James:

Thanks for taking the time to make the review and setting forth your response so clearly, as well as letting me know about it. Alas, there is much to respond to in your response.

What you claim is assumed in the presentation actually is not.

(1) The issue of oral transmission is now well treated in Eddy and Boyd's work on The Jesus Legend, complete with examples of care in transmission involving long units. The NT sources noted in the book were already going down this trail which Eddy and Boyd develop.

(2) The issue of dating of works does not assume conservative dates and view of authorship; for the case, is made, I believe, speaking only of apostolic connections, a view looser than many conservative takes. You are right to ask for more here in terms of detail. That actually is another book on its own. In addition, the argument made at the end of Dethroning for how Christianity can be connected to the earliest roots, back to the thirties, does not assume any conservative dates but works with generally accepted results in NT studies about authors, forms and dates.

(3)The suggested uneven linkage between scholarly stuff and more popular stuff is because of the use popular approaches makes of approaches out of the results from many university contexts. In my view.this means that the combinations of looks at contemporary claims is not artificial, especially when the criteria was the public square penetration of these ideas which themselves are a mix of these kinds of materials.

(4) The claim that we deny that Gnosticism of the second century variety could emerge out of Judaism actually misses the point of the argument being made in the book. I have argued that Gnosticism emerged out of Judaism myself in The Missing Gospels. A denial of the Gnostic-Jewish connection was not the summary of our point, but that the kind of view of creation in the second century material would not have come out of the Jewish roots of Jesus and his followers. I see Gnosticism as emerging from a disappointed Judaism after the fall of Jerusalem and the Roman crushing of the Jewish rebellion in Egypt, not the context of the Judaism Jesus and his disciples reflect on in early first century Galilee.

(5) The exact point was that this Gnostic story of Creation does not match with the ideas of an early Christian movement that accepted the Hebrew Scripture as canon, a point Bart Ehrman accepts about what canon the earliest church had. Therefore there was an incompatibility between these materials that meant the Gnostic material could not be rooted in the original Jesus movement. In other words, a Jew embracing the account of Genesis and God as THE Creator and the material world as redeemable (as Jesus take on resurrection hope appears to deal with and so is something Jesus appears to have endorsed), is something the Gnostic story of creation rejects.

(6) The entire point of engaging Borg and Crossan on whether the Bible is metaphor or history (or better in my view history AND metaphor- not an excluded middle option) was the burden of our chapter critiquing them. You are correct to see this as differing reference points about the Bible between us. We are arguing that the case for simple metaphor as the only alternative is not ultimately so persuasive.

(7) Finally, the idea that the Bible is contradictory within itself is precisely why the leftovers of the F. C. Baur theory in Jim Tabor's work was addressed in detail-- and not simply assumed.

In sum, I make these points simply to suggest that there is more precision in the arguments of Dethroning Jesus than your review suggests. I do not believe there is as much assumed as your review suggests. You have noted there are many issues to raise in this discussion. The points just noted above are just a few.

Thanks again for the time and interaction.

Darrell Bock