The Jewish world in which Jesus lived may have been "awash in Hellenism" in some respects, but all evidence indicates that it did NOT affect religious life. Those who find it everywhere are suffering from parallelomania.
[J. P. Holding, correcting Russell Shorto, a journalist with his nose too deep in the Jesus Seminar]

The stench of hypocrisy is often one of the most obvious. Despite having declared that we can't trust "believing scholars" and their "agenda," Pikachu proceeds to turn his own crap-crusted fan back on himself and decides to feature his own little collection of scholars, apparently unaware of how readily he can be thus hoist on his own petard. Ignore the delusion: "Modern New Testament scholarship" is NOT exploring "the broad fact of Christian borrowing," little by little or otherwise; this remains the obsession of an extreme minority fringe, each with their own problems.

It's not that Pikachu is making it up -- it's that he's uncritical of those that do.

Talk about hoisting himself. Pikachu quotes none other than Robert Price, who of anyone he could have picked would be the easiest to accuse of an "agenda". Price is an atheist and an apostate, and makes no effort to hide his anger over his former faith. He publishes with the atheistic Prometheus Press, and for good reason: No reputable religious publisher would accept his mouth-foaming diatribes, composed primarily of fringe theories accompanied by cheap accusations of psychological dyspepsia towards anyone who doesn't recognize the world as he does (like the one quoted here). In short, a good twin brother for Pikachu, but you need not wonder why Price had to start his own journal to get anything published past peer review. For more on Price's efforts, see his entry here.

Let's correct this, shall we? "It is very hard not to see extensive and basic similarities between these [mystery] religions and the Christian Religion. It is hard to see "extensive", and "basic" in other words, is "meaningless" -- i.e., as defined by a low common denominator, too general to be worth anything. But somehow Christian scholars have managed not to see it, Wrong. They HAVE seen it; they have weighed the evidence, and overwhelmingly rejected it. and this, one must suspect, for dogmatic reasons....Exactly as noted. Price substitutes this sort of paranoid drivel and accusation when he can't provide a reasoned, sound answer based in evidence.
[Review of Deconstructing Jesus]

Mack the Knife says, "What the Hellenist?" Here's another one Pikachu shoots his own foot with. Burton Mack (see entries here) is quite unabashed about his perceptions that Christianity is a dangerous "myth" that has affected our society for the far worse. Agenda, anyone? Right. I won't use that excuse myself; just keep it in mind as Pikachu hoists himself higher on his own petard.

Without specifics (we will see one below), it's hard to answer Mack's claim pulled by Pikachu that the myths it [Paul's church] generated are ultimately Greek myths. But note the escape valve Mack gives himself to slither through when he says they were used by Hellenistic Jews to rearticulate Jewish ideals. That's his ready excuse when it is pointed out that there are better antecedents in Jewish thinking: "Uh, well, sure it looks Jewish; but even that's filtered by Hellenism." In other words, if it is Jewish, it is still Hellenistic, which makes Mack's thesis conveniently unfalsiable, undisprovable, and therefore worthless.

There are more than a few problems with Shorto's sound bite claiming that the virgin birth was borrowed from Paganism....

The old canard that the virgin birth isn't found in Paul's letters or in Mark, fails in about three places. To begin, there is no relevance for the virgin birth in the places where it is lacking mention. The NT materials were written to people who already believed the Gospel; by the time the were reading this stuff, they had already accepted all of the basic tenets. Furthermore, Paul was writing "problem-oriented" letters - so that there was really no need to go out of the way to mention anything that he did not have pertinence for. It also misses the point that the NT was written in a "high context" setting on which people's background knowledge of events was substantially assumed, as opposed to our "low context" society in which we feel a need to explain everything, every time! And it gets even worse: Brown [Brow.BirM, 521] observes that the virginal conception "would have become the subject of preaching (and therefore likely to be included in the kind of writing we find in the New Testament) only when its christological significance was seen." The primary theological doctrine associated with the virginal conception (that Christ was thus not tainted by original sin) was first cited by Augustine. Thus Shorto's bewilderment is in part because he views the doctrine thorugh the lens of hindsight: Unlike modern readers, the NT writers did NOT observe any christological significance in the virgin birth per se - any more than they did in any of Jesus' other miracles collectively. Hence, there was no need to go out of their way to report it, and all we can therefore say about the silence of the rest of the NT is that the virgin birth was simply "not a ground on which (the evangelists) called others to faith." [Ander.MI, 16] Indeed, Brown suggests that adding the virgin birth to the preaching of the church would have "opened Jesus' origins to ridicule and calumny" [Brow.VirgRes, 61] - but we may guess why. There would be the inevitable comparisons to pagan myths, or, the charge of illegitimacy - just as occurs today! The virgin birth was not seen in a christological perspective when Matthew and Luke reported it (it was seen as a fulfillment of prophecy by Matthew, and for Luke was a contribution to his model for an ancient biography); hence, there is no reason for it to appear in Paul's letters or in Mark and John. Note that even in the missionary preaching of Acts -- written by the same Luke who reports the virgin birth -- the kerygma begins not with Jesus' birth, but with his baptism by John. Shorto's bewilderment at the "silence" of Paul is caused by his own contextual ignorance of the ancient world.

Besides all this, and Shorto's non-specific begged question of a "Jewish practice of creative borrowing from ancient writings," Shorto erroneously declares that there were "dozens of precedents for divine-mortal coupling and virgin birth in Greek culture." In fact, there was no "coupling" in Matthew and Luke, and contraily, no "virgin birth" in any Greek account. In fact, the "parallels" are so dubious that one Biblical scholar, Jane Schaberg, argued that the lack of parallels indicates that the virgin birth could not have happened! It seems either way you "lose"!

In the healing miracles the encounter of the sick person with Jesus is usually followed by a remark about the severity of the disease. The healing is either accomplished through a word of Jesus (magical terms from Aramaic are sometimes preserved; (cf Mark 5:41; 7:34), through some manipulation (Mark 8:23), or a combination of both; the conclusion tells of the success of the healing and the applause of the bystanders. All these features correspond to the standard forms of the telling of exorcisms and healing narratives in [pagan] antiquity. Note that Pikachu inserts the word "pagan". It also corresponds to the standard forms of telling exorcisms and healings in Jewish antiquity (check the OT, Josephus, and intertestamental lit). The likely reason for this is related to this being an oral culture -- narrative forms made it easier to remember stories and had nothing to do with the epistemic reality. It's also because, as noted in the essay, in real history, you'd more or less expect a healing or exorcism to follow a certain order. It's not as though i.e., the applause of bystanders would come at any other point like before the encounter! Same with the nature miacles.

Next slippery move: Pikachu on the Judeo-Christian notion of Heaven allegedly being borrowed from the Greeks. Note how he inserts "Judeo-" in there to cover his butt. He can't make it a "Christian borrowing" so he just moves the goalposts. But the sound bite from Shorto is still flawed....

Following Ranke-Heinemann uncritically, Shorto claims that sometime in the mid-second century BCE, it appears, the Jews found heaven. Now let's think about this idiocy for a moment. The reason given is that there seems to be no mention of eternal life in the OT, but let's get real here: the real reason for that is because of the nature of the world the OT came from, and what the OT was written for. (See the link for details.) It is simply absurd to claim that while ideas of an afterlife are otherwise universal, the Jews for centuries had absolutely NO concept of the afterlife or what would happen there until they stumbled into the Greeks and said, "Hey, a heaven. That's a darned good idea! We never thought about what happens after death." Sheesh. To make matters worse, either Shorto or his source claim that the Essenes got their ideas of it "from" the Greeks. But read what Josephus says carefully: "Sharing the belief of the sons of Greece, they maintain that for virtuous souls there is reserved an abode beyond the ocean, a place which is not oppressed by rain or snow or heat, but is refreshed by the ever-gentle breath of the west wind (76) coming from the ocean; while they relegate base souls to a murky and tempestuous dungeon, big with never-ending punishments." [Josephus, The Jewish War, 2.8.11] This does not say they borrowed it from the Greeks, but that the shared the idea, had it in common with them. It says nothing about "borrowing" one way or the other; Josephus merely notes a commonality (and we may add, probably adjusts the Essene belief somewhat for his Hellenistic readers). In fact, if you read the whole of this section of the War, you find that Josephus actuaslly describes the Essene belief differently: [Essenes believe] that the souls are immortal, and continue forever; and that they come out of the most subtle air, and are united to bodies as prisons, into which they are drawn by a certain natural enticement; but that when they are set free from the bonds of the flesh, they then, as released from a long bondage, rejoice and mount upward. And this is like the opinion of the Greeks... [continued]. Got to watch that context, Pikachu!

Next up, Pikachu stumps for Jesus [sic] death being understood as a martyr's "nobel [sic] death". But sorry -- the idea of a sacrificial death was part of the Jewish temple cultus already. And to amend Mack --

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New Testament scholars " is not just that that "martyrological ideas were used by early Christians at some time to understand Jesus' death," but that this came after concepts of Jesus' death in terms of the Jewish temple rituals of atoning animal sacrifice. Sure, it would make sense for them to also bring in the idea of Greek "noble deaths" -- that would be a perfect way of explaining it to the Greeks, and to be "all things to all men." Christian missionaries do the same thing today; as for example when they have to explain the idea of a "lamb of God" to cultures that have never seen a sheep.…So despite Mack, the ideas of "vicarious, expiatory suffering, death, or self-sacrifice," were Jewish ideas. Just ask those Temple animals on the altar...

Koester is blowing smoke when he claims that the literary model for Luke's work was the ancient Greek epic . No, it was not., Depth genre studies by Burridge, Talbert, and others (see link above) show that the Gospels all fit the model of an ancient bioi, very closely. While part of that would of course include verification of such things as i.e., Jesus being a fulfillment of prophecy -- that would not be something exclusive to an epic format! -- there can be no denying what the genre is. This is an example of how Koester is actually on the radical fringe.

And sorry -- Mark and John's Gospels too are ancient biographies; the idea of them being an 'aretalogy is just a classification game played by Morton Smith...

The literary genre of the extant gospels is that of a typical biography. Morton Smith tried to get around this by inventing out of whole cloth a genre he called an 'aretalogy.', an alleged "type of literature enumerat[ing] the great deeds of a god, hero, or famous person..." No such genre was designated in the ancient world; Smith created it just so that he could conveniently shuffle the Gospels into the category of legend. Classical scholars recognize Smith's manhandling of the bioi genre as a sham. They do recognize aretaology as something done within other documents...but not as an independent genre. This led one liberal scholar (Robinson) to modify Smith's thesis by suggesting that the Gospels had used aretalogy as a source!