I read Dennis R. MacDonald's Mythologizing Jesus: From Jewish Teacher to Epic Hero with great interest because it was my introduction to the epics of Homer and Virgil at university that eventually sparked my interest in the ancient character of the Jewish and Christian Scriptures. Though I was unfamiliar with MacDonald's body of work, I discovered through searching that in Mythologizing Jesus MacDonald applies the same intertextual and mimetic reader-response forms of biblical criticism he employs in other titles of his, such as Christianizing Homer: “The Odyssey,” Plato, and “The Acts of Andrew” (1994) and Luke and Vergil: Imitations of Classical Greek Literature (2014).

MacDonald states his thesis in Mythologizing Jesus in a rather straightforward manner: “The book you are now holding will show that the two Gospel authors we now call Mark and Luke reshaped memories of Jesus by emulating the Iliad and the Odyssey to portray him with supernatural powers” (2). MacDonald marshals support for his thesis in a clear and eminently readable manner. The book contains twenty-four very short chapters (some only three pages), each picking a particular pericope from either Mark or Luke and comparing it to a passage from the Iliad, the Odyssey, or a lesser-known Homeric work in parallel columns along with accompanying textual analysis.

Readers will most likely be intrigued by the Homeric material presented here and will grow to understand and appreciate how the ancient Greek world was shaped by Homer's legends and characters; I know I certainly did. The major strength of MacDonald's work is precisely that: it gives readers of the Jewish and Christian Scriptures a better understanding of both the form and content of ancient Greek literature. However, because only pericopes are analyzed, the larger themes and motifs of Homer's epics get lost; the connection between the part and the whole it serves is severed. This approach vitiates the gospel narratives as well, especially the prominent, if not preeminent, theme of the kingdom of God in these Synoptic texts. If the gospels are principally passion narratives with accompanying anecdotal material, then that is lost in McDonald's analysis as well. Although I realize that his approach is typical of modern biblical criticism, when pericope analysis becomes completely disassociated from the larger text, as it does here in the case of both Homer and the gospels, I begin to wonder how what is lost in exegesis compares to what is gained.

That is not the only problem here; there is a deeper issue. The more I read the less I found myself convinced of the veracity of MacDonald's thesis; certainly it is a fascinating one and erudite. However, it assumes somewhat blindly the rather subtle influence of Homer at the expense of the more obvious influence of the Jewish Scriptures. In other words, though Mark and Luke most certainly practiced textual mimesis, the simpler hypothesis is that it was principally the Jewish Scriptures the evangelists “emulated” in form and content rather than Homer's epics. It is more likely that both or either of the Jewish prophets Elisha and Elijah (as pointed out by Raymond Brown) and/or Hanina ben Dosa, Honi the Circle-Drawer, or other Jewish healer-miracle worker figures from around the first century CE (as articulated by Bart Ehrman) are the true superhero models for the two evangelists, than the Greek warrior Odysseus. If MacDonald had given equal treatment to the gospels' intertextuality with and mimesis of the Jewish Scriptures, readers would have truly something worthwhile to consider in this book.