Robyn Faith Walsh, “City and Country,” in The Next Quest for the Historical Jesus, edited by James Crossley and Chris Keith (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2024), 329-330.
The gospels are no more singularly concerned with chronicling the life of the historical Jesus than the Aeneid is a vessel for the historical Aeneas. And, to the extent that they are engaged in a traditional form of bios-writing…, we should be well served to recognize that one-dimensional comparisons are insufficient to the task of explicating the who and why of the gospels. Jesus resembles Odysseus, Daniel, Moses, Socrates, Aesop, Alexander, Augustus, for example, not only because the author is trying to draw an analogy for the sake of proving Jesus’s importance or authority and so forth, but also because the author is demonstrating their own ability and authority within the inherently competitive field of writing. The gospel writers use numerous tricks of the trade that we are inclined to overlook when we prioritize seeking evidence for recension, interpolation, oral tradition, or the historical Jesus.
The Amateur Exegete 
Cool Piece. From what I’ve seen from her videos, Walsh comes across as having an enviable knowledge of the Greco-Roman context, and one of the brightest new scholars with what could be paradigm-shifting perspectives.
(It just so happens she also does quite well in the department of aesthetics as well. Maybe descendants of the Greco-Roman goddesses really do live among us or we have found one of the nine muses…)
Anyway, I really need to grab a copy of The Origins of Early Christian Literature at some point. It keeps getting shout outs from my favorite Bible scholars and bloggers. Oh, and apologies if I creeped out poor Dr. Walsh.
LikeLike