I have often noted or even used good ideas from amateur scholars like David Oliver Smith and R.G. Price (not to be confused with Robert M. Price). I even named Price in my original study of the historicity of Jesus as among the few amateurs doing work worthy of attention, even if it didn’t always persuade (Historicity 53–54); and in my latest study I listed Smith’s study of the use of the Epistles in the Gospels and Acts as among the required reading on that subject (Paradigm 34n36), because it is that good. But Price so far as I know only has a B.S. in biology. Smith has a J.D., which is a doctorate in jurisprudence, a top level research degree in law, which is closer to a relevant skillset. And I get the impression Smith is much more facile with ancient Greek than Price.

I usually caution against relying on amateurs (see my remarks in A Primer on Actually Doing Your Own Research) and often their work goes very badly (see my examples in The Problem with Varieties of Jesus Mythicism); but I also think experts can evaluate their merits for you, so you know which ones you can trust more, or which of their results you can (see my examples in Three Genuinely Good Lay Treatments of Bible History). But even then, you should always double check even experts, much more amateurs, before trusting their results (see my remarks in A Vital Primer on Media Literacy and, for example, How to Evaluate Expert Testimony and Things Fall Apart Only When You Check). Peer review kind of serves to perform this function for you (see On Evaluating Arguments from Consensus). But that has been breaking down lately (see Exposing T.C. Schmidt’s Oxford Apologetics and The Korean “Comfort Women” Dust-Up and the Function of Peer Review in History along with these linked resources). So you increasingly need outside review to trust things.

I don’t have time or even a good reason to review every amateur work, even of those who sometimes do good work. It is costly labor for me to do that, so I would need to be paid for it. I can only afford to eat that cost myself when (1) they have done a bit of research that looks good at a glance, on a question that (2) directly informs something I am already working on. I recently wrote up an example of this from Smith: The Mystery of the Seven Loaves as Mythographic Composition in Mark. But today I am compelled to look at bad examples, one from Smith and one from Price. Because understanding why they are bad will help you apply general principles to evaluating any work yourself, expert or amateur (and, hopefully, help you avoid making the same kinds of mistakes in your own reasoning).

The Main Methodological Point

All mistakes (and, as it happens, all lies and crankery and apologetics and propaganda as well) usually function by misusing a method that resembles one that actually works. Consider the way cranks will call every criticism ad hominem because that is a real fallacy and thus a real rebuttal when it’s true—so they want to trade on the respectability and emotional persuasiveness of that real complaint even when it does not in fact describe anything they happen to be talking about. “Criticized what we said” and “criticized us” become conflated in their mind (or they want them to become conflated in your mind) in order to distract from what actually happened, all to avoid the consequences—of, for example, being caught making a mistake and correctly called out for it, and from the mistake being then correctly explained by a lack of expertise, carefulness, honesty, or whichever thing can be documented as most likely having caused it, thus giving reason to not implicitly trust more from them without checking first. “How dare you insult me” is the way you cover up the actual “how dare you catch me” that happened. And the best way to do that is to steal the valor of a real example of the thing you wish happened and misapply it to what actually happened..

Price and Smith aren’t cranks or liars. They are, rather, just over-enthusiastically self-persuaded by bad arguments from time to time. And that does have some to do with a lack of professional training and its concomitant experience. To illustrate this I won’t be reviewing either entire book that I will be taking examples from today. I am not actually interested in them because they seem too flawed to be worth more time, or else address subjects I don’t have enough interest in to carve time out for. Nor will I be addressing every single argument they make even on the single example I will be using. I will only cover enough to make the point. The rest of their arguments could be just as bad, or they could even be good but nevertheless inadequate to carry their point given the mistakes I do call out.

Tomorrow I will add my discussion of Smith and give you my Conclusion regarding both.

R.G. Price and Building on vs. Drowning in Epicycles

My example from Price is from Cracking the New Testament (2026), chapter five, where he argues for a particular hidden meaning intended by the Parable of the Sower. As per my general point, he is here borrowing a real method: Mark absolutely intended hidden meanings in his stories and parables, so we absolutely need to try to reverse engineer what they are, and that involves using techniques similar to ones Price does employ. Because not only do we have many secure examples establishing Mark is doing this (the expert literature is rife with examples: Historicity §10.4), but Mark himself outright says so—more than once, including in the middle of the very Parable of the Sower story Price examines, which is indeed wrapped around this point, thus signaling it’s importance; and again in the Seven Loaves case from Smith and Farrer that I explored before.

The Parable of the Sower is one of the few parables Jesus actually explains the secret of (Mark 4:1-20). But what Mark has him explain in secret to his apostles is that it is a generic moral lesson about “kinds” of people, not specific characters in the story. Missionaries are sowing seeds of the gospel, and some seed falls on the road (the ὁδόν as signifying the Christian mission is a gospel theme across Mark: Historicity 419–21) and takes no root because Satan snatches it away from their minds, and some falls on rocky ground and gladly takes root but so shallowly that it withers as soon as pressure comes, and some falls on thorny ground where it is choked away by the desires of life, and some falls on good ground and thus bears a crop, “some thirty, some sixty, some a hundred times what was sown.”

Which is a truism. The missionary reading this is being told, “look, get ready, some of your marks will ignore your pitch, some will love it but leave as soon as it gets hard, and others will get distracted by life and fall away, but some will get it, and will themselves spread the message, and win even more converts.” It’s a shoulder-to-the-boulder morale boosting fable. Every pyramid scheme has some similar pep talk. And couching it into an ooo-aah parable form makes it sound wise and ingenious, when really it’s kind of a lame point, like explaining why chairs have legs, or that some people will always vote for Nader. The film Circle of Iron (whose script was originally written by Bruce Lee) made fun of this kind of thing with the mocking line “and horses don’t have udders, cows can’t whinny, up is down, and sideways is straight ahead!”

So it’s reasonable to wonder if Mark meant something even more hidden by this otherwise dumb point. Price wants to argue that the four kinds of people are represented by four specific characters in the Gospel: John the Baptist, Simon Peter, James Zebedee, and Paul. That’s plausible because Mark is covertly selling Paul throughout and even has Jesus doing it elsewhere. So it would make sense if he was here too. Unfortunately there is no methodologically sound way to get beyond just “strong believers” all the way to “Paul specifically” or even anything distinctive about Paul’s mission—other than that it was materially more successful because he was selling a cheaper product to a larger audience.

But the thing is, possibly does not get you probably. And just one coincidence can’t get you there either, because of the multiple comparisons fallacy: if any link counts, the chance of there being a link by chance approaches 100% and thus cannot signal intent. You need the coincidence to be improbable in order to signal intent. And the probability being measured is the total probability, not the incident probability. For example, the probability you will win the lottery is incident; the probability someone will win the lottery is total. And so we want to know the total probability we’d find anything that connects, not the probability that the one thing we find would be it. And that’s not because Mark can’t have had the intent you allege. It’s because we cannot claim to know he did on evidence that is as likely to be there on any other reason.

• Intent is only more probable than not when intended parallels are substantially more likely than a coincidence.

So what we need is more than one link. And we cannot create links by adding explanatory epicycles (extra leaps of logic to convert a non-link into a link), because that costs us more in probability than we gain by it (that’s The Cost of Making Excuses). And yet, again per my general point, it is easy to mistake doing this for a legitimate method. In some cases, a single epicycle can recover its cost in gained explanatory power—but (a) it has to actually do that (so this being sometimes the case does not justify always adding one epicycle and concluding you’ve succeeded at explaining something) and (b) it can rarely be more than one (because there is usually no way to recover the resulting geometric progression of cost, e.g. two epicycles that are 10% unlikely is 1% unlikely, which is ten times less likely).

Amateurs will “skip over” these caveats and just mistake epicycling as a correct method. It’s not. I show why mathematically, and what it takes to overcome that, in my discussion of interpolations. Amateurs will also mistake backgrounding as epicycling, because they look similar. Backgrounding is when you have what looks like an epicycle but, lo and behold, you can present independent evidence the epicycle exists. And it must be independent evidence. That it rescues your theory is not independent evidence it’s true. You need something that does not require your theory to be true. Chapters four and five of Historicity detail nothing but background data that can “epicycle” theories without cost, because that background is all established by its own evidence as true (or true as stated), and as true regardless of the theory tested (whether Jesus existed or not).

To show you what I mean, consider that Mark’s Jesus says the converts who really let the gospel take root won’t fall away—and will even convert more people to the cause, by sometimes thirtyfold, sometimes sixtyfold, sometimes a hundredfold. This is traditionally interpreted as meaning increasing degrees of enthusiasm will produce increasing degrees of outcome. But why specifically those numbers? I noted before that numerology is big with these authors. Do the numbers mean something? Experts have so far only tracked one, and it’s informative: Mark is alluding here to Genesis 26:12, “Isaac planted crops” in what would one day be the holy “land and the same year reaped a hundredfold, because the Lord blessed him.” Isaac is of course the human sacrifice Jesus was resubstituted for to replace the Yom Kippur (Historicity, Elements 18 & 43). Mark is thus midrashing on Genesis 26:12. When you do what god blesses, you will profit a hundredfold, representing the greatest possible outcome.

Isaac sowed literal seed for a hundredfold material wealth, staking his claim on a literal future kingdom; Jesus (and thus the future missionaries embodying him) will sow figurative seed for a hundredfold spiritual wealth, staking their claim on a spiritual future kingdom. That’s very likely the intended sense. There are then the smaller numbers. Yet the numbers sixty and thirty appear all over the OT but never in any context applicable, in the way Genesis 26 is. Only one supported step of logic is needed for that verse: the conversion of literal material things into figurative or spiritual things, which is so standardly done across Mark it isn’t improbable to assume this intent is shared again here, and the context even evinces it is here (literal sowing and its spiritual sense are demonstrably present—we do not have to presume them). But that means we can’t pull any other verse in, even if we can invent more steps of logic to convert them into an applicable sense, because those extra steps are unsupported and thus improbable, pushing us in the opposite direction. Disregarding the mathematical cost in probability of “just so” stories that make things fit the evidence is a common amateur mistake. So we just don’t know why Mark wrote thirty and sixty, other than that he needed some numbers to signify different degrees of enthusiasm short of full.

Still, this shows that sometimes we can find biblical sources for numbers that happen to match our context with an apposite meaning too improbable by chance. But sometimes the source they play on is outside the Bible. In the two swords pericope in Luke we just got lucky and have that extrabiblical source; but a lot of the time we can’t expect to have been so lucky, and thus the meaning we could have extracted is lost to us forever. And that’s just that. And here, so far, I have never seen anyone make a good case for these numbers meaning anything in particular. Price doesn’t even try. Instead, he ignores the numbers, and notices instead that the second group relates to “rocky ground” which puns with Simon’s nickname “Rocky” (Peter). And indeed, as this would predict, Peter is the one who is enthusiastic until threatened and then he abandons the gospel. So Price is on good ground here (pun intended). Because we have more than one coincidence here: rock and rocky; and what happens in the story to the one so designated.

But then things get weird. Not following any criteria of allusion (as developed by Brodie & McDonald and validated in Proving History at the end of chapter five), Price wants the seed on the road that Satan snatches away to refer to John the Baptist. But he can only make that happen by completely changing the evidence we have: he wants there to have been a lost original version of Mark (for which there is no evidence) that actually had John the Baptist the one who went into the wilderness to be tempted by Satan instead of Jesus (a weird change nowhere else in evidence). Price does the same with James, whom he needs to be the thorn-choked one, completely rewriting the evidence to have this unevidenced proto-Mark say he is the one who betrays Jesus for money instead of Judas (another weird change nowhere else in evidence, and not even plausible given how this role has to be performed by a Judah and not a Jacob).

That’s not even a complete list of the stack of improbable things Price needs to get his theory. And even after all that there really is no concrete link with the “good soil” and Paul. Nothing connects to Paul uniquely or his mission to the Gentiles—no more than to just any deep-rooted receiver of the gospel. Which is unlike the Seven Loaves story which connects with the Gentile mission repeatedly and conspicuously, and contrasts with the Jewish mission almost explicitly by an otherwise-improbable stack of coincidences. The evidence is there and stacks. Nothing the like is here.

Since Price has none of that, he replaces it with two unevidenced rewrites of the evidence, and a fuzzy leap of logic of comparison to Paul (among much else, but let’s pretend he only needed these three). If you have to believe in three radical new theories to believe in a fourth, you’re going in the wrong direction methodologically. Probability just goes down and down here, not up and up. Because of the conjunction fallacy, the probability that Price’s theory is correct must be less than the probability of any (and in fact all) of his other wild theories. So, for example, if the probability that Mark has been edited to replace James as betrayer with Judas is 10%, then Price’s theory has to be less than 10% likely. If the probability that Mark has also been edited to replace John encountering the devil with Jesus is also 10%, the combined probability of both is 1%, and Price’s theory of the Parable of the Sower must be less than 1% likely. And so on. It well approaches zero by the time you get through his stack.

Theories can only be known to be probable when you are working from the evidence there actually is. If you have to radically change all the evidence to get your theory to be likely, your theory is not likely. You are in fact staring at evidence against your theory. The only exception is when you have really, really good evidence for your change. For example, the odds against interpolation explaining 1 Thessalonians 2:14–16 are hundreds to one. But it just so happens that we have a stack of evidence for it being interpolated (other than its conflict with a theory it threatens) that is at least thousands to one more likely, thus overwhelming its low prior. Price has no such quantity or quality of evidence here. Not even for one of his leaps, much less all of them. His method is wrong. It does not generate knowledge. It only satisfies cognitive elation, a common driver of false beliefs, especially religions and conspiracy theories.

To understand the difference, consider that a case could be made that the middle two examples do track almost as Price wants. Peter is indeed symbolic of the stony people, and James and John (together) are symbolic of the thorny people. Not (as Price thought) because they betray Jesus for money, but because of their fight for future glory that Jesus chastises, and their replacement with two criminals with Jesus at the crucifixion. That represents the corresponding message and story arc—just as Simon Peter is replaced by Simon of Cyrene (as I explain in Historicity, 444–51). The middle two categories thus track to the story Mark tells. But the outer two categories seem to reflect everyone else, not particular characters—it just means all the people who ignore the gospel and all the people who deeply embrace it and carry the mission forward. There is no character exemplifying these who connects in more than one way with what appears here.

For an example of the same kind of design intended in Luke, see indeed the Two Swords Pericope, especially as I expand on from the literature in Paradigm (189–209; the following table is on 198), where the same technique appears: two of the lemmas refer to named characters (this time, Peter and Judas), while the other two are generically directed (even the lemma that encompasses James and John, a shared commonality with Mark’s Sower Parable). The resulting structure looks like this:

The evidence for all this is extensive, a stack of improbable coincidences, not just one (all detailed in Paradigm); and it all follows from the evidence as it is, no epicycles needed. We don’t have to invent or change any of the evidence to get that result. Unlike Price, who does.

By contrast, consider Price’s attempt to get John to be the one who ventures into the wilderness with Satan. Even apart from the fact that that story never says he fails the temptation, so the story never matches the narrative of Satan snatching away their interest in the gospel, the grammar of Mark’s entire pericope is too consistent and elegant to ever have meant this to be anyone other than Jesus. It’s also theologically apt: Jesus reverses Satan’s rebellion (Philippians 2, Historicity, 534, 184), just as he reverses Israel’s submission to the Satanic temptations Jesus resists (as Matthew understood Mark’s 40-day symbolism to represent: Historicity, 468–69); and Jesus has to be the one who defeats a Great Adversary before coming into his kingdom, as that is a component of the Rank-Raglan hero Mark is conforming Jesus to (Historicity, 233).

But…

• You must attend to how ancient authors were taught to compose.

So your theory needs to make sense of the Greek, not of some English translation of it. Hence more telling is the language, which Price misses (not being as versatile in Greek I presume):

At that time Jesus came from Nazareth in Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. Just as Jesus was coming up out of the water, he saw heaven being torn open and the Spirit descending on him like a dove. And a voice came from heaven: “You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased.” At once the Spirit sent him out into the wilderness, and he was in the wilderness forty days, being tempted by Satan. He was with the wild animals, and angels attended him.

The pronoun “him” is in the Greek, as a masculine accusative, and must take the most recent subject or object noun, and that’s Jesus, not John. John is never even a subject or object. When last mentioned he is an indirect object (Jesus is baptized “by John” just as he gets then tempted “by Satan” which is itself a parallel construction proving Jesus is meant to be the movant in both stories). So John cannot grammatically be the referent of a following pronoun. Indeed, you might say the Spirit is the last noun mentioned (or even the Voice, but as that is feminine, it can’t be the referent of a masculine pronoun). But Mark (unlike Price) knows how to compose: to avoid that confusion he has made the Spirit the subject of the next sentence, thus excluding it from also being its object.

Which actually proves the entire intent of this pericope is that Jesus is the one being baptized then tempted: because the parallel construction is “the Spirit descended on him” and then “the Spirit drove him out” into the wilderness. The Spirit is the agent: it moves into Jesus, and thus obviously then moves Jesus—not John, in whom the Spirit did not enter. Indeed, Mark then has the Spirit reverse its direction and “go out” of Jesus at his death: for ἐξέπνευσεν is often translated “breathed his last” but it actually means literally “expelled the Spirit” (ek- is “out,” pneu– is “spirit,” and –sen makes a verb of action). Hence when the Spirit drives someone into the wilderness, Jesus has to be the movant. John’s role is so ancillary he isn’t even the subject or object of any prior relevant sentence, and certainly not the one the Spirit entered so as to impel them somewhere.

So there is no way any author here ever meant John to be the one in the wilderness. Price’s theory is just not credible. And if he had applied sound method—to thus minimize weakly evidenced epicycles to ascertain the most probable theory on extant evidence (rather than a theory he can “make fit” somehow), and then attend to the underlying Greek language and its composition and grammar, and ensure the results fit all the other evidence of why Mark is telling any of these stories (hence knowing about the role of the Spirit here, all the way to the crucifixion and back)—he would not have made any of these mistakes. And I would not have wasted hours of my life wrangling a bad theory.

I would love it if there were some allusion to Paul here. But there just isn’t. And while I noted there are problems with the Seven Loaves argument for that being a reference to Paul (an obvious inspiration to find more), those problems are far weaker, and thus unable to drown out the evidence for that conclusion—which is not rewritten or invented evidence, but the actual evidence we have.

In the Sower Parable, if Paul had said something about different yields, even used the numbers thirty, sixty, and hundred in some applicable way, for example, then we maybe could salvage something here. And hey, sure, maybe he did say that, or anything else that more directly connects to something in this parable (it need not be the numbers), in some letter we don’t have or some piece of the letters we have that hasn’t survived—but speculation is idle; don’t know is don’t know. Likewise, Price notes some correct things (the role of Ezekiel 17 here; general ideas about sowing metaphors for the mission; and so on). But none are improbable without Price’s theory, and so none are evidence for Price’s theory. And yes, I do think he may be on to something. The Peter and James & John connections are probable. So maybe there is some connection to the others we are all missing. But that doesn’t get us the rest of Price’s theory. It at best sends us on a goose chase for some other one.

And maybe it’s not a wild goose. But who knows. For example, it is true that the Satan-snatched group is associated with “the road” and that connects to John the Baptist (as he “prepares” that road and did some sort of prior preaching), but the most we can honestly say is that this would have to mean John’s preaching was ineffective, not that Satan snatched the gospel out of him—because John is the sower in that case, not the seed. And even that’s fairly weak. We are leaping here. And we don’t have the needed two or more coincidences, just one, which is not improbable enough to be sure Mark means us to connect John here at all. After all, “the road” (translated “the way”) is a motif throughout Mark, not just the John pericope; and the only character besides Jesus that Mark directly connects Satan to is Peter, not John. But not in any way that connects here. So Satan can’t have been Mark’s intended link; Satan’s role in the parable is incidental, or generic—people in general must resist his temptations as Jesus did. Or something like that. This is all not as “red string board” as what has seduced Price. But it’s still more probable on sober considerations of method.

So Price just failed on sober considerations of method.

Tomorrow I will continue with my example from D.O. Smith, and my overall Conclusion and advice.