The Origins of Early Christian Literature

by Robyn Faith Walsh

Conventional approaches to the Synoptic gospels argue that the gospel authors acted as literate spokespersons for their religious communities. Whether described as documenting intra-group 'oral traditions' or preserving the collective perspectives of their fellow Christ-followers, these writers are treated as something akin to the Romantic poet speaking for their Volk - a questionable framework inherited from nineteenth-century German Romanticism. In this book, Robyn Faith Walsh argues that the Synoptic gospels were written by elite cultural producers working within a dynamic cadre of literate specialists, including persons who may or may not have been professed Christians. Comparing a range of ancient literature, her ground-breaking study demonstrates that the gospels are creative works produced by educated elites interested in Judean teachings, practices, and paradoxographical subjects in the aftermath of the Jewish War and in dialogue with the literature of their age. Walsh's study thus bridges the artificial divide between research on the Synoptic gospels and Classics.

Genres: Religion, History, Nonfiction, Christianity, New Testament, Biblical Studies

246 pages, Paperback

Published February 2, 2023

About the author

Robyn Faith Walsh is an Associate Professor at the University of Miami (UM). She earned her Ph.D. at Brown University in Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean, with a focus on early Christianity, ancient Judaism, and Roman archaeology.

Before coming to UM, Professor Walsh taught at Wheaton College (Mass.), The College of the Holy Cross, and received teaching certificates and pedagogical training at Brown University and Harvard University. She teaches courses on the New Testament, Greco-Roman literature and material culture.

Her first monograph, The Origins of Early Christian Literature: Contextualizing the New Testament within Greco-Roman Literary Culture, was recently published with Cambridge University Press.

Reviews

[Eric Vanden Eykel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Generally speaking, authors write with audiences in mind. When it comes to texts like the New Testament Gospels, biblical scholars have for some time been trained to think about such audiences in terms of "communities of believers," or similar categories. These primitive Christian communities are keepers and passers on of oral traditions about the life and ministry of Jesus, and the evangelists are the ones who ultimately take the step to weave this oral tradition in with other written sources available to them. The result is a literary work that in many ways reflects the community that gave rise to it in the first place.

Walsh argues that much of this is fundamentally misguided, and that this approach is a vestige of methodologies and idiosyncrasies of 18th- and 19th-century German Romanticism. We don't generally think about other ancient texts in this way (e.g., people aren't constantly in search of "the Homeric community"), so why do we feel inclined to employ this lens in our study of the Gospels? Why not instead approach the Gospels in light of what we know about how ancient literature is produced and consumed in the Roman world, by "educated, elite members of Greco-Roman society" (13). I was skeptical of the thesis at first, for the simple fact that it cuts against so many "givens" in our field. But I'm not skeptical anymore. I think Walsh is absolutely correct.

In addition to being well researched and thoroughly compelling, this book is also just a delight to read. Even the chapter on German Romanticism is a page turner (!). Chapters 3 and 4 are particularly engaging, and Chapter 3 (on Authorship in Antiquity) could easily be a standalone piece in courses dealing with any ancient literature. I found Walsh's discussion of interplay between the NT gospels and the Satyrica in Chapter 4 to be stunning. All around a phenomenal book that I would highly recommend.

[Beauregard Bottomley · Rating 5 out of 5]

The author said: “More than a Gadamerian Wirkungsgeschichte that seeks the history of interpretation or effect of biblical texts at particular historical moments, such an approach is part and parcel of a larger project of redescription for the study of religion aimed at demystifying objects of study and treating social phenomena as ordinary human processes. As discussed in the Introduction, we must approach early Christian writings not only as first- and second-century CE Mediterranean artifacts but also as artifacts of eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century European thought.”

That sentiment sort of seems obvious to me. I did appreciate this book laying out that theme from multiple perspectives, and the footnotes and bibliography were wonderful to read. Clearly an overall well researched book but accessible for those interested in the topic. The Hans Gadamer explication is applicable to all history not just for origins of Christianity.

The author mentioned that Paul of Tarsus got so boring that one of his listeners fell asleep at a window and fell to the ground and died and got resurrected and that five thousand others converted at once and on the spot. Paul needs to learn that it is ‘hard for thee to kick against the prick,” and it makes one wonder how sane people would ever believe in Acts.

There’s a fairy tale being developed and passing it off as truth is an amazing process. The author gives a more believable narrative than the traditional approach by considering context, relations, background and historical pararrels. The Bible as more than myth only makes sense when it is assumed to be created out of whole-cloth.

The chapters read as essays and there are connections between the chapters but at times there seemed like dangling threads that weren’t stitched together.

[Ginger Griffin · Rating 5 out of 5]

There's not much new information in this book. Which is what makes it so interesting.

Historians have long known that the New Testament gospels resemble other, similar writings from the ancient world: allegorical fiction about miracle workers, subversive accounts of contrarian outsiders who use their wit to expose pretense, tall tales about revivified corpses that leave empty tombs behind, and other supernatural wonders. No serious historian views these works as accurate representations of the society and events they depict.

But somehow the gospels are assumed to be in a special category. Many biblical scholars still strive to find history in the gospel accounts and assume they reflect the beliefs and concerns of nascent Christian communities. As the author shows, this approach to the gospels was inherited from 19th-century Biblical scholars, many of whom worked in Germany. And those scholars in turn were steeped in the culture of German Romanticism, which saw works like the gospels as distillations of early Christian memories about Jesus, with the various gospel accounts reflecting the spirit of the communities in which they arose.

But that's not how writing worked in the ancient Mediterranean world. The large majority of people could not read or write, and among those who could, most achieved no more than basic literacy. Only a very few acquired the kind of education needed to compose a written work of any complexity. Writing was a specialized activity for a small elite who "published" their works by sharing them with others in their circle (there were no printing presses; those who wanted to own a book had to have it copied by hand). The social milieu for writers was the small clique of other educated people who could read and appreciate literary works. It had nothing to do with "religious communities" as imagined by German romantics.

Anyone with the skills needed to write a book would have gone through years of expensive and time-consuming education (not something the vast majority of people could afford). Which is one reason Romans were so eager to enslave educated elites when they conquered new lands -- such people were rare and valuable.

The gospel writers show all the hallmarks of elite education. They wrote in Greek and followed the literary conventions of their time. In the case of Mark's gospel in particular, it's not even clear that the author was a member of any Jesus community. "Mark" (whoever he was -- all the gospels were written anonymously; the names Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were assigned later) probably wrote his gospel after the Jewish War of 66-70, when interest in Judea was high among Romans. We don't know what motivated Mark to write or why he framed his story as a Messianic Secret (though that did provide him with an explanation for why nobody had heard the story before). Mark may simply have been drawn to the tale of a tragic Jewish prophet who possessed supernatural powers and foresaw a coming new age (Mark set his story several decades before the war and has Jesus presciently foretell the destruction of the Jerusalem temple -- such after-the-fact "predictions" being common in ancient literature).

Did Mark get the idea for his Jesus story from Paul's letters? It looks that way. He may have taken Paul's passage in 1 Corinthians 11:23-25 and turned it into a narrative of the Last Supper. Paul's creed about Jesus as a dying and rising savior (1 Corinthians 15:3-5) may have given Mark a chance to include the ever-popular empty tomb (Paul himself never mentions it, but Mark's readers would have been familiar with this motif as an indicator of Jesus's transition to a supernatural realm).

If Mark did have a copy of Paul's letters, what else did they contain? Hard to say. The earliest surviving manuscript of Paul's letters (known as Papyrus 46 in the Bible trade) dates to around 200 CE, by which time the Marcionite controversy had played out and the proto-orthodox Christian faction had begun piecing together its preferred canon. The letters of Paul that eventually appeared in the Bible seem to have been sliced and spliced along the way, with some letters combined and others omitted. So they may not look like the versions that were around in Mark's day.

Once Mark's gospel started to circulate, it generated rejoinders: Both Matthew and Luke clearly had access to it (and cribbed much of it for their versions of the story). It might have inspired more irreverent responses, too. As the author points out, the _Satyrica_ (now thought to have been written in the early second century) may be satirizing Mark's gospel.

So what exactly was going on within the circle of people reading and responding to Mark? It's hard to tell -- but New Testament specialists have gotten nowhere trying to confabulate vanished "Christian communities." Or, more accurately, they've gotten everywhere: Proposed reconstructions of these communities range all over the social and theological map (and generally just reflect the preferred interpretations of their creators).

So maybe it's time for a new approach? There is, after all, abundant historical evidence about society and culture in the early Roman Empire, when the New Testament was being written -- including evidence about other, non-Jewish religions that may have influenced early Christianity. Maybe it's time for NT scholars to move past the romantic guesswork and start studying this evidence seriously.

Not that I expect the field to change soon. New Testament scholars have long since identified many of the sources the gospel writers drew on (ranging from the Septuagint to Homeric epics and Stoic philosophy); they know the gospelists didn't need to rely on word-of-mouth stories from Jesus followers. Most also recognize the miracle stories and the resurrection accounts as nothing more than ancient tropes. So they fully realize that the gospels (and their companion, the Book of Acts) are not accurate representations of what happened at the dawn of Christianity -- yet they still dig around in them for traces of "oral history." Old paradigms die hard.

BTW, this is an academic book with lots of footnotes and some prior knowledge assumed. So it's not recommended for beach reading. It also won't appeal to Christian apologists who view the gospels as dispatches from God's emissaries (most apologists are still stuck trying to harmonize the many discrepancies in the gospel stories, like "Star Wars" screenwriters trying to retcon the inconsistencies in Jedi lore). This book will mostly appeal to readers with a serious interest in history, particularly the history of early Christianity.

[Nelson · Rating 3 out of 5]

The consensus among New Testament scholars is that the gospel writers were people who wrote down stories based on oral tradition of Christian communities. Robyn Walsh challenges this position, arguing instead for their authorship by Greco-Roman elites who "may or may not be Christian," with an "interest" in the Hebrew scriptures.

My initial reaction was an eyeroll, "NOT THIS AGAIN." Another secularist doesn't believe a group of peasants can produce such sophisticated holy books. Tom Holland reacted similarly at Muhammad. According to Muslim records, Muhammad was illiterate. But because the Quran contains such a deep understanding of the Old and New Testaments, and pseudepigraphic literature, Holland argues that Muhammad must have been from the Levant, and not Arabia. It will be interesting to hear what secularists will say when it becomes common knowledge the author of the Book of Mormon uses almost the entire Hebrew literary apparatus and includes detailed knowledge of the Mosaic legal code.

But the thesis was so interesting I just HAD to read this book. It turns out, she does an excellent job of explaining why the dominant scholarly position is the way it is. Before she argues for her own thesis, she breaks down the majority thesis that the synoptic gospels were written on behalf of their community. As you may know, Bible scholars have to learn German because Germany was a Biblical studies powerhouse. Their view of the gospels was colored by German romanticism, which held poets and writers to be spokesmen for their community. Learning about German romanticism was very interesting.

As I read, I realized that the scholarly consensus isn't really what I believe devotionally either. When I started engrossing myself in New Testament studies, I learned about imagined communities, like the Johannine community, the Lucan community, the Matthean community, etc. I belong to a church with a magisterium; my actual belief is that the Gospel writers were writing on behalf of the apostles, not the community.

Overall, I remain unconvinced by Walsh's argumentation. Although she demonstrated that the Gospels were typical of classical literature, her strongest parallel was the Satyricon, which was written after the New Testament. She also had to posit later dates for gospel authorship. Nonetheless, the book is still more fascinating, if not convincing.

[Peter Bradley · Rating 3 out of 5]

240319 The Origins of Early Christian Literature: Contextualizing the New Testament within Greco-Roman Literary Culture by Robyn Faith Walsh

The Gospels as Doctoral Dissertation

The thesis of Robyn Faith Walsh’s book - The Origins of Early Christian Literature: Contextualizing the New Testament within Greco-Roman Literary Culture – is that the key understanding of Biblical scholars has been fundamentally mistaken, at least with respect to the Synoptic Gospels. Those scholars conceive of the Synoptic Gospels – the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, but not John – as texts that somehow organically emerged from particular communities and which therefore reflect the concerns and understanding of those particular communities.

Walsh says that this is completely wrong. Applying her encyclopedic knowledge of how books were written in antiquity, Walsh argues that this paradigm makes no sense of how writers actually came to write books. According to Walsh, anyone who could write a book was a member of the elite. As such, their audience was other members of the elite. Therefore, they didn’t represent the voice of some disenfranchised, illiterate community, but, rather, they represented elites talking to other elites about things that interested the elites.

Thus, Walsh explains:

It is in this critique of the “death of the author” that I place my own project: texts are the products of authors engaged in certain practices and conventions that correspond with their social contexts; they are not disembodied or passive filters of broader cultural structures.

Walsh, Robyn Faith. The Origins of Early Christian Literature: Contextualizing the New Testament within Greco-Roman Literary Culture (p. 86). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.

And:

Paul offered an alternative means of achieving prestige and cultural capital within an otherwise limiting field. Similarly, for the elite head of the household, having financial means and social status “might allow one to give hospitality and patronage to a specialist, but that status alone did not confer an aptitude for skillful learning and literate practices.”74 Yet, in supporting and consuming the kinds of intellectual (and other) products Paul offered, even an illiterate head of a household could hold some distinction in the fields of learning and literate culture.

Walsh, Robyn Faith. The Origins of Early Christian Literature: Contextualizing the New Testament within Greco-Roman Literary Culture (p. 126). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.

So, instead of compiling a gospel to preserve the things that her remembered Peter saying, the author of Mark would have been an elite looking around for some “literary product” that might catch the attention of other elites. After putting the “literary product” into a written form, “Mark” would then have circulated his product to other members of his elite circle for their entertainment. “Mark” might have received feedback from his friends, which he might then have incorporated into the “Gospel of Mark.”

Here is Walsh’s description of the process:

Aware of the civic biographical tradition of distinguished statesmen, philosophers, and other leaders, he wants to engage that literary genre, offering a bios of another notable figure and philosopher who came to an ignoble and untimely end. However, here is he faced with a problem. He would like to write about a Judean figure – perhaps one of the many rural teacher-types and wonder-workers who claimed to be a son of god – but none of them (John the Baptist, Honi the Circle Drawer, Jesus of Nazareth) is a member of the dominant leadership or aristocracy. Yet, among his collected texts, our author has some material expressing an interest in Jesus, including copies of the letters of another elite cultural producer who is a Pharisee and a divination specialist by the name of Paul.

Walsh, Robyn Faith. The Origins of Early Christian Literature: Contextualizing the New Testament within Greco-Roman Literary Culture (pp. 131-132). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.

According to Walsh, this was the norm for how other texts, ranging from plays to histories, were produced in antiquity. She, therefore, concludes that this model applies to the writing of the Synoptic Gospels.

In her book, Walsh makes two broad arguments. First, she argues that current Biblical scholarship is based on a paradigm based on 19th century Romantic notions about the community or Volk curating Volkisch traditions. She spends nearly half the book discussing the relationship of German Romanticism with German Biblical scholarship from Schelling through Herder and the Brothers Grimm to the twentieth century. This is an informative and interesting read, particularly if you have only superficial exposure to these people and their ideas.

Walsh correlates this approach with the “invention of tradition.” German Romantics were not so much discovering history as inventing it. Tacitus’s Germanian was retooled to propagandize German exceptionalism, which is ironic since Tacitus was probably making things up about the Germans as a kind of “noble savage” counterpoint against his fellow decadent Romans. Walsh describes the period as follows:

A dichotomy underscoring the inherent differences between Germany and Rome persisted throughout the nineteenth century as “‘Rome’ more than ever, came to signify antinationalist tyranny, elitism, and ultramontanism, and its symbolic defeat grew increasingly important to the establishment of German cultural autonomy.”95 In Suzanne Marchand’s masterful work on German cultural history and classical antiquity, she details the extent to which Vorgeschichte was characterized by misplaced nationalistic pride. It was simple enough to construct a narrative that linked the German people to a long history of opposition to Rome’s excesses. From Tacitus’ biting account to Luther’s valor, thinkers like Madame de Staël (1766–1817), Heinrich von Kleist (1777–1811), and Ernst Curtius (1814–1896) were emboldened to claim that Rome never faced a more hated and resistant enemy than proud Germania.

Walsh, Robyn Faith. The Origins of Early Christian Literature: Contextualizing the New Testament within Greco-Roman Literary Culture (pp. 77-78). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.

Likewise the Brothers Grimm substantially changed their folktales to make them more palatable to elite German tastes. Walsh writes:

Hindsight reveals that the Grimms utilized questionable methods in cataloging their folktales. As Chapter 2 illuminates, their “sources” for these tales were more often than not their social peers and not the “common people.” The Grimms also incorporated into their fables numerous literary embellishments in order to make Kinder- und Hausmärchen more palatable to their audience.76 Thus, the notion that the folktales and “fairytales” of the Grimms represented the commonly held narratives of the German people is nebulous at best and arguably a rhetorical invention. I contend something similar is at play with the Synoptic gospels.

Walsh, Robyn Faith. The Origins of Early Christian Literature: Contextualizing the New Testament within Greco-Roman Literary Culture (pp. 155-156). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.

Walsh jumps from this Germanic “invention of tradition” to the German founders of modern Biblical studies. She argues that they lived in a world that assumed that texts were like folktales and Tacitus, expressions of a community by the community. Walsh argues that based on this paradigm, Biblical scholarship began the process of reading the Gospels as representing the values and expressions of a community, rather than what they should have been doing, namely, reading the texts in the same way they should have read the Brothers Grimm’s collection, as the product of elites talking to elites.

Walsh convinced me that Biblical scholarship – at least in its highest form –has gone overboard in its search for the “Markan community” and the “Lukan Community.” On the other hand, I didn’t need much convincing. Thirty years ago I read John Dominic Crossan’s The Birth of Christianity https://www.amazon.com/Birth-Christia... which charts the back and forth of various “communities” in early Christianity, i.e., circa 33 AD to 45 AD based on finding “layers” in the texts of the Gospels. When I realized that he was finding these “communities” in what amounted to a ten-year period, I concluded he was just making things up. Finding that much concrete activity in the phrasing of a passage seemed more like invention than discovery.

So, I was reasonably disposed to agree with Walsh, and I waited for her to apply her insights to the Biblical texts and to examples of scholarship that had invented “communities.”

But I didn’t get any. Walsh doesn’t address the texts or the interpretation of Biblical texts in any substantial way. Instead, she has her “guilt by association” undermining of the Romantic tradition do half of her work.

That’s weak. I am totally ready to agree that (a) the Romantic tradition oversold communities as the creator of texts in a strong way and (b) 19th Century German Biblical Hermeneutics was indebted to Romanticism, but that does not mean that particular Christian communities could not have played a role in the production of the text or that the text could not have reflected the views of some Christian tradition. As a caution against reifying hypothesized communities, Walsh does well. As proof that the writer was totally separated from a Christian community, not so much.

The other half of Walsh’s argument is based on Walsh’s study into writing as an elite enterprise. The purpose of the attack on German Romanticism was obviously to clear the deck for this latter argument. Walsh observes:

Liberated from strict adherence to oral traditions or Christian communities, we are better able to assess topoi the gospels share with other first- and second-century writings.

Walsh, Robyn Faith. The Origins of Early Christian Literature: Contextualizing the New Testament within Greco-Roman Literary Culture (p. 141). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.

For Walsh, the Gospel writers could not have been members of the community that are depicted in the Gospels. Walsh notes:

Authorship was a specialist’s activity that required significant training and rhetorical skill.

Walsh, Robyn Faith. The Origins of Early Christian Literature: Contextualizing the New Testament within Greco-Roman Literary Culture (p. 124). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.

And: Kurke’s folktale analogy is necessary precisely because she concedes, as I argue in Chapter 3, that the nature of producing literature in antiquity required an elite cultural producer and certain social conditions. To use her words, “it [is] impossible to postulate an author who is not a member of an elite of wealth and education.”53 Herein lies the difficulty with the oral tradition thesis. As

Walsh, Robyn Faith. The Origins of Early Christian Literature: Contextualizing the New Testament within Greco-Roman Literary Culture (pp. 190-191). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.

Presumably, such elites would not have been living in Galilee or Rome or Alexandria, at least not among the Christians, who were presumably, slaves or poor.

The problem is that Walsh spends no time discussing who these communities were or who these elites were. She speculates that Mark may have been written to the circle around Pliny (as an example) but doesn’t go much further than that.

Were there no wealthy Jews or God-fearers in Rome or Alexandria? That seems unlikely.

In any event, Walsh argues that the audience for cultural products, including the Gospels, was other elites with an interest in the topic. Pliny, perhaps.

Walsh is very informative in giving many examples that support this understanding. These examples are very informative and interesting.

However, Walsh doesn’t make the sale in my mind by discussing the circumstances of the production of the Gospels and why John could not have hired a scribe or how Mark could not have known a wealthy “culture producer” in Rome.

One question that naturally comes up is why any “elite network” would be interested in a Jewish wonder-worker on the fringe of empire. She offers two points, one in passing and the other in detail.

The passing point is that in the late first century, Jewish issues were on the forefront of Roman minds. There had been a major war against the Jews in 70 AD, one result of which was to place on the throne the general who won the war. Romans were therefore interested in this slice of Empire. Josephus did a sturdy business in Jewish subjects. Likewise, Tacitus’s Annals are noteworthy for how they go out of the way to describe the beliefs and culture of Christians and Jews in a way that no other group gets described. I had thought that those passages were interpolations, but they may represent a trendy interest in Jewish matters.

The other point that Walsh makes in detail is that there was a “genre” of “subversive biography.” This “genre” would take counter-cultural characters – non-elite, lower class, picaresque individuals – and tell stories about how they had overcome by their wit. This does not seem to be much of a “genre” but the subject did exist. The biography of Jesus may fit into the tropes of this genre.

Thus, Walsh believes that Gospels are literary products, not historical. She shares that the gospel writers may have had no information about Jesus apart from what they read in Pau, perhaps, which they filled out with the tropes of other literature. She writes:

If the gospels writers are aware of any oral tradition about Jesus, it is the position of this monograph that these elements are irretrievable to us, if they existed at all.

Walsh, Robyn Faith. The Origins of Early Christian Literature: Contextualizing the New Testament within Greco-Roman Literary Culture (p. 156). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.

And:

To this point, I have argued that the Synoptic gospels are conventional literary artifacts of the imperial period, not records of oral tradition and Christian exceptionalism.

Walsh, Robyn Faith. The Origins of Early Christian Literature: Contextualizing the New Testament within Greco-Roman Literary Culture (p. 134). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.

Walsh points that features of the Gospels fit in with other literary products:
While this manner of “secrecy” is not unique among ancient authors – indeed, shockingly few of our extant ancient biographers name themselves in their titles or prefaces – particular literary habit cannot be taken as evidence for amorphous concepts like “oral tradition.”97 Both anonymity and the notion of the “eyewitness” are themselves rhetorical tropes that must be scrutinized before being taken literally.

Walsh, Robyn Faith. The Origins of Early Christian Literature: Contextualizing the New Testament within Greco-Roman Literary Culture (p. 160). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.

And:

He then begins to write his bios engaging a certain set of issues that are important to him. Those issues might include esoteric teachings, food laws, Stoic ethics, or constructing a new, divine genealogy that subverts the one continually being reified by the Roman imperial family (e.g., the Aeneid). Any gaps in his narrative can be filled with references to other bioi of heroes, philosophers, or divine figures like Alexander the Great, or other established literary authorities (e.g., Plut. Mor. 718a: “[Plato instructs that beings born of God] do not come to be through seed [οὐ διὰ σπέρματος], surely, but by another power of God [ἄλλῃ δὲ δυνάμει τοῦ θεοῦ]”). As for other demonstrations of pneumatic ability or power, there is no shortage of testimony about afflictions and healings at the hands of gods like Isis and Asclepius (IG, IV 1.121.3–9; Mark 5:24–26), including in popular literature (Apul. Met. 1.9). He may even add some original plot device or anecdote to demonstrate literary skill. Something like the so-called Messianic Secret conveys to the reader why they may have never heard of Jesus before, while also arguably acting as a thauma in the tradition of paradoxography, Horace, or Vergil's Camilla.88 Luke’s worldwide census under Augustus, passing reference to the Syrian governor Quirinius (2:1–7), and convoluted references to Capernaum (4:31) are all seemingly fallacious details, but they make for great storytelling. Like Philoxenus’ octopus, elements of Jesus’ bios like his location, teachings, wonder-working, and death provide ample opportunity for the practice of literary allusion.

Walsh, Robyn Faith. The Origins of Early Christian Literature: Contextualizing the New Testament within Greco-Roman Literary Culture (pp. 132-133). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.

There is a lot in here that a Jesus Mythicist like Richard Carrier would find supportive.

Again, though, Walsh is not good on application of model to facts. She barely interacts with Richard Bauckham’s thesis that the Gospels betray their sourcing in eyewitness accounts by a scant assertion that there is no evidence of oral transmission. This point misunderstands Bauckham – Bauckham argues for actual eyewitness testimony, not oral transmission.

Her best internal evidence in favor of literary invention is the facts that Luke gets “wrong.” She writes:

Luke proceeds to chronicle a series of historical facts and events – again, several of which do not hold up to scrutiny (e.g., a “world-wide census [ἀπογράφεσθαι πᾶσαν τὴν οἰκου

[Amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.75 ⭐️

As a formal piece of scholarship, there’s probably a good chunk of this that went over my head. Still, I find a lot of the basic arguments compelling, especially when you compare the Gospels to other writings we have from the antiquity period. Where Walsh sort of loses me are the details, chiefly: why? Why would these cultural elite writers want to write about Jesus without a theological component, and why would religious communities end in taking up these writings as divinely inspired? Perhaps these are questions for future work from her, in which case I’m interested in seeing what she releases next.

[Darrell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Because many people today believe in Christianity, studies of ancient Christian texts are handled differently than studies of ancient Greek or Roman religious writings. The field of classics is more strict with regards to what counts as evidence, while religious studies is more lenient. In this volume, Walsh applies the same standards used for studying classics to Christianity.

New Testament scholars often invoke oral history (for which there's no evidence) or make appeals to the gospel writer's religious community (for which there's no evidence). They claim the gospels are unique and ignore the literary tradition they belong to. They claim Jesus is unique and ignore his similarity to Aesop, the Cynics, and the heroes of Greek novels.

Many Greek novels have plots including ritual anointing, crucifixion, a ritual meal, and resurrection, yet New Testament scholars ignore them. Greek and Roman authors often falsely claim first-hand knowledge of events, but when the gospels do it, religious scholars treat it as a fact rather than the literary convention it is.

Biblical scholars confuse the subject matter of the gospels with the gospel writers themselves. They confuse the characters in the gospels with the gospel writer's community. They don't consider the possibility that the gospels could have been written by Roman elites telling a supernatural story taking place in a foreign land.

Biblical scholars make several assumptions about Christian origins without evidence: that Christianity grew rapidly, was well-established, and consisted of a tight-knit community. Paul is assumed to be the figurehead of early Christianity, even though his own epistles indicate the early Christians weren't a coherent group. Paul's epistles indicate the groups he was addressing weren't united, stable, or organized and he was struggling to be seen as an authority. Paul invokes a sense of shared community hoping to bring it about. He's making an aspirational statement, not a statement of fact.

The gospels are myths Christianity tells about itself. Luke claims the church grew rapidly and religious scholars take this at face value, despite Mark and Matthew not backing up this claim. The gospels engage with the literary tropes of their era, not traditions passed down by an illiterate community. The gospel writers may have known members of the Jesus community, but this must be demonstrated, not simply assumed.

New Testament scholarship as a field is steeped in German Romantic ideas of community. The gospels are the only ancient documents that scholars think were a product of a community rather than an individual. It is often imagined that the writers of the gospels are simply recording the oral history of a tight-knit, illiterate, religious community, and thus who the writers are doesn't matter. However, no ancient writings were actually produced in this way.

Very few people in antiquity could write, so we know a great deal about who the gospel writers were based on this fact alone. Ancient writers didn't need to be part of a Christian community to write about Jesus, but they did need to be part of a network of writers in order to publish and circulate their work.

Writing was a specialist activity and consisted of a spectrum. Some people could write letters or contracts without having the skill to compose an original work. Every writer's most important social network was his fellow writers and literary critics. Writers referenced and built upon each other's works. Imitation and innovation were encouraged.

Writing is a product of the individual writer's education, training, and personal interests. In the ancient Mediterranean, only those of the governing or aristocratic classes could typically afford a tutor to teach them how to read and write. Romans preferred Greek tutors so their children would be bilingual. Stoics, who were also creative writers themselves, were preferred. The wealthy would often employ an educated slave or tutor for their entire household. Owners would often educate their slaves to increase their value. In the aftermath of a war, educated captives would become aristocratic slaves.

Basic public instruction was available at "street schools" held on street corners for boys until the age of 12 for those who could afford it. Prosperous tradesmen or artisans would send their boys to these schools long enough to learn the basics of bookkeeping, before pulling them out of school to work at the family business. Due to the expense, the majority of Romans were not instructed beyond basic job-related literacy which may not have included the ability to read or write a letter. The lower classes wouldn't have been able to read or write at all unless it was required for their job, and even then, they'd only know the bare minimum necessary.

Learning was typically reserved for urban centers and writing materials like papyrus and reed pens were specialist tools. Most would start by learning Greek. Very few would go on to advanced education which included rhetoric, word study, imitation and recitation (often of Homer). Whole texts often weren't available, so they worked off partial texts and synopses.

One could have a successful career in the courts or government just by being a good speaker and not having a lot of exposure to the world of books. Having enough literacy to write a receipt, draft a bill of divorce, etc. is not the same as being literate enough to write a work of literature.

One required additional instruction under a specialist or independent study to be able to compose original literary works. Both of these options required wealth, social connections, and time.

One could also gain admittance to a library or study house where fellow intellectual elites could exchange ideas. Judeans would train with Greek and Roman texts in addition to the Torah. Greek was an essential part of literacy at the time.

Once someone was ready to write an original piece of literature, they would then need a sponsor to produce the text, circulate the writing for critique, and hold recitations or private readings, and ultimately publish the work.

Publishing in the ancient world isn't the same as publishing today. Texts were copied by hand and would only become popular (continue to be copied and circulated) with the support of the literary community. Without a literary circle promoting a work by letter writing, recitations, and word of mouth, a text wouldn't get copied and would disappear into obscurity. Therefore, the most important social circle for any writer (including the gospel writers) was their community of fellow writers.

According to Pliny, knowledge and even memorization of passages of the work of others in your literary circle was a common expectation. Thus a writing could come to be known through fragments of it memorized by the literary community.

In the second and third centuries CE, an increase in literacy led to a new kind of text aimed at the middle levels of society that included cooking manuals, riddles, binding spells, pagan and Christian material, and romantic novels. Businessmen and managers at Oxyrhynchus had libraries containing Homer, the Medea, Plato, love spells, medical recipes, as well as the letters of Paul, and the gospels of Mathew, Mary, and Thomas. Just because this literature was directed at a middle class audience doesn't mean it was written by members of the middle class, however. It was still most likely written by elites.

Even though the gospels aren't as sophisticated as Homer or Vergil, they still required specialized knowledge to create. Luke was likely aware of Vergil and other ancient epics. Like Vergil, Luke claims to have a patron, establishes a divine genealogy of a dynastic family, interprets visions and prophecy, and writes about a founding figure establishing a new community.

Philo describes a group called the Therapeutae which scholars consider to be at least partially, if not wholly, rhetorical. If the Therapeutae don't exist, there's no reason to assume the communities described in the gospels actually exist either.

The Satyrica, written about the same time as the gospels, shares communal meals, anointing rituals, crucifixion, missing bodies, cannibalism, and empty tombs, as well as terminology. However theologians tend to ignore these parallels and only focus on similarities between Christian and Jewish texts, as if Judea wasn't part of the Roman empire.

Anonymous authors and claims to supernatural knowledge were a trend at this time. There was also a trend to depict simple country folk as having superior ethics. This doesn't mean the gospels were actually written by simple country folk, however.

The Satyrica shares a literary context with the gospels. Regardless of whether it was written before or after Mark, the Satyrica is obviously in conversation with Mark. This has been difficult for scholars to admit since they treat the gospels as separate from other Greco-Roman writings, but once you accept the possibility, pieces start falling into place. If the gospel writers belonged to a community of writers who read, memorized, and critiqued each other's work, overlaps make sense. Due to the nature of publishing in the ancient world, it may not even make sense to ask which came first. They could be based on each other.

Some similarities include ritual anointing of nard during a banquet foreshadowing a funeral (Sat 78.4, Mark 14.8), and the crowing of a rooster taken as an omen of death (Sat 74.1). Satyrica 112 contains the story of a soldier guarding crucified robbers who abandons his post to romance a widow mourning in a tomb. He leaves the tomb after three days to find that one of the bodies was removed from the cross. The widow then allows her husband's body to be used to replace the missing one.

Empty tombs and resurrected dead were popular in ancient writing. Phlegon of Tralles wrote of the resurrections of Polykritos, Eurynous, Philinnion, and Rufus of Philippi, a high priest in Thessalonica, who died and rose on the third day and who performed rituals and miracles. These stories aren't exactly like Jesus, but are variations on a theme. Plutarch called the various empty tombs and supernaturally missing corpse stories a tale that all the Greeks tell.

Common motifs of these stories include cataclysms, darkness, ascension, deification, son of God status, shining manifestations, fear over the events, a commission to write about what happened, and eyewitnesses. At least 29 such figures who disappeared and were worshipped as a God have been noted. (Walsh refers us to "Mark's Empty Tomb" by Miller for the full list).

Early church fathers Justin Martyr, Origen, Tertullian, Minucius Felix, Arnobius, and critics like Celsus all acknowledged that Jesus's resurrection was patterned after Roman and Greek traditions. The empty tomb trope signaled the deification of Romulus, Alexander the Great, Castor and Pollux, Herakles, and Asclepius amongst others. Without this context, the empty tomb of Jesus wouldn't have made sense.

The gospels came at a time when the Roman Empire became interested in Judean sacred texts following the Jewish War. (The fact the gospels get much wrong about Judea and Judaism suggests they weren't written by locals.)

Claiming eyewitnesses existed and writing anonymously are commonplace rhetorical strategies used by other novels, biographies, and philosophical writings of the time. Logos (the Word) was a Stoic idea incorporated into Judaism and later Christianity.

Walsh classifies the gospels as belonging to the genre of subversive biography that emphasizes an anti-establishment figure who is outside the dominant culture such as the Life of Aesop or the Alexander Romance. Ancient biographies such as Plutarch's Life of Homer were often indistinguishable from fiction. The purpose of the ancient biography was to demonstrate the virtues of the subject and encourage readers to likewise be virtuous.

Xenophon's Memorabilia, a collection of anecdotes about Socrates, may be the first subversive biography. It contrasts civic biography by focusing more on clever sayings, use of parables, irony, and wit than deeds such as military or political conquest. The chronological order of events doesn't matter as much and the story can be told thematically.

Like Socrates and Aesop, Jesus comes from a humble background, is able to best those in power with his wit, is unjustly sentenced to a public execution, but ends up enjoying posthumous fame.

I think Walsh makes an excellent case for the gospels not being unique, but rather fitting into the literary context of their time. The gospels should not be assumed to be historical, but rather should be treated the same as the Alexander Romance, the Satyrica, or the Life of Aesop. If New Testament scholars want to be taken seriously, they need to abandon their reliance on imaginary oral traditions and instead embrace the more evidence-based approach used by classics scholars.

[Susan Anderson · Rating 3 out of 5]

I so appreciate her literary approach to the Gospels, especially her language of “subversive biography.” But I find that she does not adequately engage dissenting arguments. I leave this book with much to think about but not really convinced of anything she said.

[Daniel Morgan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wasn't quite sure what this book would be about. This isn't an early reader or about the early church - rather, it focuses on placing the Gospels within their broader literary world.

I did not agree with the author on 100% of the things they wrote in this book. Despite that, I feel that the author both introduced totally new concepts to me and blew a lot of suppositions out of the water.

The strongest section of the book is the first three chapters - roughly 2/3 of the text - where the author takes on the contemporary mythology of the Gospels as an oral tradition. This is a common approach to Matthew, Mark, and Luke, arguing that they are more-or-less compiling oral traditions and stories told about Jesus. The author demonstrates how:

1) This is not how writing in the ancient world worked
2) There is no internal evidence from the Gospels to suggest this
3) This idea was essentially invented by the German Romantics in the 19th century

The author convinced me of their central thesis, that these Gospels were written by actual writers working within a literary milieu (and the author is quick to demonstrate that cultural elite does not mean social/economic/political elite, and that Christian literary "elite" is not the same as a standard Roman elite). This makes sense intuitively, and it was really helpful to explore how the Gospel-by-committee myth evolved as a 19th century idea. I actually felt strengthened in my own understanding of the Gospels when the author explained how German Romanticism invented the idea of the Gospels writers as the scribal spokesmen for their churches rather than as actual writers producing a work of literature.

The last 1/3 of the book (two chapters) compared the Synoptic Gospels to other literary writings of the Greek-speaking world. It was genuinely enlightening to consider how the Gospels fit into the genres and literary practices of the broader Hellenistic world. The author emphasizes that - divine inspiration aside - the Gospels are being written by real people who are trying to communicate to other real people. What sort of genres, stories, and tropes would resonate more strongly with them? What is best for the author to emphasize?

However, I am not as strongly sold on this because I wish the author had addressed social hierarchies within the Roman Empire. For example, Chapter 4 is titled "The Gospels, the Satyrica, and Anonymous Sources", which is about putting the Gospels "in conversation" with the Satyrica. And yet, do we really believe that a Roman courtier in Italy who is writing in Latin (Satyrica's author) is part of the same literary circle as a Hellenistic Jew in the Levant writing in Greek (the Evangelists)? Moving forward a few centuries, Coptic writers primarily wrote for other Egyptians and Aramaic writers in Syria and Iraq wrote primarily for local Christian/Jewish audiences (Peshitta, Talmud, about 50 others). I can be persuaded that Hellenistic Jews are studying Greek classics in their literary training, but I am not as convinced that Hellenistic Jews are actually part of the same elite circle as Hellenistic authors of the Early Imperial period.

Still, even in my resistance to the secondary thesis, I felt that author helped me clarify my thoughts and strengthen my arguments. And the primary thesis about recognizing the Gospel writers as writers and not as spokesmen for the people is brilliant. I recommend this book.

[Rama Rao · Rating 4 out of 5]

Synoptic composition

The voice of Jesus has been obscured for over two millennia, and his vision skewed by gospel writers who transmitted his message to serve their own goals. Numerous academics and scholars, over centuries, have examined the historical events to assess if the gospel narratives are real or fictious. The essence of the problem is that the four canonical gospels, Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John were composed within the Roman Empire between 70 and 110 CE as biographies of Jesus of Nazareth. Mark is supposed to have been written around 70 CE, later, Mathew, and Luke in that order, and finally John around 105 CE. The fact that the very first gospel was written 40 years after the death of Jesus calls into question, the veracity, and the integrity of the sources, and the so called “oral traditions” whereby the event narratives were passed on by a small community of people over 40 years. In fact, the Christian communities in the first century were scant, sparsely populated, and lived in different parts of ancient Israel. Jesus’s acts and sayings were remembered more as biographical and historical events than as a religious doctrine.

The most significant event in the scholarship and the hermeneutics of gospels is the founding of “Jesus Seminar” by a group of biblical scholars led by Robert Funk in 1985 under the auspices of the Westar Institute. The seminar actively investigated the teachings of Jesus, which is illustrated by about thirty-three parables in the first three gospels, also known as synoptic gospels, because they include same stories, often in a similar sequence and wording. They are contrasting to the gospel of John whose narratives and the tone are different. The current opinion among scholars is that gospels are based on two sources, the Marcan priority that proposes the gospel of Mark was used as a source by the other two (Matthew and Luke). And the second is the oral gospel traditions (also referred to as sayings traditions or the Q source)

In this work, the author takes a fresher look at the writers of the synoptic gospels in which she suggests that the writers were literate spokespersons for their communities. They were documenting intragroup "oral traditions" and preserving their perspectives of the fellow Christ-followers like the Markan, Matthean, Lukan, Nazarenes, and other Judeo-Christian communities of the first century. It is observed that these are educated peers who specialized in biographical work. Some of them did not understand of being "in Christ." A study of ancient biographies of historical figures, and novels, this study demonstrates that the gospels are creative literature of the first century. These ideas of the author are largely speculative and do not provide convincing evidence to show that Mark was an intellectual figure. The book is written in academic style which may help divinity school students, and other readers interested in the study of the first century synoptic gospels. The take-home message from this work is that the gospels are the work of few authors who documented the life of Jesus as a biography, and not as a religious message.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is a lot to like about this book. Walsh provides a rich and critical thesis for the interpretation of the Gospels and the literary context in which they were composed. Walsh begins by offering an overview of the traditional hermeneutic horizon for understanding the Gospels, which is derived from German Romanticism and posits that the Gospels arose from an oral culture and tradition that largely reflects the life and sayings of Jesus. In this interpretation, the authors of the Gospels are simply scribes, recording the Jesus narratives derived from the communities to which the authors belonged. Questions of Jesus as an historical figure, under this interpretation, comes down to orality and memory, and the task of the historian is to parse out the Jesus narrative based upon what can be established as fact (there was an historical Jesus, a millenarian prophet, who was put to death by the Roman government in Judea); what is likely (Jesus was plagued by questions of the legitimacy of his parentage, some of the sayings of Jesus); and what is myth (miracles, resurrection, prophetic claims fulfilled). Walsh provides a convincing critique of this approach to the Gospels based upon what we know of the style and quality of the Greek in the texts, the training that writers underwent in the ancient Mediterranean, the source materials writers used, and the audience to whom they would have been writing. None of this, Walsh argues, reflects on transcription of oral cultures by the Gospel writers. Instead, she argues, the texts point to the Gospels as works derived from the same milieu as Josephus and Plutarch, Pliny and Virgil. This critical analysis for how to read the Gospels provides an exceptional hermeneutic for reading the Gospels; unfortunately, for someone looking for Walsh to provide a case study for how to read a Gospel, you will find the book lacking. Though she provides multiple touchpoints throughout the text for understanding the Gospels, Walsh's final analysis of the Gospel of Mark is confined to only a couple of pages, and provides only a very broad overview of the tools that one could deploy for interpretation of that Gospel. Having read The Apostle and the Empire and Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark, I could see where Walsh was going but given her analytical mind and the acumen with which she presented her argument, I would have enjoyed a more nuanced and thorough reading of a Gospel or at least a portion of one. This is an excellent book and makes a great companion piece to other Gospel interpretations. It is well worth reading.

[Luke Burns · Rating 5 out of 5]

Truly an incredible book from a world class scholar. In “The Origins of Early Christian Literature,” Robyn Faith Walsh provides a systematic survey detailing how New Testament scholarship is, in many ways, unconsciously predisposed to interpreting the synoptic gospels through the lens of German Romanticism scholarship. Walsh uses a unique meta-critique of those in her shared field of study to argue that scholars need not be pigeonholed in viewing the gospel writers as spokespersons for their respective Christian communities responsible for organizing a grassroots literary product of narrativized oral traditions. Walsh insists that evidence in the gospels for an oral tradition of Jesus is scant at best and if it did exist, how would one be able to distinguish it from other material?

In other words, Walsh argues that we should view the authors of the synoptic gospels not as the lowly spokesmen representing the beliefs and oral traditions of their particular Christian communities but instead as rational actors in a network of ancient writers in conversation with the wider Greco-Roman ecosystem of literature. In so doing, we can look at other writing guilds from antiquity and analyze how writing, producing and disseminating literature functioned. This method of analysis is less limited in scope and doesn’t rely on imagined Christian communities as evidence for who and how the gospel literature was written and propagated.

It is my opinion that Walsh is successful in presenting her thesis persuasively while acknowledging that some things cannot be known with certainty. My only critique of this book is that it is certainly written by an expert for other experts in the field as the primary audience. The layman must be well acquainted with classics and Greco-Roman history to enjoy the breadth of content found within these pages. With this minor critique in mind, I (and likely many others) would have benefited from an occasional break in the relentless scholarship arguments for a more conversational summary of some of her points. I recognize that this is scholarly literature and not written for a popular audience per se, but, as a general reader like myself, it would have gone a long way in helping me comprehend her arguments more quickly. All in all, a fantastic book and one unlike anything I have ever read on the gospels. High recommend!

[Courtney]

So good and a much more sensible and persuasive argument than the certainty with which Jesus Mythicists present their arguments. A clear-eyed reassessment of the underlying assumptions that all trained New Testament scholars are taught. If all we can confidently say is that Jesus was a Jewish preacher from Galilee in the first century who was executed by Pontius Pilate, it may as well be a coincidence that the man sketched out in the gospels also fits that description. None of us is able to think of an historical Jesus who isn't quite a bit more than that. But what basis do we have on which to judge whether something that is plaisible actually happened if we merely allow the Gospels to corroborate one another? Highly recommended. It's a bit dense and academic, but easily understandable by interested nonspecialists.

[Jc · Rating 4 out of 5]

Robyn Walsh is a woman who wears well the label of “scholar.” Her deep study and understanding of the history of the early centuries of Xtianity and its literature are obvious in her many papers and on-line discussions. To use the vernacular, this woman knows her shit. That being said, this is NOT a work for someone who is just curious about the Greco-Roman period surrounding the birth of christianity. RFW’s Origins is a serious discussion of the religious and otherwise social-cultural milieu that gave birth to the ideas and writings of the time, and which formed the basis of later Xtianity. This belongs on the shelf of anyone who wants to do a deep dive into where the ideas that developed into Xtianity grew from.

[Charles Meadows · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a Christian who hold fairly conservative positions on the trustworthiness of scripture I would likely disagree with Prof Walsh on many things. But this is a really great piece of scholarship. She thinks the gospels are not the product of "communities", as many scholars thinks but rather works written by a literary elite, drawing on common "tropes", like an empty tomb, which occurs in several other Roman works. The best part is Prof Walsh's journey through 19th century German literature and finding a national "mythos" that German new testament scholars assumed would likewise underpin the identities of early church communities.

[Nicholas · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this awhile ago, but please let me share my thoughts. The book, depending on your persuasion, is a necessarily if not “cutting edge”intervention in Biblical studies, from a critical academic perspective.

Walsh goes through the “oral culture” debate as to how much transmission of stories changes or doesn’t when only told, rather than written. She uses Germanic fairy tales such as Grimm’s as background to inform the debate. As critical Bible scholarship also came out of this background with assumptions about oral transmission. I don’t want to give too much away.

Another point where Walsh really offers an intervention is in the presumed background of NT authors. Really, how likely is it that illiterate fishermen wrote the gospels? Extremely unlikely. Though Walsh goes beyond assumptions about oral transmission or writers close to the disciples, and instead offers up a unique and likely portrait of who may have written the gospels and why.

This is obviously not orthodox. It’s on the bleeding edge of critical scholarship, so if that is not your cup of tea look away. But if it peaks your interest, I recommend both online interviews with Walsh as well as this book of course.

I didn’t give it a 5 because it’s hard for me to unless things are super compelling, but this should get a strong 4!

[Rodolfo Huerta · Rating 5 out of 5]

Robyn Faith Walsh’s scholarly criticism of New Testament studies reading the Synoptics as a representation of Romantic communities is an important aspect on how certain texts are read in a different way compared to other works of antiquity at the time. I enjoyed reading her views on how the gospel authors were pretty smart when it comes to writing for a certain kind of audience, namely a sort of elite.

[Michael Kahn · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book may very well start a paradigm shift!

[Neal Kleinschmidt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Definitely eye opening. This book inspired me to look into other stories/legends around the times the gospels were written.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

Probably a little over my head, Walsh is clearly brilliant in her field. I found parts, especially the first half, hard to track with. Something about her writing style that didn't click with me. But overall I could tell she was building a case that supported her thesis - the gospels are literature within a tradition of writers and writings, and biblical scholarship needs to stop treating them as something altogether different and giving them a free pass.

Also, I don't want to out her, but is she a Jesus mythicist?? It seemed like she was carefully avoiding saying anything that assumed the historicity of Jesus.