‘The Origins of Early Christian Literature’ by Robyn Faith Walsh: A Brief Review

For whom were the Gospels written? The community of the faithful or something else? And to which genre of ancient literature do they belong? These are the two fundamental questions that Robyn Faith Walsh, assistant professor of the New Testament and Early Christianity at the University of Miami, Coral Gables addresses in her 2021 volume The Origins of Early Christianity: Contextualizing the New Testament within Greco-Roman Literary Culture (Cambridge University Press). Weighing in at around 250 pages, Walsh’s work seeks to not only undermine the idea that the Evangelists were written solely to Christ following communities but also to place their writings as not only bioi (“lives”) but specifically as “subversive biographies.” 

Following a discussion of Thomas Jefferson and his mangled edition of the New Testament, Walsh contends that Jefferson’s belief that the Gospel writers had managed to supplant while supplementing Jesus’s teachings with pagan ideas meant that they were no longer writing history but something else is fundamentally correct. “Their literary choices rendered an idealized vision of Jesus and his life using details more strategic than historical,” she writes (p. 4). To illustrate this point, in ch. 1 she talks about the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles, writing that “[i]f the gospels and Acts function as myths that Christianity tells about itself, scholars must be careful not to reinscribe those myths as history” (p. 21). For example, whereas the letters of Paul suggest an early Christ-following movement beset with conflict and controversy, the Acts of the Apostles “spackles over the messiness of Paul’s real-life mission…and instead offers him a prominent role on par with the disciples in the establishment of the Jesus movement” (p. 34). Later in this chapter, Walsh shows that the canonical Gospels exhibit few of the signs of social formation in religious communities. The view that it was to and for communities of Christ-followers that the Gospels were composed originates with German Romanticism, a subject covered in depth in ch. 2. 

In ch. 3, Walsh turns her attention to the work of writing and the training it took to become an author in antiquity. “Any act of writing requires a certain institutional structure, training, and other ‘social conditions,’ both to legitimize and to support the specialists involved,” she writes (p. 113). This meant not only training in rhetoric but also a network of like-minded artists who could read and promote the work. The Evangelists, Walsh contends, would have been no exception. They must have had access to “the same relative levels of education, necessary training, and associated social networks” as other ancient authors (p. 121). Additionally, as she argues in ch. 4, the Gospels engage with many of the same motifs and issues brought up in contemporary literature. She spends several pages comparing them to the Latin composition Satyrica, noting that (among other things) both it and the Gospels contain stories of anointing, a crowing rooster, crucifixion, and missing bodies. Their significance in the context of “paradoxography” is explained later in the chapter. 

In the final chapter of The Origins of Early Christian Literature considers the Gospels as a subset of the bios genre – “subversive” biography. Examples of this kind of biography are offered (e.g., Plutarch’s bios of Alexander the Great) and Walsh thinks that the Gospels’ depictions of Jesus fit well within this mode. At the very least, she writes, the Gospels “are the products of creative literary activity” (p. 194). This may not sit well with some readers, but she is no doubt correct. The Evangelists were not merely receiving a tradition and putting it to paper. We know, for example, that Matthew, Luke, and probably John used the Gospel of Mark as a source for their own accounts. The way they handle Mark is evidence for their creativity as authors. They rearrange, replace, and otherwise revise what he had to say about Jesus of Nazareth. In so doing, they necessarily create their own version of the Jesus story. This is the work of authors, not mere redactors. 

Walsh’s contribution to the issue of Gospel origins and the workmanship of the Evangelists is fascinating. Despite being unfamiliar with a range of ancient works she discusses, I found her style as readable as it was scholarly. Her discussion of the influence of German Romanticism on the field of New Testament studies, warts and all, is a must for those who want to know where some of scholarship’s most cherished ideas have come from. In the span of just a few hundred pages, Walsh has given me a lot to chew on.