Price may be right that the Jesus of Mark’s Gospel was entirely a literary creation, but it’s simplistic at best to say that Jesus was “just” a literary device used to blame Jews for their suffering at the hands of the Romans. The same goes for the assertion that the Old Testament was treasured and preserved primarily because of belief in its ability to foretell the future.
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Effectively, Price's view is strong only if it is already assumed that Mark was written in the interval 70-100 CE, as theodicy for the war. Only from that premise, it is not "simplicistic" the idea that the Mark's Jesus was only a fictional punisher of Jews ex evento.
But if Mark was written in the first half of second century, then the best reason of the his creation was the need of an "objective" Jesus against the many "Christs in their own right", the various cases of spiritual possession by Christ. All these Christs were already posing as the first apparition on the earth of the Risen Christ. Hence at least one of them was:
‘the abomination that causes desolation’ standing where it does not belong
(Mark 13:14)
the same anti-nomianist (as Gnostic) figure described in 2 Thess 2:4:
4 Who opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called God, or that is worshipped; so that he as God sitteth in the temple of God, shewing himself that he is God
the reference is to Valentinians, who, inside the first forms of proto-catholicism (the "temple of God" is only another name for the Church), simulated only the observance of the Torah to not scandalize the brothers about their Gnostic recognition of being themselves "Gods" and "Christs".
But really the brothers were scandalized.
If Theudas was considered by these Gnostics the precursor of their Risen Christ on the earth, "Mark" invented John the Baptist as precursor of the his anti-Gnostic Christ.
And if respectively at the beginning and at the end of the story of Mark we see:
- - a Precursor (=John the Baptist) of the Christ as anti-precursor (=Theudas) of the anti-Christ
- - the presence of the Risen Christ in Galilee (Mark 16) as opposed to the presence of the Anti-Christ in the same "Temple of God" (Mark 13);