Steefen, Walsh is not a mythicist.
Robert wrote
Critical scholars have been saying this for as long as I’ve studied their works…
Yes but remember Walsh is questioning the traditional view of orality behind the gospel. She is trying to place the gospels in a different cultural context. When I say “creative” I mean that Mark actually made stuff up to suit his purposes, as I will discuss.
In her fourth chapter Walsh examines other texts more or less contemporaneous with the gospels to illustrate her claim that the gospel writers are members of a literary elite drawing images and motifs from a shared body of cultural referents, definitely Jewish but also heavily drawn from pagan sources as well. She does point out that there has always been a scholarly recognition of this although there has also been reticence to follow this admission through to its logical conclusion.
Walsh spends a lot of time on the Satyricon, traditionally ascribed to Petronius, composed mid-first century. Apparently there is an ongoing debate in the scholarly community about the dating of this text with with many scholars now favoring composition in the second century. Either way the parallels are difficult to reconcile with a strictly oral gospel tradition. To Walsh it makes much more sense of the material that these literary elites were drawing from a shared pool of images and ideas.
The parallels are striking. Associations drawn between ritual anointing and burial. The crowing of a cock as a harbinger of death. Empty tombs. Missing crucified bodies. The crucifixion of thieves. Ceremonial meals associated with imminent death and remembrance. Resurrections!
What are we to make of all this? I’ve always been skeptical of Dwight McDonald’s contention that Mark is deliberately modeling his gospel on Homer. It seems much more likely that the tales of Elijah and Elisha function as a template. But an educated literate composer of texts would have been exposed to Greco-Roman culture as part of a normal education. Second Temple Judaism was thoroughly Hellenized. The old idea that there was a demarcation between Jerusalem and Athens no longer stands up to scrutiny.
Whoops, Dennis MacDonald not Dwight McDonald.
I’m not sure if Walsh and Macdonald have had any direct interactions. I don’t think Walsh would go so far as to say that Mark is directly using Homer as a template. It would be more diffuse than that. I’m still skeptical of the idea that all koine students would get a full classical Greek education anyway. If your fate is to become a secretary at a plantation in Asia Minor are you you really going to get a full classical Greek education? You might copy passages as exercises but that’s a different thing.
I suspect that Mark is a diaspora Jew like Paul, not a pagan convert. One of the weaknesses of Walsh’s book is that she doesn’t spend a lot of time on Jewish literary practices. of course we don’t know a whole heckuva lot until we have later Rabbinical sources. I think Walsh makes her point about literary elites but we need more info about specifically Jewish practice. In her book, in an effort to associate the gospel writers with the larger pagan culture, at times she almost makes it sound like the gospel writers aren’t invested in their subject matter. The gospels, especially Mark, no matter how dependent on Greco-Roman literary culture, are drenched in the Hebrew Bible.
To jump ahead a bit, I suspect that what Mark possessed was a Christian narrative exoskeleton. Like Paul’s credo in I Cor, Mark would have had the basic narrative framework. But the actual stories in his narrative are creative compositions, composed along the lines described by Walsh using the materials available to the author. I will definitely expand on this view when I finish my survey of Walsh’s book.
Walsh finishes her chapter 3 with short discussions of the issues of pseudepigraphy, anonymity of texts, and appeals to eyewitnesses. If you reject oral tradition in the gospels as Walsh does then you have to interpret these factors in the texts as literary strategies. So she does.
If anyone reading this is familiar with Prof Ehrman’s work, both popular and scholarly, you’ll know he has written extensively about the problem of pseudepigraphy, or to put it more forthrightly, forgery, in the New Testament. Texts that claim to be written by someone but were not. Here we encounter an oddity. Walsh quotes from and includes in her bibliography Ehrman’s popular work, Forged rather than his scholarly work, Forgery and CounterForgery. Now there’s no duplicity at work. She discusses this choice in her footnotes. I’m just wondering, since Ehrman previously addresses most of her objections in his scholarly monograph. The real problem here is when we discuss forgery in the NT we are largely discussing Paul not the gospels. It seems to me that even if we accept Walsh’s critique the question of Paul and the question of the gospels should be considered separately. Whatever we can say about the Pauline forgeries they were written by people who were not Paul but claiming to be Paul.
Much more interesting and much more applicable to the question of the gospels is the subject of anonymity. If you accept the traditional view of local Christian communities behind the gospels then it seems to be a case where, as they were distributed and used in other contexts than the spot of composition, gradually the names of the authors and the provenance of the original work was lost. But, if you reject an oral tradition then you have to explain why the gospels were anonymous. Walsh discusses anonymity of texts in the ancient world as a literary strategy. Walsh provides examples of texts that were known as adespoton, “without a master”. These texts, like the gospels, were later gathered and ascribed to authoritative sources. Examples would be the Sibylline Oracles and the canon of Pythagoras. Of course recognizing that there were other traditions of anonymity in the ancient world doesn’t explain why the gospels specifically were anonymous. And the Pauline forgeries are specifically not anonymous.
It seems probable to me that the very anonymity of the gospels contributed to their success as “founding” documents. If we knew for sure that Billy Bob wrote the gospel of Mark in his free time while a literate slave on a plantation in Syria then it would certainly undermine apostolic authority. It is a scholarly commonplace that the provenance of our surviving NT gospels was formulated (or invented) in retrospect. Dicey if we knew too much. (One of course must at least consider the possibility that the original provenance was deliberately suppressed. Cue the ominous organ music.)
The question of apostolic authority naturally leads to the idea of eyewitnesses. Walsh uses Luke 1:1-4 to illustrate the appeal to eyewitnesses in the NT.
Since many have undertaken to compile a narrative about the events that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed on to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word, I, too, decided, as one having a grasp of everything from the start, to write a well-ordered account for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may have a firm grasp of the words in which you have been instructed. -NRSV
I have always interpreted the author of Luke’s words to be an acknowledgment that other written accounts existed. We know he used mark for example. And probably knew Matthew. But he does appeal to eyewitnesses. Is this why he privileged Mark? Because he thought Mark relied on eyewitness accounts? Or was this a literary strategy, meant to give his account authority? I wasn’t an eyewitness but I have sources who were. As far as I’m concerned this remains an open question. What’s clear is that as the proto-orthodox church formulated its traditions and established its canon the question of apostolic authority became more and more important. But this is nothing new. There are books in the Hebrew bible that are there because of authorial tradition. Eventually Moses became the author of the Torah not just its chief actor.
In her final chapter, “The Gospels as Subversive Biography”, Prof Walsh describes what she thinks is going on in the gospels. As indicated in her title she finds the gospels as part of the ancient genre of biography, bioi in Greek, vitae in Latin.
Since it became possible to speculate along such lines without sanction, scholars have wondered, “What are the gospels?” Many have thought them sui generis, unique. Others tried to see them as representative of, or at least influenced by ancient literary genres. The problem lies in the very fluidity of ancient genre. How can we meaningfully distinguish between a work of ancient biography and a work influenced by ancient biography?
First, Walsh contrasts our modern concepts of what constitutes a biography with that of the ancients. She highlights how porous the genre boundaries were in the ancient world. And of course our modern concept of the objective, disinterested biographer simply didn’t exist. We moderns like our categories and are sensitive to boundary violations. I remember the outrage once over a best-selling biography when it was revealed that the author had imagined some of the private conversations that took place between his subject and others. The ancients had no such scruples. Ancient biographers freely admit to making stuff up when they thought it revealed the character of their subject.
Walsh gives several examples of ancient biographies that more or less resemble what she thinks is taking place in the gospels. She identifies what she describes as “subversive biographies”, works devoted not to the great and powerful in society but to the excluded, the marginalized of society. Walsh finds the gospels to be representative of these types of texts.
I’m not going to go through her examples in this limited space but it is mighty interesting and mighty surprising to compare other ancient texts with the gospels. It’s extremely difficult to hold on to the idea that the gospels simply fell out of the sky as self-contained literary artifacts.
The discussion of ancient literary genre reminds me of the astronomical debate about how best to classify objects in our solar system like Pluto. Discovered in 1930 Pluto was considered one of nine planets orbiting the Sun for decades. But as we discovered more types of astronomical bodies and expanded our conception of what constitutes a planet, it was reclassified as a dwarf planet, a Kuiper Belt object. Much hilarity ensued. But of course on a purely existential level, Pluto still floats out there in the icy twilight, same as before, not giving a f*&^ about our debates.
In the end we circle back to where we began. We don’t know the provenance of these texts. We don’t know who wrote them or where. Dating is a guess – an educated guess – but still a guess. So all interpreters must glean what they can from the the texts themselves. What they reveal. Because of this we are forced to take them at more or less face value. Meaning that we must assume that the authors were communicating what they intended to communicate. So the quest for interpretation begins by attempts to imagine a context for these documents. One of the strengths – and challenges – of Walsh’s book is her critique of the assumption that we can derive the context of the gospels purely from the text itself.
The obvious advantage of the view that there was an oral underpinning for the gospels is that it connects them to an incipient Jesus movement. There is a bridge of tradition however dimly understood. Scholars can debate Walsh’s analysis of the European cultural developments that might have led to this view. I’m certainly not qualified to do that kind of cultural analysis. My questions are literary. Where is the evidence in the texts we have of such an oral underpinning? As others have pointed out, Homer is a bad comparison. Oral artifacts still exist within the Homeric corpus. But where in the NT do we see such?
Of course there is a distinction that needs to be kept in mind. To say that there were no oral underpinnings to the gospels as literary texts is not to say there was no oral tradition in the Christian movement. This seems to me to be two separate questions. I’m going to spend some time on this.
Walsh’s book is terrific. is she right about everything? Who knows? All I can say is that it has been a long time since I had to stop so many times and think about what I just read. Walsh’s position serves to loosen our moorings and a certain amount of vertigo is the result. When has that ever not been a good thing?
Where is the evidence in the texts we have of such an oral underpinning? . . . where in the NT do we see such?
It seems like there are a few:
For example, Mk 2:27-28, at least if Bart’s reading of it is right, gets us to a prior Aramaic tradition, though it is impossible to say whether that prior tradition was written or oral.
The same can be said for Mt 1:21 which explicitly uses a word-play that is only present in a Semitic language.
Again, the passages where Jesus speaks of the Son of Man in the third person, which together, seem to hearken back to a pre-gospel tradition in which Jesus did not identify himself with the Son of Man.
Porphyry, I was thinking more of techniques used in oral storytelling like stock-epithets and formulaic compositions and repetitions. Even ostensible sayings like the Sermon on the Mount and the parables reveal literary structure. I suspect Walsh would say that Aramaisms in the gospels are conscious literary attempts at verisimilitude on the part of the writers.
Now that I have finished a general survey of Walsh’s book I plan to get into some of the issues she raises and the questions I have about them. That will include instances where the writers seem to have some “memories” of the historical Jesus.
Stephen, I have been following this thread to read your views about Walsh’s book, and have been particularly interested to see your take on her last chapter, focusing on subversive biographies. Of course, I am looking forward to reading what else you have to say about it.
Bart’s blog post for the day – An Intriguing and Unusual Demonstration of Early Christian Differences – presents a very interesting thesis showing how different oral traditions could have developed in different communities around the historical Jesus. The authors’ views are very intriguing, but the entire concept strikes me as in significant tension with Walsh’s thesis. What are your thoughts on this?
TTHorne56 I hope I didn’t give you the impression I was done. I’m much too long winded for that. Much of her book I feel unqualified to directly critique. My goal here, as in a lot of technical historical discussions, is not to have an opinion so much as to try to understand the arguments. At this point what I have are questions.
Walsh’s basic contention is that the context previous generations of scholars have constructed for the development of the gospel traditions is the result of largely unexamined cultural assumptions. Cultural assumptions she identifies and critiques. She points out, contra Ehrman, that we really have little if any evidence of a direct oral tradition behind the composition of the gospels. Walsh offers and examines a largely neglected context for the composition of the gospels, the presence of an elite strata of literate composers, about which it turns out, we know a great deal.
In her conclusion Walsh finds the best explanation of the gospels to be what she calls, a “subversive” biography. This requires, first, that she demonstrate a correspondence between the gospels and the genre of ancient biographies. (This in itself is not a new idea. Some august scholars fall on both sides. When Adela Yarbro Collins opines that Mark is not a bios it gives me pause*.) Well there is no doubt there are similarities. It would be hard to argue that the gospels were not at least influenced by bioi. But the obvious rejoinder is that genre boundaries were extremely fluid in the ancient world, a point Walsh freely acknowledges.
The ringer here is Paul. Sorry, mythicists, but we know these folks existed. From Paul. But if Paul’s work had been lost wouldn’t we have a cadre of scholars arguing that the gospels are Greek novels, a genre which they also resemble? Where do you draw your lines here without begging the question?
*Just for the record, Yarbro Collins categorizes Mark as “apocalyptic historiography”.
Bart’s blog post for the day – An Intriguing and Unusual Demonstration of Early Christian Differences – presents a very interesting thesis showing how different oral traditions could have developed in different communities around the historical Jesus. The authors’ views are very intriguing, but the entire concept strikes me as in significant tension with Walsh’s thesis. What are your thoughts on this?
One success on Prof Walsh’s part is that she has tipped over my final objections to the idea that the gospels are creative literary compositions and do not depend primarily on a direct oral tradition stemming from early Jesus communities. Now as I said before this doesn’t mean that there weren’t oral traditions – in such an overwhelmingly oral culture how could there not be? But that is a different question than asking if the gospels depended on an underlying oral tradition. I do intend to go back and reread Prof Ehrman’s book, Jesus Before the Gospels just to revisit the arguments. But yes they are divergent views.
Walsh’s view is that Ehrman is speculating about a possible provenance for the gospels using examples from other oral cultures without providing any real evidence that this situation applies to the gospel authors. I’d love to hear the two of them have a nice long discussion about it. The problem with that is if the discussion were for other than a specialist audience they would have to spend a long time talking about the background of the arguments, which of course they do in their books. At this point best to read the books and if a chance is provided ask some questions.
I think I can explain why I agree with Walsh on this and have intentions to do so since it strikes me as fundamental.
Re: depends primarily
The point of view being critiqued by Walsh is that the composition of the gospels depended on collections of stories passed along orally by communities of believers. Walsh also raises the possibility that the authors of the gospels were not themselves part of a community of believers. The first I accept. The second raises all kinds of questions. Walsh only offers it as a possibility. She is not making a claim.
What I suspect Mark had by way of oral tradition was probably some sort of creedal confession along the lines of Paul’s in 1 Cor 15. It’s possible he knew specific stories but I suspect he created most of the narrative details in his gospel himself.
My problem with saying that Mark was not invested somehow in his material is that he, like in the example from Matthew, is engaged in interpretation that would seem to be only of interest to a believer of some sort. My example is the tension in Mark between the message of the pre-Easter Jesus and post-Easter Jesus. In Mark 6 Jesus sends the disciples out two by two to proclaim, what? Not the significance of Jesus’ death on the cross because he doesn’t tell them about that that part until chapter 8. The proclamation seems to be the same as given earlier in chapter 1.
The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.
This would seem to be the original apocalyptic proclamation of the historical Jesus.
But one of Mark’s main themes is his radical reinterpretation of the meaning of the Jewish Messiah. No more triumphalism but victory through suffering and death. It’s hard for me to see how this tension doesn’t reflect a historical aspect of the developing Jesus movement. I would of course be extremely curious to hear Walsh’s views.
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