AJR Conversations I The Origins of Early Christian Literature

AJR continues its #conversations series with an exchange between Robyn Faith Walsh and Cavan Concannon on Walsh’s new book, The Origins of Early Christian Literature: Contextualizing the New Testament within Greco-Roman Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2021).

Below is the transcript.

Cavan Concannon: I’m really excited to talk about your fantastic new book, The Origins of Early Christian Literature. To begin, I want to talk a bit about what contributions I think you're making with your research and then ask about next steps in light of these insights. As I read the book, I saw three important advances. 

First, the book offers a genealogical study of the assumption that there's a community behind the gospels (within which the gospels are embedded and/or to which the gospels speak). This gives rise to the idea that we can learn something about early Christian communities from studying the gospels. The argument you make is that we can locate this presumption to a strain of German Romanticism. The book does an amazing job of showing how these ideas move from people like Johann Gottfried von Herder and Friedrich Schlegel and find their way into contemporary biblical scholarship.

The second contribution that I think you're making is that the gospel writers need to be seen as elite cultural producers writing for other elite culture producers. They draw on tropes and themes of those cultures but also perform for and intervene in those cultures with their own stylized elaborations of the bios of Jesus. So, there is not just a one-way influence in which the gospel writers take genre forms or ideas from the broader culture; there's actually a kind of back and forth.

Finally, you make an argument that the gospels are best seen within a genre of subversive biography. This is where I think you are working within, or at least intervening in, more traditional debates about how to classify the genre of the gospels. Your argument is quite compelling and in doing so you bring in exciting new comparanda, such as the Satyrica.

Robyn Walsh: Thank you, first of all, for having this conversation with me—especially since I’m such an admirer of your work!

On the whole I agree with your précis and the three main objectives that you’ve identified. There is one thing that I would nuance slightly. I am not trying to suggest that we abandon the category of “community” all together. Rather, I suggest that perhaps we've been focused on the wrong community. I do not presume that the immediate and most formative social networks for these authors are other Christians or a cohesive Christian group of some kind—a Markan or Matthean or Lukan “church,” for example. I am looking at literary networks—the networks of fellow writers—for evidence of formative influence. I am resisting the notion that the gospel authors (and by this I primarily mean the authors of the Synoptic gospels) are acting as something of a Romantic spokesperson or “genius” for the illiterate Christians around them. This is an idea and a presumption that has been handed down to us for generations and I trace its history not to the early Jesus movement but rather to German Romanticism. It is a theory that arguably has its greatest expression in theories about oral tradition and the gospels, which I find tenuous—particularly given that the Synoptics supply evidence for writers citing each other. So, I am trying to shift our frame and ask what happens if we describe the social network that we know is more historically plausible for authors of the imperial period.

In short, I'm assessing what we miss about the social development of early Christianity by only focusing on the presumed Christian communities of these authors rather than also on what we know about ancient authorship practices in general. For instance, we know that advanced literacy is relatively limited in the imperial period. For somebody to produce creative literature like the gospels required a specialist’s knowledge and training, and that professionalization and expertise necessarily circumscribes what is possible for these writers. The question thus becomes: how might those literary networks—or literate networks—influence how we see the content in the gospels and what they are trying to achieve if it's not primarily about communicating so-called oral traditions?  

Cavan: One of the things that I think is great about the book is that it's doing something that a number of other early Christian scholars have called for in recent years, which is a critical interrogation of the origins and formation of the discipline itself. My next question wants to press on that. Some of the studies that have interrogated the origins of our field have looked at questions of race and anti-Semitism and colonialism as constitutive. I could hear a lot of those same resonances in the sources that you were working on and I’m curious how you how you think of your interrogation of the origins of the field in conversation with some of those other studies.

Robyn: That's a very keen insight, especially as it concerns my second chapter on Romanticism. It's critical, to my mind, to remember that the disciplinary divisions we know today do not obtain for early scholars participating in what we might consider the critical study of religious texts. Somebody could work on the gospels one day and then publish a book on German folk tales the next and often the methodologies overlapped. There was also often a political subtext to much of this work in an era of increasing nationalism, and given the influence of certain thinkers like Charles Darwin, the search for social and religious hierarchies is arguably a thread running through much of this discourse, whether consciously or not. This is especially the case when I discuss the idea of oral tradition being centralized or exemplified in the work of the so-called Romantic poet.

Cavan: It strikes me that your interrogation of the influence of German Romanticism on the study of early Christianity helps us understand how that discourse relied on racial frameworks in particular. I see you adding to and expanding on the work that Shawn Kelley does in his Racializing Jesus.

Robyn: That is an excellent book that I teach often. The work of Stan Stowers and Bill Arnal’s Symbolic Jesus were also formative for me, along with Sue Marchand’s work on German Romanticism; her German Orientalism in the Age of Empire is basically the book I wish I could have written. I really recommend those works to our colleagues in order to think more about these issues and I hope someday to write something as useful.

The other thing I tried to demonstrate is that we can critique Romanticism and its continued influence in terms of what we regard as thinkable about Christian history and literature. But we also have to contend with the idea that we have reified troublesome methods in ways that are more covert. One way that I try to get at that is to talk about the concept of the “Death of the Author” and post-structuralism. I don't get too theoretical, but the framework for that in my own mind is that, post-World War II, we tried to critique all of these racist, nationalist methodologies. When post-structuralism starts toying with the idea that you can get rid of the author as the central figure in the production of literature, it doesn’t do the work of nationalism, per se. But the work of de-centering the author ironically converges with the same kind of Romantic instincts as looking for the volk, dismissing “the book,” or looking for exceptional or fantastic or miraculous ways that new religious movements like early Christianity entertain. This has done the same work; continuing to mystify origins.

Concannon: So, let me take us out of our present context into the first century.

Walsh: Presuming that the gospels are first-century!

Concannon: Okay, all right. [laughing] Fair point. Let's say late-first / early-second century just for the sake of having a marker for now. If your argument is correct that the gospels were produced within highly literate elite circles, what becomes of the gospels as sources for early Christian history?

Walsh: Well, you have to contend with the possibility that what we have in the first instance of these “written records” is the work of elite cultural producers. And so, if we deal soberly with the evidence that's in front of us, in the case of the gospels, we have a bunch of writers writing. We can no more posit a Markan community than we posit a Virgilian community or a Philonic community. We just have to deal with the author. Now that's maybe a little bit uncomfortable given what we're accustomed to in the field—except that you still have someone like Paul who is “on the ground” trying to build cohesion among the people he’s talking to, performing “pneumatic demonstrations,” and so on. I’m suggesting that it’s possible the gospel writers are doing something different.

We need to ask: what do we know about authorship practices and what do we think their objectives might have been as intellectual elite cultural producers? Or what might their source materials have been, other than oral tradition and religious community? And to me there are new and exciting ways to take that on.

Concannon: One of the things that I think is an important piece of your argument is that you call attention to the second-century mythmaking processes or the “invented traditions” of the second century, whether that be the names of the gospel writers or stories about how the Big Bang, as you call it, of Christianity happened (this is from your second chapter; pp. 50-104). You challenge scholars to put those invented traditions to the side, in order to come at the evidence in a different way. Your challenge got me thinking about maybe a crazy experiment.

In any other kind of “open text,” to use David Konstan’s phrase, in the ancient world, whether that be Joseph and Aseneth or the Alexander Romance, authors feel free to make new versions of stories. When we analyze those texts, we categorize the openness of the text according to recensions (sometimes as simple as long or short). Would it be possible, or would it be advisable or interesting, to treat the gospels as recensions of an open tradition of Jesus’ bios and not as discreetly authored texts? 

Walsh:  That's certainly one approach you could take. The only reason I resist it is because I am interested in authors and respecting them as elite cultural producers: the moves they are making that may be unique to their individual, creative approach to the subject matter. So, for example, I have been working on my second book and one thing that I’ve been looking at in particular is the way that Mark seems to imitate Virgil. Mark’s presentation of Jesus is unique in many ways from the other Synoptic gospels. And so, the one thing that I would want to bear in mind is that, while I like this thought experiment, I don’t want to lose the degree to which we know writers in this period would exchange texts on similar subjects with their own twists and in a form of competition with one another. If we think purely about it as reception, we might lose some of that social context. Nonetheless, I think it's an experiment worth pursuing and it’s an excellent challenge.

Concannon: I could see a way of describing them as still being strains that are influenced by particular questions of style, like whether you're imitating Virgil or not. But that wouldn't rely on an assumption that we have access to the version that the person we call Matthew produced.

Walsh: Absolutely.

There's an argument emerging that the gospels were second century in response to debates amongst the church fathers, designed to back proto-orthodox positions by returning to the life of Jesus. To the extent this is also a useful thought experiment; it changes the stakes for why these writings are being produced and why they might circle back to this idea of competition.

Basically, lest you think that our field has sort of exhausted it all, I think that we actually have a lot of work to do to reimagine this literature—and these authors—once we divorce ourselves from these Romantic frameworks.

Concannon: In that vein, I have become relatively convinced that there was an earlier version of what ends up becoming Luke floating around that Marcion had, that has some of the same elements of Luke but isn't the Luke that we know about from later manuscript evidence. So, it makes me wary of arguments that rely on access to the author. 

Now let me ask the question that I know I have to ask, because people will want to know. If we give up on the idea of oral traditions and if we are really paying renewed attention to the gospel writers as literary producers and not just editors and redactors, what do we say now about the historical Jesus?

Walsh: [laughing] To be clear, I tried to be careful in the book not to completely dismiss the idea of oral tradition. I think that there is a way in which—to the extent that you might see my thesis as radical—you might start to assume that I'm completely throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

I just want to make sure what we are calling “oral tradition” doesn't look too much like the methodology of, say, the Grimm brothers (whom I discuss in the book as sort of the quintessential example of how the search for oral tradition can go awry).

Let me give you my favorite example that nobody likes: the Last Supper. Paul talks about it in 1 Corinthians 11. He describes what is essentially a divination experience wherein the risen Christ tells them about what happens at this meal on “the night he was betrayed.” The same description of events—and nearly the same wording—are cited in Mark 14, Matthew 26, and Luke 22, yet these parallels are explained in terms of inherited oral transmission. A simpler and less anachronistic explanation would be that the gospel writers read Paul.

Concannon: The other alternative is that there's a Passion narrative that’s the first thing that gets written.

Walsh: So maybe that's what Paul means by his “good news”—except in this case, he tells us it was a divination experience. So, let's say that that's correct and then start to marshal other evidence from that starting point.

But, back to your question: what does that mean for historical Jesus? Well, it may mean that the “historical Jesus” on which we rely was principally in the mind of Paul and then expanded upon by the writers of these lives of Jesus. Theoretically, you don’t need a religious “community” to describe that work historically; you just need texts and authors.

We need to understand what we're driving at when we ask about the historical Jesus, or we ask about origins, so that we're not contradictory in our expectations.

Concannon: Since we’re on the topic of origins, let me ask what may be my last question. Why do we care to tell the origins of Christianity, or at least to tell the story of the gospels, in the way that we have inherited from German Romanticism? We haven't just inherited these categories we've put them to use and we keep them. So why do we care?

Walsh: I think something that's underappreciated in the field is the degree to which we have close relationships with our mentors and are professionalized in such a way that it makes it difficult to break out of these structures. It’s institutional but it’s also deeply personal. I put a caution in the book where I say that I realize readers can argue I make the gospel authors sound like a bunch of doctoral students. [laughing] I'm trying to be careful about that, except I maintain that we are still talking about an elite class of thinkers who are able to compose writings in a certain way, so some seemingly phenomenological overlap is perhaps to be expected. But, back to your question, I think that we can't discount the degree to which our own professionalization and the academy circumscribes and calcifies our expectations and our methods.

Concannon: I wonder, as well, if there is also a value placed on the story that early Christian communities were not terribly full of elite culture producers. Part of the decline narrative of early Christian history is that we go from egalitarian, proletarian origins to (proto-)Catholicism and imperialism by the mechanism of money and educated people coming into the movement. And so, part of what we lose in this recasting of the gospels is the access or the claim to proletarian communitarian forms of Christian identity. 

Walsh: Yes. We are invested in the narrative that the early Christians look like the people surrounding Jesus in the Galilee—the downtrodden, the least of these. We've taken this construction literally when we imagine early Christianity, instead of taking it as literary strategy. Certainly, when we look at Paul, that not exactly what's going on. Paul is highly educated and from a professional class appealing to those with means to help him. There's actually little in our written evidence that suggests a truly struggling proletariat. I think there are echoes of this critique in the work of people like Candida Moss and it’s crucial for us to reexamine.

Concannon: I can see a trajectory that goes from the quest for the German peasant Volk to a Marxist/socialist-inspired, proletarian early Christianity with scholars like Karl Kautsky and Gustav Adolf Deissmann in the early twentieth century to forms of resistance to colonialism in the late twentieth century. The community of the peasant class morphs with our changing geopolitical interests. Yet still remains as the thing that we're looking for.

Walsh: Yes. I agree. I want to be cautious, however; I'm not saying that the disenfranchised are not there historically, just that I think they may have been overdetermined based on the  evidence of who is producing this literature and what we know about ancient literary practices. Troubling these inherited ideas opens up so many new avenues for imagining who is writing these texts—whole new avenues for thinking about what we mean when we talk about “the origins of Christianity.”

Concannon: Well, I think it's a good place to leave it. Thank you again for this fantastic book and I hope that everybody out there gets a copy and reads it.

Walsh: Thank you for this wonderful conversation.

Robyn Faith Walsh is Assistant Professor of the New Testament and Early Christianity at the University of Miami, Coral Gables. An editor at the Database of Religious History, her articles have appeared in Classical Quarterly and Jewish Studies Quarterly, among other publications. Her first monograph, The Origins of Early Christian Literature: Contextualizing the New Testament within Greco-Roman Literary Culture was recently published with Cambridge University Press.

Cavan Concannon is Associate Professor of Religion at the University of Southern California. He is the author of Profaning Paul (Chicago, 2021), Assembling Early Christianity: Trade Networks and the Letters of Dionysios of Corinth (Cambridge, 2017), and ‘When you were Gentiles’: Specters of Ethnicity in Roman Corinth and Paul’s Corinthian Correspondence (Yale, 2014). He is also the co-director of the Mediterranean Connectivity Initiative.