In chapter 2, the author outlined the history of a chronic disease that plagued historical science and biblical research from German Romanticism to English Postmodernism in terms of research methods, accepted criteria and the way of asking questions. Unfortunately, she did not give a good answer.
Her proposal is useless.
“We need to describe the history and social networks of these writers and consider their methods and rhetoric before attempting to reconstruct the subsequent communities that adopted them.”
Walsh, Robyn Faith. The Origins of Early Christian Literature: Contextualizing the New Testament within Greco-Roman Literary Culture (p. 104). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.
The content competition between ghostwriters is always the same whether you’re writing a gospel or another romance for Harper One. Those of Harper One are more honest – they don’t use pesher cynically just to win.
Chapter One: The Myth of Christian Origins
Anachronism is a constant issue when dealing with ancient cultures. How do we approach these sources on their own terms without reading our own definitions and understandings and concerns into them? Is that even possible? We can only see through our own eyes. With no contemporary representatives of these cultures, with only a more or less random sampling of surviving texts (or perhaps worse, a collection of texts that only survived because they were privileged by subsequent generations), are we forever barred from Eden? Well one thing we can do is examine how past interpreters of these ancient texts read their own contemporary concerns into them and perhaps then extrapolate how we are tempted to do so. Hindsight is 20/20, right? Right?
In her first chapter Prof Walsh performs this exercise with views about the “origin” of Christianity. This chapter prepares the reader for subsequent discussions and so some themes raised here will be circling back on themselves throughout the course of the work. Consequently reviewing this book chapter by chapter might be a mistake but I will continue to do so as an approach. Later there will be time for an overall because this kind of discussion is fundamental to the field and truthfully, never-ending. And we’re not in any hurry now are we friends?
I’m not going to provide a synopsis of the entire book but try to distill what seems to me to be the points of especial interest. For me of course. There’s a lot to chew on here. I can’t possibly get to everything. Read the book.
Walsh points out how our views of first century Christianity are shaped by developments in the second century. She suggests that what we have come to call Christianity is largely a product of the second century. She suggests that what second century interpreters were doing was taking an available reservoir of texts, excluding some, privileging others, and “inventing a tradition” that provided a “suitable historic past”, validating their own assumptions about who they were, providing a mechanism to define the “in” group from the “out” group.
Now none of this should really be shocking to anyone at all familiar with historical criticism of the Bible. Not to put too bald a face on it but isn’t this precisely the logic of what Hebrew Bible scholars are saying? At a certain point literate Yahwists took their written traditions and created a narrative of their past? A narrative we have come to call the Old Testament?
Walsh questions the idea of an early oral Christian “community” passing on traditions that were later collected and edited into texts. She cautions against the idea that we should take the claims of these texts and the social situations they describe at face value. In subsequent chapters she will provide different contexts in which to place these texts. We know little about the authors or the provenance of these first century texts but she points out that we know a great deal more about Roman cultural literary communities and practices.
Walsh ends her first chapter by offering some examples of her thesis from Paul’s letters and the synoptic gospels. In my next post I will present some of these, which are actually very interesting. It’s always useful to reexamine your assumptions especially the stuff that seems most beyond dispute. Sometimes the hardest thing to see clearly is what’s right in front of your face.
Wow, current events take up too much time.
Anyway…
I’m almost through chapter 4 and I can see that my original plan to deal with each chapter separately will not work well with this book. I almost wish Prof Walsh had begun with chapter 3 dealing with authorship in antiquity and then worked her way backwards and forwards through the implications for study of the NT. Her later chapters certainly deepen and illuminate earlier comments. It’s been a while since I read a book that so constantly made me put it down and think about what’s been said. When I’m done I can see I’m going to wind up with lots of questions. I’m still going to use the chapter headings as a guide but there will be much circling about.
Walsh finishes chapter 1 by considering the examples of Paul and the synoptic gospels.
If you’re going to question the idea of early “community” traditions and oral transmission you have to deal with Paul, of course. Walsh invites us to question that Paul is dealing with fully formed communities that share a mutual awareness of being part of a coherent movement. Paul is trying to establish such communities and his claims are aspirational. Paul is “invoking groups he seeks to evoke…summon them, call them into being”. The Corinthian letters, for example, are used as examples of the dangers of divisions in a community, but not as evidence that this “group” was only loosely affiliated. The letter to the Galatians is used to depict a formerly strong group that has been infiltrated and subverted by outsiders.
Paul is in almost constant controversy. Paul is in competition with other authority figures. But are we dealing with a diverse “movement” or groups who don’t see themselves as affiliated at all? All we have is Paul’s perspective. What was the real relationship between Paul and the original disciples? We cannot rely on the narrative in Acts which has an overt harmonizing agenda. Perhaps Acts seeks not to heal an early conflict in a “community” of Jewish and Gentile converts but create a cohesion that didn’t exist in the first place?
Walsh next asks how much we can glean about the idea of an early Christian community from the synoptic gospels when we have almost no information about their provenance? What scholars have done traditionally almost by necessity is to imagine the communities that could have produced such documents. (Walsh will later provide another context for consideration.) But really, what was the Markan “community”? Look at the Markan Jesus and his emphasis on secrecy and silence. Jesus’ disciples go through the narrative uncomprehending. At the end they are scattered, lost and afraid.
In her second chapter Walsh will examine the cultural reasons she thinks led NT scholarship to the approach we inherit.
Before I proceed a couple aspects I find interesting.
Walsh comments how Luke/Acts must have known Paul as well as Mark. I found this assertion odd since Acts contradicts Paul’s letters so often that many scholars have come to doubt such a knowledge. Then I remembered her overarching point. If there was no oral tradition behind the gospels then all transmission must have been literary. Of course the only way Luke/Acts could know about Paul was through Paul’s actual writings.
Walsh only briefly mentions the dependence of the synoptic gospels on each other. The problem with this aspect is that including whole swaths of verbatim text in a subsequent text by another writer is unprecedented in ancient narrative literature. Wouldn’t the simplest explanation for this be to indicate a continuity of belief on the part of the writers? That they privileged Mark’s account in some way? (Remember that even those scholars who think Luke knew Matthew realize that he must have had a copy of Mark available to him.) It’s unfortunate she doesn’t spend more time on John which she only mentions briefly. Why didn’t all the gospel writers write their own individual gospels like John? Matthew and Luke’s dependence on Mark seems to contradict what we should expect if Walsh’s position is correct. I’d love to ask her about this.
Having made it through four of the five chapters already I must say I find this the weakest part of the book. I’ll get to what I consider the strongest part of the book in due course.
Stephen: “Walsh only briefly mentions the dependence of the synoptic gospels on each other. The problem with this aspect is that including whole swaths of verbatim text in a subsequent text by another writer is unprecedented in ancient narrative literature.”
I think you have hit the nail squarely on the head with this observation. Neither the authors of Matthew nor Luke depart from the overall structure and many of the details of Mark’s account, and include almost verbatim copies of portions of Mark’s text. One has to wonder why that is the case. As you note in your post, in this respect the Synoptics do not really fit into the cultural and literary elite model Walsh describes.
Note: I am also reading the book, and have finished Chapter 3.
The third chapter of Walsh’s book is the longest and most dense with information and is probably where she is going to lose a lot of non-specialist readers. It’s a cultural/social study of developments in 19th century western literary thinking. The easiest way in to simply quote Walsh.
This chapter proposes that critical scholarship of the New Testament – a field that emerged during the Romantic philosophical, political, and cultural movement – has inherited from German Romantic and Idealistic thought a number of presumptions about the social formation of early Christianity and the role of early Christian authors within their presumed communities. Such presumptions have contributed to the development of approaches to early Christian writing that are idiosyncratic when compared with allied studies of ancient literature.
and, later…
A close reading of their [Romantic literary theorists] work reveals a clear trajectory from Romantic methodologies for reading literature to the Form Criticism (Formgeschichte) and Redaction Criticism (Redaktiongeschichte) that continue to undergird approaches to the New Testament today. In short, and as I discuss in the Preface, I judge the field [New Testament studies] has lost sight of its roots in Romanticism and that appeals to this legacy are now not only largely unconscious but also persistent.
Now normal folk can have long and fulfilled lives without knowing about any of this stuff but it does make for a bracing critique. My own degrees are in literature and philosophy so much of this is known to me but I am by no means a specialist. That’s part of the problem I think. This chapter could have been an entire book in and of itself and needs a thorough going over by a proper classicist and a 19th century western european cultural historian. What will happen of course is that it will be largely the purview of NT specialists who, as Walsh points out, have, alas, little of the necessary social/cultural knowledge outside their own specialty.
Every century is a response to developments in the previous century and so is frequently blind to its most salient features. So one task of each new century it seems is to reevaluate the century before the last. It is so now. In our academies the 19th century is currently being given a thorough going over by fresh perspectives. I see Prof Walsh’s book as a focused part of that project. Her views seem very perceptive and I am perfectly willing to follow her. But of course with lots of questions.
Walsh has a long discussion on the concept of “myth“. In the popular realm most people who think about it at all are usually guided by, in a previous generation, Joseph Campbell, and currently, Jordan Peterson. What is completely obscured is the long history of thinking behind the assumptions these popular figures share. Really, this is a scholarly bottomless pit, but a fascinating one. Our very definitions of “myth” are being shaped by largely unquestioned two hundred year old arguments.
Walsh usefully compares the development of the field of NT studies with the development of the field of Homeric studies. And a substantial portion of her critique of the influence of German Romanticism includes the activities of the Brothers Grimm, more famous than actually known. Walsh explores the idea of the Romantic “genius” as a spokesman for the Volk and as cultural representative of the Volksgeist. Here Walsh makes the point that because of the 20th century world wars we are so familiar with the malignant aspects of these fraught concepts that their benign influence in the humanities has been virtually occluded. She concludes this chapter with a focused analysis of how modern NT studies and the assumptions they require have developed.
There’s so much here! Like I said this could have been an entire monograph itself.
Note: There was some comment earlier about Prof Walsh’s, well, sensitivity in a prefatory note about mentioning certain individuals involved in infamous historical occurrences in the 20th century. In this chapter I think we might detect a modicum of justification for this. Walsh is writing about ideas that have had both a malignant and a benign influence on subsequent history. I don’t think it’s overly sensitive to point these things out. Not everybody whose ideas partake of and depend on the concept of the “folk” or the “folk spirit” are Nazis. But how can you deal the benign aspect without being conscious of the malignancy as well?
just in case anyone actually wondered, I haven’t abandoned this effort. I’m just over a bout of sinusitis and been on a couple late summer road trips which preclude extended reading. In Walsh’s book next comes what I regard as the most interesting part.
A teaser-
For a while I have been questioning the account of the writing of the gospels discussed in Prof Ehrman’s book Jesus Before the Gospels. The idea is that of a long oral tradition behind the composition of the gospels. The writers of the gospels are seen as editors and redactors. The concept of authorial creativity is not denied but definitely minimized. My academic background is primarily literary and over the last few years I have been reading a good bit of what has come to be called “Narrative Theology”. This is mostly just an uppity name for what is essentially literary criticism of the New Testament. It seeks to interpret the text as a narrative, focusing on the story it is telling, not depending on textual issues, or trying to look “behind” the text.
Consequently I have become less and less satisfied with this view of oral tradition. Prof Walsh deals with this view, critiques it, and has crystallized a lot of my thinking on this issue. It becomes even clearer to me that the gospel writings are creative literary works.
In the meantime, definitely read Ehrman’s book since it is an excellent summation of much current thinking abouot orality and the gospel tradition. If you’re interested at all in Narrative theology look at what is now a classic text, Mark as Story, by David Rhoads, Joanna Dewey and Donald Michie. This book is in its third edition. A search will reveal a bunch of books on this subject but MAS is still a great place to begin.
Note: The latest edition of Prof Ehrman’s podcast, episode #49, is a discussion of the issue of a pre-gospel oral tradition. It is entitled Stories about Jesus before the Gospels: Oral traditions in the early Church. Ehrman hits the highlights and of course doesn’t have time to go into the detail he provides in his book, Jesus Before the Gospels. In the podcast, available on YouTube, he really doubles down on his view, projecting a level of certainty. I really need to go back and reread his book myself. It’s been several years. But this view, liking the gospel writers to the popular notion of the Brothers Grimm, collecting stories and editing them, seems less and less plausible to me. I suspect the actual process was more like what the Brothers Grimm really did, rather different than the popular image of their work.
More to come…
ps: I don’t know exactly how Prof Ehrman came to know Megan Lewis. I was familiar with her previous work with her husband Joshua Bowen at their YouTube channel Digital Hammarabi. If you’re interested at all in Ancient Near Eastern studies, check it out.
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I finished Dr. Walsh’s book earlier this week, and had a similar reaction to Stephen’s when listening to this week’s podcast. Now that I’ve read her book I find myself recasting arguments about “what Jesus really said,” which is not knowable, into arguments about the earlier forms of the texts. Ultimately that is not knowable either, but it seems to be a more honest inquiry.
Now I know more about German Romanticism than I ever wanted to know, but Dr. Walsh did make her point.
What did the Brothers Grimm really do, as opposed to the popular notion?
Well, they had an agenda. And sometimes they filled in the blanks. And, uhhh…, sometimes they made stuff up.
I don’t think there’s a necessary contradiction between the gospel writers using traditional material and their being genuine authors in their own right.
No, you’re right, but there is a difference between texts composed from an oral tradition and texts composed from a written tradition or, as Walsh argues, written using motifs and tropes familiar to contemporary literate elites. As we shall see.
Ok, Walsh has spent the first two chapters of her book critiquing a current, widely held view of the background of the gospels. She has attempted to illustrate the origins of this view and its problems. Basically the view is that the gospels are products of decades of oral transmission finally written down by literate members of local Christian communities. The problem is so obvious that it’s easy to miss. We have no evidence whatsoever as to the provenance of these texts. We don’t know who wrote them, where, or under what circumstances. So…all scholarly descriptions are at best speculation based on clues sussed out from the texts themselves.
Now, I don’t think we should completely disparage these attempts, especially since we have nothing else to go on until much much later. (Papias and all that.) But it can only take us so far. And at what point does it come down to scholarly cleverness? Alternatively, as Walsh points out, we do know quite a bit about first century literate elites and their activities.
Prof Walsh’s third chapter discusses what it meant to be an author in antiquity, how education worked, and the conditions under which these literary elites operated. She also discusses how these writers viewed the texts they produced. She finishes the chapter by using Philo as a case study and offers an alternative framework for the composition of the gospel of Mark. This last provides a bridge to the last two chapters of the book which provide parallels between early Christian texts and contemporary pagan literature, and discusses what kind of texts the gospels might be.
As I’ve written earlier, this is the most interesting part of the book to me since it validates some intuitions I’ve been gradually coming by over the last few years of intensively reading Mark. I’m going to spend some time on this, working out my own thoughts. However I will be very careful to distinguish Walsh’s claims from my own speculations. Mostly at this point what I have are questions.
A point Walsh has made repeatedly in the first three chapters is that we must not assume that the social conditions of the writers mirror the social conditions of the subjects of the text. Again, this seems obvious, until we realize that this is one of the underlying assumptions behind much NT critical interpretation. Mark is seen as a literate member of a community of Christians writing for the use of the non-literate members of the community. But what evidence do we actually have for that assumption?
Walsh discusses the elite nature of the literate community. Their “eliteness” was primarily based on their literacy, not always the product of the wealthy class. What was required was the opportunity to learn and the time to do so. Obviously wealth was a very great help but we do have examples of literate persons who were not members of the upper classes. One characteristic of these literate producers was that their audience tended to be each other.
In the last 10 months or so I have been making the point:
there is no Oral Tradition of a historical Jesus of the late 20s early 30s since no one referenced him during the Jewish Civil War and Revolt against Rome (examples: Even in Galilee, Agrippa II did not counsel the people of Galilee against revolting against Rome, Agrippa II never told Jesus of Gamala, Galilee: “Decades ago, there was a Jesus of Galilee. He was known to my father, Agrippa I …” Second, high priest Jesus, son of Gamala [in Galilee) didn’t say in his speech to the Idumeans, “This day is the day the great miracle worker and ethical teacher, decades ago, warned us was coming–This is the destruction of Jerusalem that Jesus warned us was coming.”
Not one disciple, even wrote a letter to Agrippa II or high priest Jesus: “These are the times our master warned were coming, These are the times for which John the Baptist who came before Jesus, told us to prepare.”
Steve Campbell, author of Historical Accuracy
Steefen thanks for the video.
These were primarily oral cultures so it’s hard to imagine there wasn’t some level of oral tradition in the Jesus communities, however messy they were. But it seems to me to be a different question as to whether or not there was an oral tradition behind Mark. Comparisons with Homer seem dodgy to me as well since there are oral techniques still present in the surviving Homeric texts. Where are these oral techniques in the gospels? What stories are present that would have been collected by hypothetical editors/redactors? Why do the other gospels depend so heavily on Mark? My perception is that if there was an oral tradition it consisted of the frame story, the major events of Jesus’ life and death, not the details included in the gospels. I agree that the gospels were creative literary creations. I do still have a problem with the idea that there was no continuity of belief among the writers however.
Robert
You believe Josephus possibly is the author of the letters of Paul.
You believe Josephus was part of the Flavian conspiracy to invent the story of the biblical Jesus.
Then, certainly he should have put these speeches in the mouths of Agrippa II and Joshua, son of Gamala.
Steefen
In the three passages (Testimonium Flavianum and the two passages after)
1) Joseph describes the biblical Jesus
2) Decius Mundus is the self-sacrificed savior of the world. (Decius Mus, Father and Son are one in self-sacrifice–an atonement for a victory. Each Dwxiua Mua died for a military victory–good news of a military victory. Paul: we have VICTORY through Jesus
[1 Cor 15: 57] Victory over starvation by Mary offering her son to be consumed, after her own “communion”).
3) Paulina in Passage 2 becomes Fulvia in Passage 3. A Paul figure is introduced in Passage 3 who is wicked. So, the wicked man in passage 3 is the wicked man in Passage 2 who is Jesus in Passage 1, the Testimonium Flavianum.
Finally given the borrowing of autobiographical information of Josephus in the biblical Paul, Josephus is Paul who is wicked, who is the wicked Decius Mundus, who is Jesus, savior of the World. Flavius Josephus was earlier known as Yosef ben Matityahu / Joseph ben Matthias. So, yes, with the power granted to Josephus by the Flavian emperors, Josephus helped construct the biblical Jesus and Pauline Christianity.
Josephus did fail to cover the Oral TRadition question that I am raising about 2,000 years later and that Robyn Faith Walsh is also raising about 2,000 years later.
The oral Tradition cannot even be traced through the Woe-saying Jesus who did not reference a Jesus from the late 20s / early 30s.
Furthermore, I also raised the question of how so much of the gospel Jesus does not appear in the “occasional” letters of Paul, particularly, if Paul is writing a Letter to the Romans, he does not reference by Oral Tradition, Jesus healing the Roman officer’s servant.
Steve Campbell, author of Historical Accuracy
Prof Walsh uses the gospel of Mark as a case study. She provides a scenario under which the gospel could have been produced without recourse to the traditional view that the author was a literate member of a community of believers writing for the needs of such a community. One interesting aspect of all this is how similar the assumptions are behind both of these scenarios. Even if the author was writing not for a believing community but for a group of fellow cultural elites there are some common assumptions you must make.
The author of Mark had an interest in Jewish literary interpretation and some degree of investment in Judaism, and possessed some degree of training in Greco-Roman literary culture. He was probably writing post First Jewish revolt, concerned as his text is with the significance of the destruction of the Temple. I think all of that would have to be true regardless of authorial situation.
The divergence comes when you consider what sources would have been available to the author. In the trad view Mark would have access to a fairly developed oral tradition as well as some amount of hypothetical literary sources. Because Prof Walsh minimizes the oral traditions in her view Mark’s sources would have had to be almost exclusively literary. Mark couldn’t just have known about Paul. He must have had access to Paul’s actual letters. Many scholars have pointed out what seems to be a Pauline influence on Mark’s text. (Walsh has a nice passage listing what seem to be Pauline memes present in Mark. Good to have in one place.)
But a question – could Mark have written his gospel with just the surviving authentic letters of Paul, a writer notorious for lack of interest in the details of the historical Jesus’ life? Another question – where would Mark have gotten access to the Pauline corpus? These were occasional letters written to specific, uhhhh…communities, right? Preserved by members of those communities who had some kind of investment in Paul’s teachings? I think everyone would agree Mark must have had other sources.
Prof Walsh assumes that Mark is a bios. Is that true? is Mark a Greco-Roman biography? This seems to be a dominant scholarly view and it would be hard to argue that the other gospels do not reflect such an influence. But Mark? (I have a paper somewhere I downloaded on PDF arguing that Mark is not a bios, pointing out the dissimilarities to that genre.) Assuming that Mark is a bios provides a framework for interpretation and of course there was no one template for such a fluid genre. I’m not sure how we could differentiate between a text influenced by the bios genre, and an actual bios anyway.
To be fair, Walsh finally claims agnosticism as to whether the author of Mark was associated with any sort of Jesus “community”. Her primary concern is to demonstrate that the gospels were first century literary products that owed more to a network of elite cultural producers than to poor illiterate believers passing on stories. In her final two chapters she will compare the gospels to other contemporary texts produced by other members of these literary cultural elites.
A personal note – For a while I’ve been less and less enamored of the view Prof Ehrman discusses in his book, Jesus Before the Gospels. If you want the best presentation of that view of the oral foundation of Jesus traditions you should definitely read that book. While my academic background is partly literary, it does not include New Testament or classics specialization. When I first began reading the gospels seriously (curiously that only took place after I stopped believing, go figure) I was struck how profoundly literary they are. Big deal, right? They’re books! But consider the actual claim. The gospels are collections of stories that were passed down through a multigenerational oral tradition that was ultimately written down by a literate member of the Jesus community.
But read the gospels. Where are the stories that would have been passed down? Functionally how would that have worked? If you read Homer studies for comparison you find out how bad an example that is. Homer retains elements of orality. Where are such in the gospels? Prof Walsh has succeeded on one front. She has reinforced my perception. Whatever their actual provenance it seems clearer to me that the gospels are creative literary texts. So while I am considering all of Walsh’s claims this is my own particular itch to scratch. (For Walsh this conclusion just follows logically from her assumptions.)
More to come.
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