Robyn Walsh, The Origins of Early Christian Literature

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Irish1975
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Robyn Walsh, The Origins of Early Christian Literature

Post by Irish1975 »

Have not read this yet but it sounds interesting.

Robyn Walsh, The Origins of Early Christian Literature: Contextualizing the New Testament within Greco-Roman Literary Culture (Cambridge, 2021).

Mark Goodacre’s podcast interview with Walsh.

Publisher’s Description
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.
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Irish1975
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Re: Robyn Walsh, The Origins of Early Christian Literature

Post by Irish1975 »

My first question is whether Walsh gives any credit to Thomas Brodie for developing a very similar approach over the past half century, while being completely ignored by his peers.

In the preface, Walsh takes time to reassure members of her “guild” that she is not going to criticize them “extensively,” that her approach is “not a threat” to the discipline, and is “not allied to any social, poltical, or religious objective” other than, you know, knowledge and scholarship.

An odd thing to put in an academic book.
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neilgodfrey
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Re: Robyn Walsh, The Origins of Early Christian Literature

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Sounds most interesting indeed. In addition to Brodie, the "midrash school" in France (I don't know if it has spread beyond France) leads one to a very similar conclusion -- that the allusions in the gospels can only be appreciated by a quite literate elite. Such a hypothesis goes some way, I think, to helping us understand a somewhat crude narrative exposition in the earliest surviving external references to the gospels that is at odds with some of the literary allusions in those gospels. It goes some way also, I think, to explaining why OT allusions that were made in the earliest external references to the gospels were so different from the types of allusions we find in the gospels themselves.

Something major was lost when they were embraced by "the orthodox".
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maryhelena
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Re: Robyn Walsh, The Origins of Early Christian Literature

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Irish1975 wrote: Sun Jul 11, 2021 8:59 pm My first question is whether Walsh gives any credit to Thomas Brodie for developing a very similar approach over the past half century, while being completely ignored by his peers.
Google books allows a search - and 'Brodie' does not come up. 'Ehrman' does.......

Before coming to UM, Professor Walsh taught at Wheaton College (Mass.), The College of the Holy Cross,
https://people.miami.edu/profile/rxw159@miami.edu


The College of the Holy Cross (Holy Cross) is a private Jesuit liberal arts college in Worcester, Massachusetts. Founded in 1843, Holy Cross is the oldest Catholic college in New England and one of the oldest in the United States.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/College_of_the_Holy_Cross

Teaching at a Jesuit college maybe not an indication of her personal beliefs - but interesting nonetheless - especially as she has written a book about The Origins of Early Christian Literature - and, seemingly, finds no relevance of the scholarship of Thomas Brodie...


Robyn Walsh

The notion that religion is a category of human behavior restricted to the private sphere of personal belief and activity is deeply problematic. The cliché itself is largely a product of Enlightenment-era thinking that viewed religious practices as separate from other kinds of social doings such as politics, law, and economic activity. Practices deemed to be religious, however, are not so easily distinguished as individual, private phenomena. Religion cannot be restricted to a state of mind, but is inextricably tied to social formations and processes.

https://www.academia.edu/27426119/_Reli ... 7_pp_69_82

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mlinssen
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Re: Robyn Walsh, The Origins of Early Christian Literature

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Review
'This breathtakingly original excavation of the hidden ideological commitments of New Testament scholarship challenges many of the dominant assumptions about how and for whom early Christian texts were written. Walsh's lucid prose and polymathic command of classics, literary theory, and modern history is not only essential reading for students of the Gospels, but a field-shaking intervention in how we think about the production of early Christian literature in general.' Candida Moss, Edward Cadbury Professor of Theology, University of Birmingham

‘The Origins of Early Christian Literature turns a century of New Testament scholarship on its head. Setting the gospels in their proper literary context, Robyn Walsh calmly dismantles naive, romantic notions that are immersed in an anachronistic ‘oral tradition’ paradigm. Lucid, provocative, and compelling, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in Christian origins.’ Marc Goodacre, Frances Hill Fox Professor of Religious Studies, Duke University

'Scholars of New Testament and early Christianity usually assume unidirectional influence: the writers of the New Testament borrow from their cultural context, but do not really impact it. Walsh's analysis instead opens up the question of whether stories about Jesus were productive in a competitive market of story-telling, inspiring others to interlard resurrections and miracles into their own writing. She brings an impressively broad bibliography of ancient materials and contemporary conversations to her project. The book is interesting, rich with details from the texts of antiquity, and rich with knowledge of scholarship on them.' Laura Nasrallah, Yale University

Goodacre and two women - with a very strong focus on the textual and literary aspect of it all. An exclusively textual aspect, it seems, and perhaps this is a formal goodbye to any Christian writing being authored by "an eye witness".
However, I also see a departure from the zealous in NT scholarship, and a possible answer to the call of "honest research" that has been surfacing

And, with that, of course, it is a welcome distraction from the search for the historical Jesus
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maryhelena
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Re: Robyn Walsh, The Origins of Early Christian Literature

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The Origins of Early Christian Literature: Contextualizing the New Testament within Greco-Roman Literary Culture

Robyn Faith Walsh

5 - The Gospels as Subversive Biography

Summary

Chapter 5 argues that the Synoptic gospels can be read as a “subversive biography” in the tradition of similar treatments of notable underdogs like Alexander the Great in the Alexander Romance or the notorious Aesop. Situating the gospels securely within a new genre classification demonstrates their engagement with the literary culture of the imperial period. Thus, specific characteristics of Jesus’ portrayal in the Synoptics need not be a function of oral tradition, but a reflection of the rational interests of elite, imperial writers.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/or ... FCC5FA212A

Could be interesting......

Once a search for a historical Jesus is given up as futile, once an oral tradition is faulted as unreliable - then the way is open for an examination of Roman Jewish history. Ground zero needs to be examined for any relevance to the gospel story.
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Re: Robyn Walsh, The Origins of Early Christian Literature

Post by StephenGoranson »

This is a helpful thread. I have not--yet--read her book.
If she treats gospels as examples of "subversive biography," then am I allowed to ask here, without being considered a heretic, whether she, in this book, regards Jesus as historical?
StephenGoranson
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Re: Robyn Walsh, The Origins of Early Christian Literature

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Gosh, perhaps i need to add here, that imo Alexander the Great was historical)
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Re: Robyn Walsh, The Origins of Early Christian Literature

Post by Giuseppe »

the irony in all this is that the same 'oral tradition theory' is the last literary embellishment added to the gospels.

Just as the Greek translators of the original gospel introduced here and there: "this means"..., "this is interpreted"... "this is a Jewish custom...", so, our modern "translators" (=euhemerizers) add: "this was passed orally..."
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neilgodfrey
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Re: Robyn Walsh, The Origins of Early Christian Literature

Post by neilgodfrey »

Listening to Robyn Walsh's interview with Mark Goodacre I was reminded of all the other works that have been produced in relatively recent years on the relationship between the literature of the gospels and that of "the classics" -- Homer, Virgil, Euripides, et al. I have had the impression that those works have been generally sidelined by the majority of the guild who prefer to focus on the Jewishness of the gospels. (I'm reminded of articles trying to inform peers that they really should read the classics to get a new and relevant perspective on what they were studying.) Walsh first majored in the classics and was constantly reminded of tropes that she had read in the Bible -- an experience I am sure many of us have had.

Towards the end of the interview Robyn Walsh raises the image of the audiences (second century) of the gospels being a (newly emerging?) class of people who were the type who also enjoyed reading Greek novels.

The sort of thing Walsh addresses from one of the points discussed in the podcast: Literature of the day had so many empty tomb stories and gods being resurrected etc (I'm sure she was just speaking conversationally and not meant to have her words interpreted dogmatically) that the author of, say, Mark, wondered: Okay, now how do I show that this character became a god? Ah yes -- everyone writes that someone is thought to become a god by having their body disappear/their tomb found empty.

(Is that really a position that is so startlingly different from anything we have read before? She may be saying more that I will need to read the book to discover.)

The impression I got from the interview that a significant step forward by Walsh beyond simply noting the overlaps between classics and the gospels is that she asks if the evangelists were part of a circle that was represented by the likes of Petronius (author of that scene of the widow in the tomb of her crucified husband) -- or is that the next project she said she will be working on? Listen to the interview if you want to be sure -- or read the book.

(And omg, yes, some of us are hung up by a book like this over the question of Jesus' historicity -- hung up on both sides of the so-called "debate". I am quite sure Robyn Walsh takes the historicity of Jesus as a given, like most others. That's not the question she is addressing in this book. Forget it. Focus on the point of the book!)

One thing she did point out was that we will never know the context and circumstances of the writing of the gospels because the data is simply not there. It is lost. Yes indeed. And I think that's why studying the gospels to learn what they are, what the sausages are made of, might give us little glimpses -- and teasing ones -- into their origins.

For many years I have been studying the echoes of classics in the gospels (and other biblical lit) and have only recently turned back to the question of the possibility -- nothing more (still many questions unanswered) -- that they may be translations of Hebrew works. If so, then the classical lit connections become even more fascinating.
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