This is the final installment of my response to R.G. Price’s Case Against Historical Christ. I’m shocked that a person would come up with such weak reasons. By trying to provide too much evidence, he has actually weakened his case.
The Catholics made purely theological arguments as to why Jesus Christ had to have existed “in the flesh”
Price takes us through a few New Testament passages and more church fathers to show that a flesh and blood Jesus is only a theological construct. His point is that there are no historical reasons to believe in a Jesus with a real body, only theological reasons.
Yes Christian writers did argue that Jesus having a physical body was necessary for the atonement. I’m not sure how that negates a historical Jesus with a human body.
The theological ramifications are not the beginning point for why the Christians had a body. The first Christians just took that for granted. Some Christians explained the theological significance of this, but that doesn’t mean their belief was only based on theology.
Also, those early Christian apologists were arguing within a specific religious context. Normally you don’t have to fight over whether or not someone has a physical body.
But certain Docetists and Gnostics were arguing that Christ didn’t have a body. That was not because they thought that Jesus Christ was only an allegory that lived outside of history.
These people were working with a dualistic worldview that saw matter as evil and spirit as good. They took this so far as to see the God of the Old Testament as being evil since he created a universe of matter.
Since everyone was agreed that Christ was good, it was logical to these people that Christ must have been only spirit and only appeared to have a body. If he had a physical body, that would suggest an imperfection and thus disqualify him as a Saviour.
Yet none of these Docetists or Gnostics were claiming anything like the Jesus Mythicists.
The early Christians built a theology on the incarnation (God made human) but that was not why they believed that Jesus appeared as a physical human being.
