When we find we must spend time disabusing students of Christian origins of the red herrings strewn about with gleeful abandon by apologists, we critics of traditional supernaturalism find ourselves in a strange and seemingly ironic position. We view ourselves, contrary to the perspective our own critics and debating opponents have on us, as the true champions and friends of the Bible. We are viewed as insidious villains seeking to undermine the belief of the faithful, trying to push them off the heavenly path and into Satan’s arms. But this is not how we view ourselves at all. Whatever religious or nonreligious convictions we have, we find ourselves entering the field, as we see it, as the champions and zealots for a straightforward and accurate understanding of the Bible as an ancient text, and of the resurrection accounts as natural accoutrements of such literature. In our opinion, it is the fundamentalist, the apologist for Christian supernaturalism, who is propagating false and misleading views of the Bible among the general populace. We are not content to know better and to shake our heads at the foolishness of the untutored masses. We want the Bible to be appreciated for what it is, not for what it is not. And it is not a supernatural oracle book filled with infallible dogmas and wild tales that must be believed at the risk of eternal peril.
There was a generation of Bible debaters who naively took for granted that the Bible made the claims that its misguided proponents made for it. But we belong to a newer generation. We do not hate the Bible or view it as another version of Mein Kampf, as some critics of religion have. We do not seek to debunk it, for it is not bunk, any more than the Iliad or Beowulf is bunk. To frame the issue in such terms is itself a foolish fundamentalism in reverse. The arguments of this book are not attempts to debunk the Bible but to understand it better as what it is: a great ancient text of mythology. When we attack the arguments of apologists, we believe ourselves to be doing the same sort of thing our Classicist colleagues would be doing if they had to reckon with an eccentric movement of apologists for the Olympian gods, zealots who wanted to convince people they must believe in Zeus and Achilles. Classicists would rally to the cause precisely because they loved the old texts and did not want to stand by and allow them to be distorted and made to look ridiculous by grotesque demands that they are literally true!
—Robert M. Price
The Empty Tomb (pp. 15-16)
