The Origins of Early Christian Literature

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-Christianity-Discovering-Immediately-Execution-ebook/dp/B003JBHVWC/ref=sr_1_4?crid=2896A4XCGS5S4&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.G5frHgq8Jcze839mPQwarxCoPBNHncOlTzHsDI9mHmvgT3umk6bFqFjr02PHFP4NGIV7rhEDzF3ARUB7Oi8ONiq4F5pS5Qf30o3cy6QZY-8c32oYtNh-ndz0giGc5aJzyESwwtn1LEuyWYJvTMeAOhnWrd8lLN-_dCiNnXfc-7l0ThAxcpQZPZyEOawmpzb4ZOwifzOCICI5zV58N3S6RnvVLoAkNKJC0JxWscJSJ3M.PCPCdn5lMoREZK2RAhKPkDLEqgOwFML8vZRsB58u1T8&dib_tag=se&keywords=John+Dominic+Crossan&qid=1710878134&s=digital-text&sprefix=john+dominic+crossan%2Cdigital-text%2C286&sr=1-4 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