Great Expectorations

Or, The Apostate Who Wasn't All There

James Patrick Holding

It seems I give Skeptics too much credit at times. When readers asked me to look into the new DVD The God Who Wasn't There, I expected the film to be a somewhat scholarly (as far as these guys can get) review of the best case for the Christ myth.

What I got was so bad it makes The Bible Fraud look like peer-reviewed scholarship.

How does it actually break down? By percents:

20% a documentary on Earl Doherty's Christ myth theory (though Doherty does not appear in the main film!)
20% pagan copycat garbage (that's not an insult; he actually makes use of Graves' "16 Crucified Saviors" list as well as the Freke-Gandy "crucified Bacchus" forgery!)
20% objecting to the religious right
10% objecting to how bloody "The Passion" was
30% Flemming offering a tempter tantrum over his prior fundamentalist upbringing, to the point of him childishly ending the film in the chapel he was "saved" in and declaring his apostasy there in "nanny nanny boo boo" fashion

Some random thoughts otherwise, for a mostly random film:

Flemming appears to be a man with serious psychological problems. He has gone from being an Christian who was gullible and ready to believe anything to a Skeptic who is gullible and ready to believe anything. His eyes look more dead than toxic waste. He apparently lied to his former school principal about the purpose of his interview with him. He has recently (4/06) orchestrated a "War on Easter" in which his fans dump copies of the DVD and other related material into churches. A total of 666 DVDs are being distributed this way, according to a secondary source. This might be acceptable if the scholarship in the film were worth ten cents, but that is precisely the problem -- it isn't. Flemming is using his own ignorance to inflict error on people who are no more aware than he is how much in error he is.
I rather wonder if some of his interviewees (like Richard Carrier) know they were being used in a film that gave Graves' crucified saviors list a highlight. One of the links below notes that Flemming offers conclusions that Carrier in particular otherwise disagrees with (such as that Nazareth did not exist).
No new arguments, of course -- all Flemming uses has been refuted time and again on this website: late dates for the Gospels; Marcan priority and Q; appeal to the Sanhedrin trying Jesus at night, and especially use of Doherty's "silence" argument. Flemming has stated that the reaction of the church to the film has been to ignore it and hope it will go away. In that case, where is bad boy Flemming with his replies to all this stuff of his that we've refuted before?
I found amusing Flemming's "Christian on the street" interviews in which he asked people if they had ever heard of Mithra, Attis, etc. (under the assumption that his nonsense pared from the likes of Graves was accurate). I really wish he'd run into some Tekton readers instead, but I expect he would have edited all of that out.
Flemming seems to have been particularly hot and bothered over "Left Behind" eschatology, which leads me to wonder what he'd have to complain about to a preterist.
Flemming selects the wackiest persons he can to represent Christianity, to the point of even claiming David Koresh (!) as one. I suppose then that I can tale Stalin as the best representative of his set. Had Flemming tried this with a Ben Witherington, it likely would have been edited out.