(16 votes, average: 4.88 out of 5)
Loading...Here is the second post by Robyn Faith Walsh, challenging what the majority of scholars think and teach about the relationship of Paul and the Gospels, and the implications for early Christianity. Again, this is related to her book, which you can find here: The Origins of Early Christian Literature.
******************************
Paul makes sense as a “source” for the gospel writers for several reasons.
The first relates to literary practices and social context: given what we know about the processes of ancient authors, it is likely that the gospel writers would have sought out any available material about the Christ movement as they created their works. And the only available writings that we know existed before the gospels are Paul’s letters; that some of these letters even survive to the degree that we have them suggests they were circulated and/or known in some measure.
Get access to Dr. Ehrman's library of 4,000+ articles plus five new articles per week about the New Testament and early Christianity. It costs as little as $2.99/mth and every cent goes to charity!
Unlock 4,000+ Articles Like This!
What a fascinating thesis. Its implication, if true, is huge: that a significant chunk of what we think we know about Jesus from the gospels actually stems not from an oral tradition rooted in historical events but rather from one man’s self-validated mystical experiences.
Of course, we’ll never know one way or the other…
Thank you Dr Walsh. Much of what you have said makes perfect sense to me. I had often wondered about the close correlation between the Last Supper wording in Corinthians and the Gospels. I would have thought that there would be more discrepancies if an earlier oral tradition was being tapped into. So I’m sure that there is a good chance that Paul is the source.
Thank you!!! It’s interesting to think about why there has been such resistance to this idea historically!
I think one issue with this Paul influenced the Gospels theory is that Paul says very little about the historical Jesus. Is this a problem for this thesis? Thanks
No, for two reasons: (1) I don’t suppose that Paul is the only source for the gospel writers– just one we should consider and (2) the information he gives us about the historical Jesus, at least in some cases, comes from divination experiences he had of the risen Jesus, for which there may have not been much distinction in antiquity.
Some scholars have detected a Pauline influence on Mark. Paul is Luke’s hero. But what about Matthew? Doesn’t the presence of ideas that Paul despised, obeying the Law for example, and the inclusion of biographical and sayings material that can’t be easily traced to Paul indicate there must have some extra-Pauline source material?
Some scholars– Stanley Stowers and Erin Roberts– have noted that there is a lot of Stoicism in the gospel of Matthew that gets missed because of the focus on it as the “Jewish” gospel and it indicates that, at minimum, the author of Matthew is in the same philosophical thought world as Paul. Stowers just published two new books this year– check them out if you can!
Thank you, Robyn! I’ve been thinking the same thing along similar lines ever since I heard Mark Goodacre in a podcast offhandedly refer to Mark as a narrative prequel to what Paul says about Jesus.
My pleasure– great framing by Mark!
Mark’s account of the last supper (Mark 14:22-25) seems more primitive than that in 1 Cor 11. Mark’s gospel narrates events from the viewpoint of the 12. Luke and Matthew’s gospel tend to edit out the references to the 12. The last supper account is no exception. Mark 14:22-25: “they were eating ….. he gave it to them ….. he gave it to them …. all of them drank …. he said to them”. This seems to be closer to eyewitness testimony than Paul’s account, which lacks the viewpoint of the 12. If Mark derived his account from 1 Cor, why would he add the perspective of the 12, which Luke then removes?
It is true that Paul does not acknowledge that he is dependent on any of the apostles for his account. This may be because the Corinthians are looking for excuses to ditch Paul and adopt another apostle: “I am of Cephas!”.
Very interesting fresh perspective.
Thank you!
Given the current lively discussion about how much Christian theology might have been “invented” by Paul, it’s fitting to reflect upon the implications of taking Professor Walsh’s suggestion seriously. That engages the perilous task of distinguishing what is original with Paul and what proto-Pauline Christianity looked like. But here are a few hypotheses: given Paul’s commitment to the gentile mission, Jesus’ persistent attacks upon family loyalty (i.e., kinship as the foundation of group membership) might reflect later adoption of Paul’s project. Similarly the Gospel polemics against the (already long-contested) authority of the Temple establishment might reflect Paul’s own views concerning the future of the Temple as the center of worship, as opposed to the institution of a new kind of monarchy. And that, in turn, would be conceptually tied to (what obviously was central to Paul), the role and authority of the Law in the eschaton and the movement ushering it in. Fourthly, Paul’s expectation of an imminent apocalypse might have shaped the Gospel depictions of Jesus. Did Paul initiate or inherit these ideas? And, of course, that’s only a sample of the possibilities. Plenty of scholarly digging in view.
I love all of this!
1 Thess 5:1-2 “But as to the times and the seasons, brethren, you have no need to have anything written to you. For you yourselves know well that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night.”
Here Paul fully expects his readers to be already aware of this saying – ie Paul is not the one making it up.
Is her point that sourcing supernatural sayings and divinely dictated pomp from Paul rather than …. Oral tradition is appropriate because Paul claimed divine contact? Or….its not fair? Is without critical merit?
I think that we should bring Paul and his divinely-received visions into conversation with our ideas about literary influences and oral tradition.
These two articles have been really fascinating and strike me is highly plausible. One can see why early enthusiasts would want to provide some engaging and presumably devotionally stimulating backstory for this epic but mysterious figure upon which Paul based his faith movement. Where do you think the gospel writers got all their other common material from that famously isn’t in Paul, like the miracle stories and parables etc, that several of them have and presumably not entirely from each other, in most cases?
Thank you! I think in some cases they are drawing on themes and tricks of the trade they learned about in school. I have a piece coming out in the Next Quest for the Historical Jesus about how the epics (Homer, Vergil) loved to present their heroes in a way that created a sense mystery or mistaken identity– that’s exactly what happens to Jesus in Mark! Dennis MacDonald has written quite a bit on this and I am very sympathetic to his views. Other things like the empty tomb were a motif to indicate someone has become a god of some kind (it happens in the Greek novel all the time). Miller has written about this. To those influences + Septuagint + Paul = gospels! As for specific teachings– a lot of those themes can be found in other philosophical schools. Some say, for instance, that the Pythagorean Golden Verses were an influence on the Lord’s Prayer.
It’s great to have you posting here, Professor Walsh! I’m very sympathetic to your perspective on the evangelists as genuine literary authors, ‘poets’ in the classical sense, but I’m a bit skeptical of a couple of points of your elucidation of the gospel of Mark. For example, on pp 131-132, you point to Mk 1,12ff as the author depicting Jesus as a new Adam and Mk 1,1 relating to “the proper interpretation of Judean law and allegory … as one might expect from a Pharisee.” Can you please say a little more about these two specific points?
Ha! P. 132 hints at much of what I talk about/expand in these blog posts– good eye!
Beginning with the second example: Mark 1:1 (and, really, Mark 1:2) indicate that what is about to follow is like a decree– good news (gospel). This was a term that was already out there an associated with the revelation of important events that had transpired (e.g., Augustus would use it in inscriptions to detail the play-by-play and outcome of a battle or the like). This is followed by a reference to Isaiah. So there has been a major event, Mark is going to tell you about it, and to understand it you have to interpret the Hebrew scriptures.
Jesus is like a new Adam in Mark 1:12 because, after being declared God’s son, he is ultimately sent into the wilderness– just like Adam. Actually, this is something Paul also talks about. Jesus has basically come to be the first of a line of God’s children, but reborn into spiritual or pneumatic bodies in what we would probably call the afterlife.
I am an atheist. Recently I had a robust conversation with my evangelical daughter in law about some of your views on Paul. She listened patiently to my explanation of my views on your views. She responded by giving me a book by Martin Hengel entitled “Between Jesus and Paul” which essentially does what you describe in your posts but in addition he tries to demonstrate by reference to Acts, that Paul’s “mission” did not come from Jesus as in Gal. 1.11, but rather from his association with other Hellenistic Christians as mentioned in Acts 6.1. Aside from the fact that this contradicts what Paul actually says in Galatians, he uses Acts to justify that Jesus’ message migrated from Aramaic to Greek based on the idea that Hellenists in Acts are Greek speakers. In addition my own thought is that it seems hard to believe that Gospel writers created out of whole cloth what is in the Gospels and Acts based solely on what is in Paul’s letters unless possibly he wrote many other letters that we don’t have but were available to the Gospel writers and Luke for Acts.
@sjhicks: I share your atheism (though I try hard to keep that out of the way in working on interpretation). I also have a high opinion of Hendel’s work. To what is Paul referring with “getting from the Lord”? Very hard to say. My study of mystical traditions (see, e.g. I. M. Lewis’ *Ecstatic Religion*) finds Paul’s language entirely compatible with his having, not a literal vision, but the sudden dawning of a program for combatting the existential Jewish problem of his day: Roman rule. It is an open (and important) question to me how much of this he owes to previous Christian thought and how much is his. I agree with Walsh that a lot of it must be his, and I think can in fact be extracted in some detail from his existing letters. (He no doubt said much more in lost letters and preaching.) I don’t know whether you or your daughter in law have looked at my *Reading Sacred Texts,” which contains “Road to Damascus” as a chapter, but there I try to work out in much further detail the Pauline/Gospel ideas as I see them.
Well said Dr Walsh. In your Wednesday evening mixer breakout room prior to the NINT conference, I asked, “Who gave Paul the authority which he claimed to have?” I recall that this inflamed your passion for this topic. For some months, the very issues you raise here have been rolling around in my head even though I’ve not yet read your book, but will. Your application of Occam’s Razor to the Gordian Knot of the chronology of early Christian literature is quite brilliant IMHO and I agree with it wholeheartedly. It also occurs to me to ask: if the Christian idea of God wished to provide written good news that would speak to all ages and generations, why did They make it so difficult to understand? Your thesis helps to clarify for me at least, that Paul indeed founded Christianity in much the way that Joseph Smith founded the LDS. In both cases it was their “private” revelations which formed the basis of their dogma which is ironic in that the church catholic and orthodox, has a long history of not basing its dogma on private revelations. – Pete
Thank you! I also try to remember that people are pretty flexible about sources of “truth” in general! We want a certain reliability from texts like these (naturally)– but that really isn’t how people work and how we treat these texts today (as scripture) is not necessarily the exact context into which they were born. To draw an analogy: historically, I’ve been a bit of a Hollywood gossip type (I read the blind items :)) and I think about how quickly rumors, innuendo, and so forth become truth when people get a hold of it and want something to be true. Or sometimes people just want to feel engaged, or fascinated, or entertained (does anyone remember the supermarket rag “New of the World”– I loved Batboy!). So it’s an interesting exercise to think more about these issues of authority and how they end up coming into conflict with reception and manipulation!
Is Robyn’s book ‘The Origins of Early Christian Literature.’ for the general reader (i.e. us) or is it a scholarly work?
Scholarly. Not for those expecting to find translations of quotes of foreign tongues included so bone up on your German, Latin, Greek, etc. Not for the faint of heart or mind either so brace yourself. It’s essentially her dissertation expanded.
I intentionally wrote it to be accessible– but, yes, there is a lot of scholarly engagement in it and it does build off of the dissertation (although the dissertation was far more academic/jargony). My piece on Q in the Redescribing Mark volume from SBL press was originally a chapter in the dissertation that was cut from the book and re-homed; the piece on Imperial Captive Literature I have in Robert Myles’ Class Struggle in the New Testament was also once a section in the original book manuscript– also repurposed!
I think it’s readable even if you aren’t in the field. I don’t come from a family of academics (this is a first for either side of the family!), so I put a lot of effort into writing this book in a way that made it appropriate for a scholarly press (which you have to do for tenure) but also accessible for anyone who was interested. This is probably odd, but I spent a year reading newspapers, magazines, and book reviews to get a sense of how to strike the right tone… basically, I re-taught myself how to write after years of training in scholarly writing. I hope that comes across!
I agree, to a certain extent yes, it is readable, but to the (highly) educated class even if they’re not full-time scholars. Reminds me of the writing of Frances Yates, the scholar of the Renaissance who put a lot of effort into making her subjects comprehensible by the well educated, curious lay person. Not easy to do.
Dr. Walsh
Your argument that Paul was the source for narratives that occur in both Paul’s letters and the gospels makes a lot of sense. But isn’t there an awful lot going on in the gospel narratives than cannot be traced to Paul? We know that some of the gospels used sources other than Paul, because (at the very least) Matthew and Luke use Mark as a source.
So if you just start with Paul, and jump to the first gospel, Mark, where does the rest of Mark’s narrative come from – the huge amount of narrative that can’t be found in Paul’s letters?
Yes, absolutely! I don’t think the gospel writers only used Paul by any means. They are clearly also using the Septuagint and ideas from the epics (Homer, Vergil), philosophy (Platonism, Stoicism), material/themes from the Greek novels and related literature. I just would like to see us include Paul in our conversations a bit more when we think about what the gospel writers likely had at their disposal.
Thank you , thank you for this post. I thought Mark used Paul, Matthew used Mark, and Luke combines Mark and Paul.
Looking at it chronologically, I started believing that Paul invented the last supper for his congregations.
I never saw this view in any scholarly works until now. Thank you
My pleasure! I hope it was a fun read!
The idea that the gospel writers are basing their biographies of Jesus on the letters of Paul is hard for me to wrap my mind around. If one is absolutely hidebound by chronology, then I guess you’d have to do it that way, but there’s no reason to limit ourselves that way.
There were certainly people who knew Jesus that were alive when Paul was writing his letters, and even more people who knew people who knew Jesus. Certainly they had their own memories and traditions, and it seems just obvious to me that those are the memories or traditions that make up the bulk of the bios material.
It seems highly strained to point to a couple of passages that the gospels and Paul have in common and to make such wide-ranging conclusions off of it, that the gospel writers must have 1) read Paul, 2) approved of Paul, and 3) used Paul (but only very very very sparingly, in just the handful of places *total* where he mentions specific teachings or biological details about Jesus).
I dunno…maybe I’m misunderstanding something. This doesn’t make any sense to me.
I guess we just don’t know whether Paul circulated his own letters to a wider audience during his lifetime right? I don’t really know the history of this, but it would seem weird to me that the earliest churches would copy the letters and send them out to people they were not intended for, at least while Paul was alive. That’s not what you would commonly do when receiving a letter addressed to yourself, and why would you even think to do that? It could come across as a breach of trust between the two parties.
In that light how would the gospel authors have gotten ahold of the letters by the 60s-80s? Would the churches have looked at them with such significance by then that some or all of them would think to make copies and send them out to fellow believers around the time of Paul’s death? Or maybe those familiar with Paul’s own copies found them and distributed them? I’m genuinely curious.
This is a terrific question! Scholars often suggest that Paul’s letters were copied and shared among various early Christian churches– sort of like an ancient form of publication. I’ve always wondered a bit about this theory; I think it captures what happens with his letters later, but maybe more like second century? One thing we have some evidence for is people sharing portions of his letters– there have been cases where what we would call a chapter or two were found alongside things like Homer, the Medea, Plato, etc. If you can, get your hands on AnneMarie Luijendijk, “The Gospel of Mary at Oxyrhynchus (P. Oxy. L 3525 and P. Ryl. III 463): Rethinking the History of Early Christianity through Literary Papyri from Oxyrhynchus,” in Re-Making the World: Christianity and Categories, ed. Taylor G. Petrey (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2019), 391–418.
I certainly appreciate what Dr. Walsh is saying, but she may not go far enough. Paul himself was instructed in the tenets of what the faith was about.
Paul seems to struggle to explain the crucifixion, not the resurrection. This is understandable: ‘God’s chosen suffers the worst possible death? Explain how this crucified guy is a savior instead of despised by God.’
Resurrection – life after death – was commonplace in story narratives of the time. Not a big problem.
Crucifixion? Savior? God’s chosen? BIG problem.
Paul provides 1 Cor 15:3ff as essentially a creedal statement that he had received (long) prior to writing the letter, i.e. well before ca. 50 CE. It indicates that much of the story of Jesus had been formed in some way before Paul started preaching it.
Dr. Walsh’s thesis that Paul was the informer of the shape of gospel accounts may grant him too much influence on a process that Paul indicates predated his ministry and letter writing by quite a lot.
The only gentle push back I would give to this view (for which I have sympathy) is that Paul and the gospel writers are clearly functioning in the social practice and tier of literacy — which was the purview of very few. Yes, there were likely what we might call oral traditions of one kind or another floating around, but Paul offered concrete writings with which to engage, debate and from which to borrow…
When (and if) Paul actually said something close to, ” I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you,” I firmly believe he was referencing what he heard when he saw Jesus in Heaven during his NDE (near-death experience), and not that Jesus was “resurrected” as a human, which we infer from what other people reported. Note the reports claimed to be by Mary and Peter that the saw and heard the resurrected Jesus give them instructions at the open tomb are clearly fiction, since they contradict each other and this event is basically a highly unlikely “miracle” occurrence. If you read either of the two “Life after Life” books by Dr. Raymond A. Moody Jr., you will understand that NDEs are a common experience, and that many living individuals who are not them selves dying (such as doctors and nurses) but who witness the passing of another individual also see the individual who had died earlier return to earth to ease their transition to another realm that human bodies can neither see nor travel to.
Bill Steigelmann
Interesting idea that the educated writers of the gospels fleshed out the writings of Paul, to compose stories and words of Jesus. That means all four gospels were Pauline, in some sense. That is the first time I ever read that.
My guess is that the writers did this, yet the actual filling in of details was based mostly on oral traditions, with Paul’s sketchier narratives secondly, and their own speculations thirdly.
Exactly– I also think that Mark is heavily Pauline in many ways (particularly its cosmology) and, if scholars are right that Mark is where Matthew and Luke start (not to mention Luke has his own thing going on with Paul), then suddenly the gospels are very Pauline indeed
Paul relates nearly nothing about Jesus’ life. And he goes off more than a decade before checking with James and Peter. Paul seems to be more interested in his own revelation than in the one who preceded him and what others think of him.
To me he seems to put himself apart, which might explain why he is actually held to be apart from the original core of followers.
What’s your reaction to this?
YES!
I wrote another post that might have self-destructed– but, yes, I agree
Paul’s wording is given a time frame, “on the night when”, which typically not occurs in heavenly visions, but rather stems from a historical source. Isn’t the simplest solution to this that he learnt it from the inner circle, although he may have elaborated it.
Except right before that he says “For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you…” so he is clear that there wasn’t an intermediary.
@bsteig: We probably agree that the question is what best explains the data we have. I think we do have different starting points. I think it likely that Paul made the claim you quote, possible that he did have some sort of mystical experience, and likely that he is not simply passing on what he heard from disciples. That leaves several possibilities; and much depends upon what you think Paul was up to, what motivated him, and how he might have thought the claim would serve his purposes. I am no Bible scholar, but I do have a background in anthropology, and in particular study of the social contexts of mystical traditions (including Judaism and Christianity). And – without accusing Paul of skullduggery – I find it perfectly possible to explain his motivations in ways that make no commitment one way or another about what mystical states, if any, he experienced. (If of interest, see my “The Road to Damascus” in the special 2005 issue on mysticism in *Faith and Philosophy*.) NDEs doubtless happen. I don’t think the evidence supports their being veridical. Was Paul’s experience an NDE?
Bart, is it possible to get Robyn to respond to some of these great questions/comments?
I thihk she has either responded to them or posted them unresponded to already. She had a ton of them and no way should could get to everything in the middle of a busy semester.
Here I am! A couple of hurricanes and a couple of conferences later!