon during that period, so the modern sense of recording fact-based history is simply something that wasn’t pervasive in that culture. These types of fabricated embellishments of biographies were widespread, so even if the authors of Matthew and John thought they were writing biographies of a real person, embellishing them would have been a common practice.

….so, by the same token, if Mark was writing a biography of a real person it would still have been normal for him to embellish it with mythical elements… such as presenting it in a way that reflects scripture. And, in fact, we can see that Mark was prepared to present the life of an actual person in a way that’s embroidered and given a particular scriptural slant, because he does this with John the Baptist, whose existence has been confirmed by an actual historian.

In other words, the story we have – that of a contemporary rabbi and apocalyptic preacher of the time, dressed up with lots of Scriptural references – is exactly what we would expect to see in a hagiography of an actual contemporary rabbi and apocalyptic preacher that had been written by one of his unquestioning followers.

There’s an important question here that it never seems to have occurred to Price to ask himself; what would we expect the biography of a real Jesus to look like? If an author of the time was writing about an actual rabbi/apocalyptic preacher who was the original founder and leader of the author’s religious group, what sort of thing might we expect him to write? In what way does Price think that such a work would have differed from what we do in fact have? GMark is a collection of stories about a preacher saying the kinds of things that a rabbi or apocalyptic preacher of the time would have said, significantly embellished in ways that framed it clearly within the context of the Jewish scriptures, and heavily influenced by slightly later writings (Paul’s) that we know were indeed very influential in shaping the direction of the early church. What part of that does Price think doesn’t look like something we would expect from a hagiography of an influential Jewish preacher from a time and culture where embroidering stories and paying homage to the scriptures was normal?

Meanwhile, Price still leaves us with no satisfactory answer to why, if there was never a real human Jesus, gMark would have invented one in the first place. Why would a member of a group that believed Jesus to be an immaterial heavenly being decide to rewrite him as an imperfect human rabbi? And, speaking of having no satisfactory answers to questions… why would this fictional work catch on so completely and rapidly that multiple other people would write extended versions without realising it was fiction and, within the next fifty years, people who had nothing to do with the group would also hold a widespread belief that this fictional person had in fact led the group and been executed?

Price has simply not given us a single argument that stands up to any kind of examination. He’s pointed out derivative passages in a work where we would expect to find them, and then stretched comparisons to the breaking point in order to claim far higher numbers of derivative passages than are actually there. And this deeply flawed analysis of gMark is the cornerstone of his whole argument. If you’ll excuse me phrasing it this way… he has founded his house on sand.

This seems like a good place to split the chapter. Can probably manage the rest of it in one further post (maybe two) and there’s then the list of questions, which I think is also best split into two or three posts. So, the end is in sight.

Walking Disaster, Chapter 24

This is a chapter-by-chapter review of problematic romance novel ‘Walking Disaster’ by Jamie McGuire. Posts in the series will all be linked back to the initial post, here.

This was initially a companion series to the magnificent Jenny Trout‘s review of the original novel, ‘Beautiful Disaster’. Jenny has since stopped her review, not wanting to give McGuire any further publicity in the wake of her attempts to run for office.

 

Chapter Twenty-Four: Forget

Another surprise: at the beginning of this chapter, Travis is actually trying something helpful. He’s realised he’s got to keep himself from constantly calling Abby, and he’s recognised there’s a huge chance of him giving in to temptation, so he’s managing this by avoiding having his phone with him. Initially he leaves it in his car. Shepley objects because what if Travis’s dad wanted to get in touch with him (uh, Shep, you’re Jim’s nephew; I’m sure he could send a message via you in case of emergency) so Travis leaves his phone on the TV so that he’s not constantly reaching for it. Good for you, Travis!

And another: This bit is actually reasonably well-written. Did Maguire take a writing class part way through and then just not bother to go back and rewrite the earlier bits? Anyway, we’ve time-jumped forwards to what we find out is New Year’s Eve. We learn that Trenton keeps phoning Travis in what Trav describes as ‘some sort of Maddox suicide watch’ which is well-meant but a) irritating for both Trav and Shep and b) really not helping with the whole ‘stay away from the phone’ thing, and that Travis is trying to take his mind off things by doing as many of the illegal fights as Adam will arrange, which isn’t very many because it’s winter break and there aren’t enough people around to want to watch them.

Trent tells Trav he’s being ‘a huge pussy’ for not doing more to get over it, because apparently we’d gone a bit too long without having some sort of misogynistic/toxic masculinity moment. Oh, well, my few minutes of not hating this book were quite nice while they lasted.

Anyway, Trent thinks Trav ought to come out with him for New Year’s Eve, so when Trav keeps refusing Trent tells him that if Trav isn’t showered, dressed, and ready to go out by the time Trent turns up Trent will phone everyone up and tell them that Trav’s having a party at his place with beer kegs and hookers. That’s… actually kind of ingenious in a ‘yes, but next time use your powers for good and not for evil’ kind of way. Anyway, it works and Trav gets ready, but not before taking a few minutes to gaze longingly at the engagement ring he bought for Abby back when they were still together. You know, when these teenagers dated for… I was going to say a couple of months but it isn’t even that, since it was well into autumn when they got together and still before Thanksgiving when they broke up. During which less-than-two-month period Trav bought her an engagement ring. Because, apparently, it ‘made sense to keep it just in case the perfect moment happened to arise’. No, Trav, it makes sense not to assume you’re going to get to the proposal stage with a relationship that just started weeks ago. Sigh.

Trent arrives and the three of them (Shepley included) head out to the Red. Apparently Trent has got ‘a friend coming’ and Trav seems to understand immediately who he means by that… (scans ahead) oh, wait, it wasn’t that Trav had someone specific in mind, it was that Trent’s trying to set Trav up with someone. The ‘someone’ in question turns out to be a divorced woman called Carissa who apparently used to babysit for Trav, which doesn’t sound like a great setup for getting together. Though she was in the same school year as Tyler and Taylor, so it must have been a teenager babysitting for a slightly younger child rather than a situation where she was taking care of an actual toddler, so, less weird than I initially thought.

Anyway, she drunkenly tries the whole don’t-want-to-be-alone-tonight line and Trav’s not interested. Carissa tries kissing him at midnight anyway and he pulls away, runs off into the bathrooms, struggles with himself over whether to phone Abby, and ends up resisting the temptation and hurling his phone at the wall instead, startling some poor guy at the urinal. Then he tells the guys he’s going and Trent drives him home…. despite having been drinking heavily through the evening. Sigh. They make it back without incident but Jesus fuck, McGuire, stop normalising drunk driving. Stop normalising something that destroys lives both metaphorically and literally.

We time-jump ahead to the start of spring semester, which Trav has very mixed feelings about because he’s longing to see Abby again but at the same time dreading it. He tells us that he was ‘determined to be all smiles, never letting on how much I’d suffered, to Abby or anyone else’, which makes me suspect that we’ve got some sort of ‘clearly he doesn’t really care that much about me at all’ misunderstanding coming up, but, oh, well, hopefully I can skim through it quickly if so.

Anyway, Trav sees Abby at lunch but spends the first part of lunch telling his frat boy friends Wild Anecdotes of drunken adventures with his brother, then briefly tries making heartily casual conversation with Shep and Abby while resting his hands on Abby’s shoulders and… swinging her from side to side? Is she now a fidget toy or something? Anyway, Abby sounds unhappy and it’s all seriously awkward and Trav heads outside pretty quickly.

Trav makes it through his last couple of classes and heads home with Shepley. Shep reluctantly tells him that America reported that Abby’s been miserable over Christmas break. Since Shep isn’t sure why she’s miserable or what she wants from Travis, this doesn’t really help the situation and Travis just gets upset again.

Shep, still trying to be helpful, tries the following suggestion:

“You think . . . you think if maybe you focused on all the bullshit you had to endure with her, that’d make it easier?”

I’m at a bit of a loss as to what ‘bullshit’ Shep thinks Trav had to ‘endure’ as a result of being with Abby, though I’d have no problem coming up with examples of the converse. Trav’s reply that he wishes he could ‘have all the bad stuff back . . . just so I could have the good’ is not much help in clarifying what the hell McGuire thought she meant here.

Shep is saved from his further clumsy struggles to be helpful by Trent texting to ask Trav to pick him up from work and take him to Cami’s, as his own car’s broken down. Oh, sorry, not Cami’s place, but the Red, where she works. (Cami is the main bartender there and Trent’s love interest for the next book in the ‘Beautiful’ series, or at any rate the next one after ‘Beautiful Disaster’, since I believe ‘Walking Disaster’ was written later.)

Trav borrows Shep’s car to take Trent to the Red and proceeds to get blasted drunk, without Trent trying to stop him despite the fact that he is supposed to be driving someone else’s car home. McGuire, fuck your horrible examples with a cactus. Megan (I think she’s the one who was staying over in the first chapter but who gives a fuck at this point) comes and tries to get off with him; she does offer to drive him home and Trent persuades him to let her, which, despite her obvious ulterior motive, is a pretty good idea right then.

They get out to the car and Megan promptly starts snogging the face off Trav and moves on to pretty much dry-humping him. Trav goes along with this in a why-the-hell-not kind of way, and they go back to the apartment, obviously planning sex. I assumed from the start of reading this bit that Trav would look up at some point and see Abby was watching all this, and, with depressing predictability, so he did. When he and Megan get back to the apartment, to be specific. Also, Abby is holding Toto, so Maguire has clearly remembered his existence yet again after weeks of him getting ignored during the breakup.

Abby storms out in a huff saying that she doesn’t even know why she’s surprised. Yes, Abby, you broke up with him weeks ago, I don’t know why you’re surprised either. He does get to move on.

No matter what I did – moving on without her, or lying in my bed agonizing over her – she would have hated me.

Trav follows her screaming at her for being mad at him for this, and, just for once, he’s not wrong. (Oh, wait… have now checked the scene out in ‘Beautiful’ and it seems my skimming means I missed the bit where this whole argument, including the bit where Abby is getting huffy with him, is only happening because instead of just letting her go he runs after her and grabs her coat to keep her there. Which, by the way, is on icy ground so she damn near falls over. OK, I retract my statement. Trav’s still actively being a dick.)

There’s a short scene which is basically several lines more of Abby being mad that the man she split up with has now decided to have sex with someone else and Trav being upset about that she’s mad about it, and then Trav grabs Abby’s arm to try to stop her leaving. Which I agree isn’t great and he should lay off, but America loses her entire shit over this and starts hitting him.

“How could you? She deserved better from you, Travis!”

So once again America, who has regularly been willing to give Travis a pass for his aggressive, stalkery, and borderline abusive behaviour, decides that the one thing she’s not going to stand for is Trav having sex with someone else while he’s single. And, when Shep tries stopping her, she ‘glares at him in disgust’ and we get this:

“Abby broke up with him. He’s just trying to move on.”

America’s eyes narrowed, and she pulled her arm from his grip. “Well then, why don’t you go find a random WHORE” – she looked at Megan – “from the Red and bring her home to fuck, and then let me know if it helps you get over me.”

America gets in the car with Abby and drives off after telling a pleading Shep ‘”There is a right side and a wrong side here, Shep. And you are on the wrong side.” Shep reacts to all this by punching Trav, which Trav figures he deserves, for… the heinous crime of being about to have sex with someone else almost two months after his girlfriend broke up with him, I suppose. Anyway, this all puts a comprehensive damper on anything he was about to do with Megan, and the chapter ends with Shep being about to drive Megan home.