← Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman
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- [00:00]
A
When I found out I was going to be a parent, I immediately felt a lot of anxiety and worry. So I went on to BetterHelp to try to look for a therapist to help me with that. My relationship with my family and with my boyfriend and with myself were suffering. I really needed help. I was ruminating a lot.
- [00:17]
B
Really getting those thoughts out to a therapist and getting feedback was just life changing. Discover what BetterHelp online therapy can do for you. Visit betterhelp.com today. Welcome to Ms. Quoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman, the only show where a six time New York Times best selling author and world renowned Bible scholar uncovers the many fascinating little known facts about the New Testament, the historical Jesus and the rise of Christianity. I'm your host, Megan Lewis. Let's begin. The academic study of the New Testament is a field unto itself, historically separated from history, classical literature, and the study of the cultures that produced it. Modern scholarship, however, has moved toward understanding the Gospels and the other books of the New Testament as products of the classical Mediterranean world and more and more seeks to place them within that cultural and chronological context. My guest today explores the Gospels as works of literary creativity that are intrinsically related to Greek and Roman literature and that by placing them within that literary setting, they can be more fully understood and appreciated. Bart sadly can't join us today. He's off in deepest darkest Cornwall trying to pinpoint the last known location of the Holy Grail. Instead, I am thrilled to be joined by Dr. Robin Walsh. Dr. Walsh, thank you so much for joining us today.
- [01:43]
A
Thank you for having me here. I'm looking forward to our conversation.
- [01:46]
B
It's going to be fun. So for people who are not familiar with you, you earned your MDIV from Harvard and MA from Brown and and your PhD was awarded also by Brown University and you wrote on the beginnings of Gospel literature. You're currently an associate professor of the New Testament and Early Christianity in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Miami. And very excitingly, you've just published a book titled the Origins of Early Christian Contextualizing the New Testament within Greco Roman Literary culture. It is 29.99 from all good bookstores for those who are interested in reading that. And I've read some of the book and from what I've seen, it's very much aimed at a non academic audience. Is that right?
- [02:25]
A
I tried to strike a balance between both so that it would be accessible and interesting and you wouldn't have to be interested in, you know, very minute details about philology or things like that. But also try to bring a larger scope to the field for thinking about some of the methodological issues. So I tried to do both, but I think it's readable. Also, my husband's a pretty good editor, so I'm lucky to have taken advantage of that. So he has no interest in this field at all. So if he could read it, he's obviously a very careful reader. But if he could read it and be interested, I knew that I was on the right track.
- [02:59]
B
Fantastic. And the book, correct me if I'm wrong, but seeks to bridge the very artificial divide between research into the Synoptic Gospels and classical Greek and Roman literature. And you do an awful lot of comparative work looking at ancient non New Testament literature to try and kind of draw parallels and see exactly how the Gospels fit into the literary context of the time.
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A
Yeah, I came from a classics background, and actually before I was employed by Miami, I was a classics bap, so visiting assistant professor. So even though I ended up in New Testament as my primary field, it was really because I had started off in classics and then began reading Koine, started reading the New Testament and my background in understanding, for example, philosophical literature and terminology. When I would turn to the New Testament, I would think to myself, well, why are we translating this word as spirit when everywhere else it means this? Right. And so that was really how I started to ease into the idea. Well, there. There's an infinite number of topics I would want to tackle within this field. And so as a career, I thought it made a lot of sense to go into New Testament for that reason.
- [04:12]
B
That actually kind of answers both of my next questions, which is like, how did you get into New Testament scholarship and why exactly did you choose the research field that you're focusing on? So thank you for that.
- [04:22]
A
Well, and also I. I should clarify that I did go into my PhD to work on Paul, and Paul was kind of my first interest. And I think that's a specter to some degree. And everything that I say about the Gospels in the sense that I definitely think chronologically and I also think in terms of kind of a textual transmission model insofar as I imagine that Paul's letters, or at least some element of Paul's construction, his use of technical language and so forth, makes its way into something like the canonical Gospels. So I'm often thinking in those terms. But so many people at the time that I was finishing my PhD were writing dissertations on Paul or working on Paul. I had kind of two choices. I had another topic that I won't divulge that was on Paul and the Gospels. And I had started working on that and at some point, and this is what good advisors do. My dissertation advisor, Stanley Stowers, and I was also working with the classicist David Constan at the time. They were both saying, you know, why don't you just do the Gospels? I mean, you've already done so much work and you've been researching them and translating them, and so suddenly that seemed like a good idea.
- [05:32]
B
Fantastic. Thank you. Before we dive seriously into today's topic, I should probably mention that you will be speaking more about this topic alongside a whole host of fantastic New Testament scholars in a virtual conference that Barth's putting together. And the conference, for those who are interested, I'll give more information at the end of the episode, but it's called New Insights in the New Testament. And really interestingly, it's a biblical scholarship conference aimed at non academics, so aimed at a general audience who didn't go to grad school and pursue a career in this area. It looks like a really, really exciting event. And I have to say, having looked at the list of speakers, I think I'm going to have a lot of fun watching the lectures. And from what you and I have spoken about off air, this interview will kind of be like a very brief introduction to some of the topics that you might be covering in your talk.
- [06:19]
A
Exactly. And I'm very excited to be a part of this because I think that doing public education is an essential part of our job. And so I'm really excited to be invited to participate with all of these fabulous scholars. And I think it's going to be a really exciting couple of days. So I hope people will, will sign up.
- [06:38]
B
I hope so, too. And again, there'll be more information and a link at the end of the episode. But to get kind of to the topic at hand, why have classical literature and the Gospels developed as two really distinct fields of study? And I similarly to you, I, I went into university and started with the classics of. Took a bit of a tangent from there, but it was very much Greek and Roman literature. It's what I think people would expect when you say, oh, I studied classics, that as an undergrad and the New Testament was absolutely nowhere to be found. And yeah, having spoken to my husband, who kind of went the other direction, he did New Testament and Biblical studies and there was absolutely nothing about Greek and Roman literature more widely included in that. Why, if they are products of the same cultures in the same chronological time frame, why have they developed as Distinct fields of study.
- [07:32]
A
There are a lot of different ways that I could answer that. So I'll ramble and then maybe, you know, jump in at any point if I'm. I'm saying something that you either want to add to or clarify. The first thing is I, I should be clear, you know, I've studied quite a bit of the, not just intellectual history, but also history of the field insofar as it pertains to the critical study of the New Testament in the Bible, really coming up in what I call the Romantic period. And we can talk more about that maybe in a couple of minutes. But the university system and the way that we go about studying these things in a professional way, these kinds of texts and these different categories of text, at the very beginning there really wasn't the disciplinarity we think of today. There wasn't a classics department and a New Testament department, et cetera, not even for the study of say, national literature. I'm thinking here in Germany you wouldn't actually have different departments for each one of those kinds of categories of the study of texts. The best example I might be able to give of this that people have heard of before is Nietzsche was actually a philologist, he was a classics and then he's just sort of would write on philosophy and that was perfectly fine to do. What you start to see as time goes on is a divergence for a few reasons, I think. One is that kind of the most obvious, that New Testament texts are for theologians. And there were inter debates within different religious groups. You know, Protestants had a different approach than Catholics and those debates were so overwhelming. If you are a philologist, a classicist, you may not want to get involved or into the middle of that if you're studying this other, you know, these other hosts of text. There was also a perception for a very long time that New Testament texts are somehow other, that they were Jewish literature, or that you would back to what we were talking about a moment ago, want to translate certain words differently because they meant a different thing within Christianity than they did at the time that they were written. And that's largely the product of subsequent centuries, I think, or subsequent acts of translation, interpretation from people like the Church fathers. But it's stuck. And that anachronism wasn't quite recognized. And so even today you'll have a New Testament dictionary and then you'll have your classics dictionary. And so they were just very much treated in a very different way. Related to that is that New Testament is written in Koine Greek. So a Common Greek. It's not the, you know, classicizing Greek that you get from Homer or Plato or somebody like that. And so that also sort of seemed like, oh, well, you know, let the New Testament people deal with that. You know, Koine is not as interesting. We have a few examples of ancient authors who write in Koine, but those differences, I think, in language created enough of a divide that that conceptual sort of divorce made a lot of sense to people. So I think those are really sort of the structural reasons why that that kind of separation happened. And then back to this idea of kind of the theological approach versus, let's call it a secular one. I actually start the book with a story about a German scholar named Gustav Volkmar, who. Who was very much, you know, he was a Protestant as far as I. I know if I'm wrong about that, then he was a Catholic. But, you know, those were the only two options. And he would have readings of the New Testament that were fairly secular in the sense that he would be like, oh, well, there probably wasn't an eclipse at the crucifixion, or he wasn't. Probably placed Jesus in a tomb, because if you were crucified, that wouldn't have happened. He had to have been buried, right. He. He would make these kinds of things, distinctions, and he was ostracized for it. So you also, you know, those structural elements we're talking about are reinforced by social dynamics as well in the 19th century, again, as the field starts to divide into these different disciplines and people sort of stake their claims or, you know, in camp and certain kinds of approaches and methodologies. And so not only do you start to see classics and New Testament divine, but you see the methods for evaluating these kinds of. These classes of text divide. I want to be clear that within the field, you know, I am not the first person to compare the New Testament to other ancient Mediterranean texts, both Jewish and what we might call, quote, unquote, pagan or, you know, the broader Roman world. By no means am I the first person to do that at all. So that has been going on, but there is still a tendency, you know, I was looking up yesterday for my own research, that the Gospel of Mark, he often includes some Latinisms, we might say, in the text. It looks like he had read Latin at some point and sort of transliterated it a bit into Greek and was sort of interacting with these idioms and Latin. And I was looking up, you know, who's talked about this, you know, the usual kind of scholarly research. And I could only find initially And I'm sure I'll keep digging, but just to give again the listeners an idea of scholars saying like, oh, well, you know, you'll find this word in Maccabees, and therefore, this is from the Hebrew Bible. Actually, for this reason, this.
- [12:30]
B
It's not that he's picking up on Latin literary traditions. He's actually picking up on the Old Testament and older biblical tradition.
- [12:38]
A
Yeah, that interface tended to become the default. You know, this must be the true core or origin of this literature. And you see this even in a lot of the scholarship from, I would say, the early 20th into the mid 20th century. And I can tell you that some of my own teachers at Harvard Divinity School taught this way, which was to say, well, there is a core wisdom tradition within the New Testament, or there is a core sort of Jesus as a Jewish teacher. And when you start to see Greco Roman terminology fused into the Gospels, or when you start to see other kinds of Greco Roman Atticisms or things like that brought in to the Gospels, oh, well, that must be because the message of Jesus went from, you know, the Galilee into the rural, you know, reaches of Judea, into the city center. And once it went into these Greco Roman cities, then it got somehow altered where you started to see, you know, well, we must appeal to pagans. Or it got kind of urbanized in a way. And that whole model, there was no reason for it that I could see again, coming from classics and reading these texts as I would anything else I had been trained on in Greek. I couldn't quite understand why you would make that jump. And so I started to become really interested in why do we create these elaborate backstories for these texts where, you know, like, they've journeyed from, you know, the rural setting to the urban one. And that changed this. And you can break down these interpolations and we must have these idiosyncratic translations and, oh, there's not actually an author here, it's a whole group put this text together, and we know it's an oral tradition for these reasons. And it wasn't that I wanted to discount ideas like that there's some kind of oral tradition in any of these textbooks, by any means, nothing like that. But I just couldn't quite understand where are these methods coming from? How are they justified? So I started to research a little bit more about that actual history of the field and the history of the methodology. Because especially as somebody coming. I was raised Catholic. I was a terrible student. I still talked to Sister Yvette, who was my religion. I Sent her the book. I just. It never clicked for me, which I guess there's always something autobiographical about any kind of scholarship. And I guess for me, it was always the struggle of being like, wait, what? How did we come up with that? And just always that kind of curiosity of. Because I hadn't eased into my own religious tradition and always felt a little bit outside of it. I had sort of that posture always of kind of a critical perspective.
- [15:11]
B
This might be actually a good point to circle back to something you mentioned earlier, which is Romanticism. So what is German Romanticism? And kind of how is it related to. To the study of the Gospels as distinct, separate, somehow special when set against classical literature?
- [15:29]
A
So the short version is that the German Romantic period, you know, some people quibble on the dates. Does it start in the 17th century, really 18th, 19th century? And it was characterized by a few things. And it wasn't just exclusively in Germany, although I focus on Germany because that's really where I see the most influence, at least in my judgment, on the field of New Testament. But the Romantic period really had a focus in a couple of things. One was there's, and I want to get this out of the way, kind of a nationalistic fervor that happened with Romanticism, in part because of the political situation in Europe, including England at the time. You know, think Napoleon, right? Think about Germany becoming a state. Once you had all these kinds of things happen, you had a greater interest in deciding, discovering the people of a particular territory. And part of that was discovering the texts or storytelling that could become emblematic of a people. One example that I talk about in the book, which oddly, the Germans picked up, which I wouldn't have expected, is Shakespeare. So Shakespeare becomes the poet of the British people. You know, he becomes a representative of the kinds of stories. And I think the quote I have in the book, something like the low lizards lived Elizabethan, you know, like he. He is the representative, the poet of the age. And so you can read Shakespeare and have a sense of what the Elizabeth Ethan people were like, right? The Germans pick up on this for a lot of reasons, including not being a Protestant country, primarily really resisting the cultural dominance of quote, unquote, Rome, meaning in modernity for them, in the contemporary period, the Pope and Catholicism. But also meaning, if you look back at quote, unquote, classics, Roman culture and Roman imperialism. And so what you started to see in Germany was an attempt to reclaim the voice of the people. So the word in German is the folk. So folk. Folk literature, right. Everybody's kind of Heard of folk tales. And so the Brothers Grimm would. They basically made them up, but they would go around and try to collect the folk tales of the German people. So like every Disney cartoon ever made, I mean, they've kind of, they started to branch out now, you know, at least my generation, like Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, like, you know, Snow White, these are kind of these fairy tales, quote unquote. But this whole connection of the German people to certain stories that are supposed to represent not the elite high culture, but the people, the folks. So the oral stories they tell each other and the way that they self identify as a group. And so you can start to see from that and that kind of community language where an idea of a nationality comes from. So you have a couple of things here that I've identified. The idea of looking for the language of the folk and that poet who becomes the representative bard of the people or of the age. That principle is what I saw reflected in New Testament methodology. So back to the lack of disciplinarity in the Romantic period. You could work on multiple texts, so you could work on a German fairy tale and then you could work on the Hebrew Bible and then you could do something over here in New Testament. Then you could go back to something entire, then do Shakespeare. It didn't. You could sort of dabble. But you would bring the same methodologies to each kind of set of texts. I'm not talking here, by the way, about all the texts that were forged to be ancient to compete with the Romans. We'll talk about that another time. That was happening too. But you would bring some similar methodologies to each one of these texts. But always the goal was to reclaim the voice of the lost folk. And so what I saw in New Testament was an attempt to say Mark met. So just let's talk about the canonical Gospels, Although I'm happy to talk about non canonical at some point. And I really focused on the synoptics in the book in part because I thought with the way that you can see them telling the same story, it was evidence maybe of three authors kind of telling a different version of the same story, which is normal for authors to do, right in a competitive space, or they're demonstrating their source material, quote unquote. So I really focus on the synoptics. But what you saw in each case was this claim that Mark, Matthew, Luke, John, each one of them is merely the spokesperson for their community. The Mark and community, methane community, Lucan community, Johannine community. And what they are doing is purely taking the oral stories of the folk, their Christian community and repackaging them. And the other thing you would see in these methodologies was an attempt to say, well, any differences, say, between the Synoptic gospels was representative of the interests of that spokesperson's community to clarify something about their own interests in the text. You kind of using the text as weaponizing it in a certain way. So, so you would hear things like, well, the methane community. If you had remarks that indicated some kind of intra Jewish conflict between different Jewish groups, well, that must mean that the Christians have left the synagogue and they're angry at the synagogue. You would have these whole backstories created based on these little redactional differences. And that to me looked exactly like what I saw going on with Shakespeare or what I saw going on with the Brothers Grimm, which is this idea that while we, we don't have a lot of information about the early quote unquote church, we have Paul's letters. It's unclear how successful he was in every case. He hadn't even met the Romans. So we know other stuff is going on there, but we only have kind of this written record from a tier of society that was fairly limited, the number of people who could read and write. You know, we can quibble about statistics,
- [21:12]
B
but not a lot is the salient point.
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A
Not a lot. Right. And not the average person. Right. In the ancient world, the average person, person might be able to sign their name, write a receipt, curse somebody, but they're not writing prose literature. Right. And so unfortunately, the New Testament scholar is faced, or anybody who's just interested in Christian history is faced with a terrible problem. If you want to know what it was like to be a disciple or to be around Jesus or what the historical Jesus was like, what the early church was like, number one, you've got only Paul, who's frankly kind of boring if you're not, you know, like nerding out a Middle Platonism. It can be a little bit like, what is this guy talking about? Not clear that the groups he's talking to are cohesive. And so he's not the greatest model for early Christianity. And then you have these gospels which are, you know, if you take them as just Greco Roman literature and in that I'm including Jewish literature because the ancient Mediterranean, you know, we shouldn't create a divide between Jewish literature and other kinds of literature. It's all under one empire. It's all, you know, under one period of time in a, in a roughly similar geographic location, you know, so these are, this is literature being produced in a particular time and space. It's just not a great way to retrieve the voices of the lost early Christians, if that's what you're looking for. But if you use the same methods again that you use for the Brothers Grimm, then all of a sudden you could start to retrieve those kinds of ideas. And that to me seemed to become a very slippery slope into things about, you know, making claims about the historical Jesus, et cetera. All of those interests to me seem to be more focused on what the scholar wanted than what the texts were providing or what known historical context could provide you. So if I have a text attributed to an author and that's it, if I were in classics, then I would just translate that text as if, you know, this author's like any other author. Even if, you know, something like the Satiricon is theoretically supposed to be anonymous. Right. We have other kinds of anonymous literature in antiquity, but you still just kind of treat it as a text onto itself. It doesn't represent a whole community of people who, you know, are the Satiricon people. Yeah, you know, you just, you don't do that. And so I basically had to create a bunch of post it notes that I stuck up around my computer screen and I would tell myself, you know, don't make them a community. Because essentially what was happening is by treating the New Testament texts as if they, each author represented a romantic community. I was saying that Christianity was a national identity, that Christians are a people on par with the Brits and the Germans and the French. You know, they, they became all of a sudden sort of this manifested self evident people, which we know is not the case in the first century because it's a Jewish movement. Right. So all of that kind of mess seemed to me to be very confused. It was very well organized within those German romantic methods. But to me it had no concrete relationship to how we treat other ancient texts or how we understand the historical Circumstances of the 1st 2nd century of the Mediterranean world.
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B
If it's so problematic to view the authors of the Gospels as like spokespeople for a community that we're apparently making up based on just the existence of this text, how do we begin to view these authors as something different?
- [24:47]
A
So I don't dispute that there are Christians somewhere, you know, behind this text, because why would an author be interested in spending the time, money, resources, etc. In writing what's essentially a life of Jesus unless they had a reason to? And that reason can be as simple as there's a patron who's paying for it, or it could be more complex. You know, they're part of a early Christian group themselves, right? So it's not that. I think that is total bunk by any means. What I tried to do in the book is say, what is the most formative group, social group for the production of this literature? Because we treat it always, again, manifestly as if it's the assumed Christian community, that this person is the spokesperson for that. Mark, Matthew, Luke, John are the poets for the folk, right? We always do this. Yet we know that probably more formative for these authors would be a literate community around them of people, some of them might not have even been Christians, who past, present, you know, they have produced literature that dictate what we would call genre, that set the standards, that dictate what would be of interest. The terminology, the structure of a story. All of those things are learned within an intellectual community, or learned within, I call it, elite cultural producers. And the reason I do that, I borrow from a French sociologist named Bourdieu. When I use that framing, what it means is not economic elitism, but cultural elitism in the sense that these authors, you know, they're writing a koine, sometimes their Greek isn't awesome, but they are clearly aware of the biographical tradition. They are clearly aware of philosophy. They are clearly aware of paradoxography. In my mind, they're aware of a variety of different kinds of literature, and they're engaging it. I think they're familiar with epic, whether Homer or Virgil, and we can have, you know, fruitful debates about that, but they're. They're familiar with all this kind of literature, and they're writing a story that is supposed to insert itself into that trajectory of ancient Mediterranean literature, because otherwise, why would anybody be interested in it? Now, before, we used to say it's because, oh, it's just for the community, for community use. But we know that's not the case because it's being cited by, you know, non Christians, and by the second century, it's being debated. It's, you know, it's out there. And so we know it's not the case that just these huddled masses of Christians are just, you know, like, paying someone to write down their oral stories and holding on to it. We know that these things were circulating and just part of this panoply of ancient Mediterranean literature. So I tried to say, if we shift that focus, no longer just assume the Christian community is the most formative, but start thinking about the literary community, quote, unquote. But the literary networks as the most formative for the content of The Gospels, what changes? And I think then you have a more comprehensive range of comparative pieces to put together to try to think about what the Gospel authors are trying to get at. I think that gives us more options, really endless options for reconsidering this literature and its place within ancient Mediterranean society and intellectual output. And it's also really interesting to me to think, what if these texts do represent a more quote, unquote, elite stratum of society? If we start thinking about that and then bringing questions of education, social location, what did it take to be an author in the ancient world again? All of a sudden we open up a whole new range of possibilities for reconsidering this literature. And somebody who's doing this right now, who I think is doing some wonderful work is Canada Moss, who has a book forthcoming where she even gets into more nuance here and says, you know, if you were rich enough in the ancient world or lead enough to produce literature, you probably didn't do it yourself. It was time consuming. You know, it could give you arthritis. You know, these scrolls or these papyri, they're awkward to handle. You had enslaved persons do it now, what does that mean? Right. So I'm already starting to see other people in the field engaging kind of this new approach. It's not a new methodology by any means, but it's a new way of contextualizing this literature. So we see it slightly differently. And I think it opens up new doors.
- [28:58]
B
That's really, really interesting. And if New Testament scholarship is moving away from understanding the Gospels as someone simply writing down the oral tradition of a Christian community, how do we try and account for literary creativity when we look at these ancient sources? Like how far maybe can we use them to understand the communities that produce them? Do they give an accurate perspective or account of daily life? What can we really do with these?
- [29:26]
A
I'm slightly obsessed with the idea of creativity because I know that authors lie a lot. Or sometimes when we see something, let's not call it lying.
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B
It's like Instagram, you put forward your best self.
- [29:41]
A
Exactly. Or the most engaging version of something. Or, you know, like what fits the story better. And if, you know, especially in the ancient world, we get so caught up on what's historical fact, because we want historical fact, not taking into account that history writing in antiquity, very different from today. Right. So they are trying to give an impression of what someone was like, an impression that of a situation. Because the kind of fact checking we hold ourselves as a standard today is not really operational for antiquity in the Same exact way. So creativity I find really interesting as a problem because I think that our authors do often take what we tend to call artistic liberty with a lot of details, in part because they are trying to make the story interesting or innovative in some way to gain attention. This is why authors write, generally speaking. So that is something I continue to wrestle with. I talk about it in the conclusion of the book with a weird example, you know, not to be a phenomenologist, but I gave an example of Picasso painted a picture of his partner at the time, Francoise Gillot, who. He gave her this, like, pencil that was tied to a desk. So all these scholars started writing critical evaluations of this art, saying, oh, well, she tied her pen to the desk because she had two children. And they would knock her pen. And then she actually just passed away, I think a month ago. But they would interview her, and she'd be like, I never had a pencil like that. What are you talking about? He made it up. He made it up. I don't know why he did it. I asked him. He didn't answer me. I don't know what to tell you. And then she would just move on. So I'm not trying to posit a whole new methodology or a whole new philosophy on how to approach these things. That's the work of other people in the field. And I'll be interested to see what they do or I'll come up with some. Something later on. So I'm not trying to come up with some kind of grand scheme here, but I do think we need to be attentive to the ways in which we have to kind of always keep on a little bit of skepticism when we approach these texts or think about. If a particular detail sounds like it's echoing something we've heard somewhere before, then maybe that's the author's attempt to insert their subject matter again into a literary trajectory. And those kinds of comparisons, I think, are very interesting. But it's still really difficult, I think, for us to get at. But I think we need to be aware of it. I'm not sure if that answers the question.
- [32:05]
B
No, it's. To be fair, the question was, I think, virtually impossible to answer because it's how, essentially, how do you know if someone is telling the truth in literature? You can't unless you interview.
- [32:14]
A
I don't. Yeah, I. I have no idea. But I think you were asking me, you know, can we retrieve basically the lives of these people from this literature? I. I think, actually, I've said this and I've Wondered if I believe myself and then I'll say it again. And I think I do, which is generally speaking, the only thing I think I can retrieve from these texts as a historian, from a historical standpoint is information about the author. And I know that that's tricky because we have trouble with manuscript traditions and all of that. But the only things that I can really fill in the blanks on, I think on a lot of these ancient texts are what can I tell about this person's dialect? What can I tell about their level of education? Can I tell anything about what they're reading? Can I look at social networks, literary networks, to be able to tell who's exchanging texts, who's translating each other? Does that mean they went to school together? You know, like trying to, you know, who are their patrons? That kind of reconstructive history is at least for me, a little more concrete than the assumption that I'm dealing with illiterate spokespersons and community and oral speech, et cetera. Again, not discounting that it's there for me. I just haven't found a methodology that doesn't sort of reduce itself into some kind of historicism. I haven't found it yet, but it's my first book.
- [33:39]
B
It's a work in progress.
- [33:40]
A
Yeah, exactly.
- [33:42]
B
So Bart and I have spoken in previous episodes about the relationship between the Gospels and classical bibliographies. And in your book you talk about the Gospels as subversive biographies. Sorry, not classical bibliographies.
- [33:54]
A
I get what you mean.
- [33:55]
B
Another word entirely classical biographies. Sorry, yeah. So your book, you use the term subversive biographies. What does that mean?
- [34:03]
A
So I figured after all of this work of saying like, oh well, we can't necessarily reconstruct the community and here's what education was like. And here literary borrowing I see going on that we haven't necessarily considered before that one thing that was still kind of hanging over me was so what is this stuff? Right? Why would anybody be interested in this if it's not for a faith based usage or, you know, how would I reinsert the Gospels into again a literary trajectory in the ancient world? And again, many people before me, countless have seen and discussed that the Gospels are a form of biography of boy. Is the, the term in Greek in antiquity. Again, genre is really kind of a modern construction. But there are literary expectations and parameters that one would fit into. And the Gospels certainly fit into a life of an individual. Especially if you're looking at Luke and Matthew, where you do have pre birth birth narrative, you know, all the way to death. And that's usually what you have, cradle to grave biographies of notable figures, heroes, etc. What I noticed in the Gospels, and I did this work with that classicist that I mentioned before, David Constam, is that Jesus isn't your typical hero in the story. He tends to get by sort of by his wits, depending on which gospel you're talking about. He's certainly, I think, angry but witty and mark, or he gets by with his wonder working or he gets by with his teachings throughout each gospel. So, you know, we could break those down. But he usually, you know, has some kind of parable or something that's not always completely clear to someone. The miracle working everyone's familiar with. And that's the way he sort of negotiates time and space throughout the texts, including when face to face with certain kinds of imperial leaders. And what David and I discuss and what I explained expand in an article that was published before the book and then I expanded on it in the book, is that that trajectory of literature actually already existed before the Gospels. If you think about it with figures like Aesop or the Alexander Romance versus the life of Alexander, where one is that cradle to grave, you know, very sort of distinctive and respective biography of a great military hero and the other is Alexander as sort of a less than kind of unattractive but clever guy who plays tricks on people, but also seems to have kind of a touch of the divine as well and negotiates space that way. And so we talk about this idea of subversive biography, that it's that expected genre, kind of characteristic of this is going to be a great hallowed figure of some kind. But in this case he gets through life not because he's strong and beautiful and, you know, all powerful, but because, you know, he's an underdog, more or less. And so we trace that trajectory within literature from, you know, Aesop, Alexander, Romance, all the way through to the Gospels and then later hagiography, which often especially, you know, martyrdom accounts like this person's usually, you know, a down on their luck person for one reason or another. Maybe they've had a fall from grace for one reason or another, and then they're gruesomely killed at the end of each story. Each one of these hagiographies and accounts kind of takes that similar tack. So we try to identify that trajectory of literature.
- [37:34]
B
Thank you. So that kind of fits into what I was going to ask next. What other ancient genres, ancient literary works, can help give us additional insights into the Gospels or are we restricted more to the ancient biographies and the things like the Alexander romance.
- [37:52]
A
Biography, for sure. I think epic is in view in part because to some extent these Gospels are serving as foundational texts for the life of Jesus in the sense that they're establishing. Especially if you think about, I would say Luke and John do this for sure. Mark not so so much, and there's kind of an ideal Israel presented in Matthew, but an idea of institutional structure going forward for what we might call the church, or at least an idea of, you know, like Peter being the rock. Right. So there's an idea of foundation going on there which you would get from Homer, which you get from Virgil, and particularly in the first century, that's going to be acutely in view for an author who, you know, knows that Virgil is. Is out there. So as a competing narrative, that's going to be operational. The other genre that I'm increasingly interested in, and I'm pleased that it managed to slip its way. If you do like a word search on my manuscript, I did say it, but it's one of those things that, you know, is probably towards the end of the writing of the book, you know, during subsequent edits, and I started to see it, I was like, I can't. I can't bring in one more thing, you know, to this book, but paradoxography. So this is a genre of literature. Oh, by the way, philosophy. So let's just bracket that. We've already talked about that a couple times. So a paradoxography was a kind of literature that existed for, you know, hundreds of years before the first century, but became, I think, increasingly popular in the imperial period, which had a few key features. And Jessica Lightfoot wrote a book on this that I'm actually reading right now. So I can recommend that to people and I'm going to bring it into my mind monograph I'm writing right now. But this idea of thauma, of wonder. And so they're chronicles of either kind of strange or unique things going on either in nature or with people in sort of the far flung reaches of the empire that are like a Ripley's Believe it or Not. And I think that that was probably in view not only because the level of koine that you sometimes see with this kind of literature, I think is on par with what you have in the Gospels. So they already sort of reveal that they're kind of in the same wheelhouse, but also when you think about what Jesus was doing, this wonder working in kind of a remote part of the empire, quote, unquote, at least from the conceptual center of Rome, etc. You have basically a chronicle of amazing deeds, you know, people in a far flung place that was recently brought into the empire, you know, against its will. And so those characteristics, those, I think key characteristics of paradoxography get repeated in the Gospels sort of in the aggregate. And so I'm increasingly thinking that that's a key piece of what's influencing the Gospel production.
- [40:35]
B
Thank you. And final question, and you've talked a little about this throughout our conversation. How does what you're arguing for in the book differ or build on maybe earlier New Testament scholarship?
- [40:49]
A
Well, I'm certainly indebted to all the scholars that came before me. And, you know, again, I'm not the by any means, the first one to do some of the comparative work we've been talking about. I think the difference, if anything, was I just didn't listen to anybody. I didn't take as a predicate any real assumptions about methodology that I had been taught, which is probably not what you're supposed to do. But I had a very understanding disagreement. Director. But I just wanted to see if I could approach these works without any personal interest in trying to retrieve something from my own faith perspective. I didn't want to approach these texts with any preset objective of trying to reclaim this or that from the text. I just wanted to approach it in a way that I said to myself, okay, like, pretend I just found this thing, you know, in a collection, in a codex somewhere, and I didn't know anything about the context. How would I approach it, and what not assumptions would I bring, but what critical apparatus would I bring from a historical perspective on what's here? What do I know about authors in the first century? What do I know about Koine? What do I know about the cross references that I can detect and the terminology, and what does that tell me about relative to education, et cetera. So it's not that that's different. I think a lot of people in the field do that. But that coupled with sort of that comprehensive critique of how did we get here and the book collapses those two things on to onto each other. I think in the sense that, you know, by the end of my research, I was starting to get very suspicious about that romantic approach we've talked about. So the book really starts there and says, you know, we have to really look at, like, why do we do this? And then while I'm continuing to debate that, I bring in those other historical evaluative elements. And so I think that kind of dynamic moving back and forth between critique of methodology while also trying to sort of reverse methodology. That's something I hadn't quite seen before. It's not to say it hasn't happened. I've seen it in other fields. So a historian who had a lot of influence on me was Suzanne Marchand who had a book on, you know, German Romanticism. She's had two down from Olympus and a book called German Orientalism that was hugely influential to me. Glenn Bowersock was hugely influential as well and his work on history and there were a few others who I thought had taken in stanza hours as well. And so those approaches I think really helped me try to do something a little bit different.
- [43:33]
B
Well, thank you very much. This was really interesting audience. If you've enjoyed listening to this episode and you'd like to find out more about the Gospels and their place within the Greco Roman literary world. Dr. Walsh's book, as I said, is available now from really everywhere you could expect to find books. Could you just remind us of the title please?
- [43:52]
A
The Origins of Early Christian Literature Contextualized in the New Testament within Greco Roman Literary Culture. And I chose the COVID so you can remember it, the red cover, because you have the gospel authors kind of high fiving each other and you see the same text repeated over and over with. It's the cleansing of the Temple Tantrum, which is one of my favorite when Jesus, you know, turns the tables over in the temple, which I like to call the Temple Tantrum. I think Paula Fredrickson had that first.
- [44:21]
B
I was gonna say, I've never heard it called the Temple Tantrum. And I just stealing that for the rest of eternity. That's amazing.
- [44:28]
A
I had to have the Temple Tantrum because it's one of my favorite things. But you can see each one takes their own approach. So I really liked this cover. And then, you know, I have to confess there's that whole German nationalism critique in here too in chapter two. And so the red cover was sort of evocative of some nationalistic colors that you might know about. So just look for the red book and I'm always interested to hear back from people on the book. I. I can't always keep up with my email, but I do read them all. So I hope to see a lot of people at the event in September. And I really thank you for this opportunity to talk about it.
- [45:00]
B
Oh no, it's been lovely. And like Dr. Walsh said, the conference is New Insights into the New Testament, a biblical conference for non scholars. And she will be one of 10 academics who are all giving lectures. And the lectures, like I said, are aimed at people who are interested in biblical scholarship but are not themselves academics, which is something that I think there's definitely a gap in the market there for academics to talk to people who are not other academics because we're all very good at that. We go to our professional conferences and we talk to our peers and our colleagues about our research, their research. It's a little bit more difficult to talk to other people who are not also academics about the research that we're doing.
- [45:41]
A
Hard for hardcore nerds not to nerd out.
- [45:44]
B
It is quite tricky. But I think the beauty of this conference is that you get to nerd out to people who are also nerds, just slightly less experienced nerds.
- [45:52]
A
Well, yeah, I know that. I mean like this morning my husband caught me before we were taking our son to school with a Greek dictionary and he was like, what are you doing? And I was looking up some words.
- [46:00]
B
I have to check something.
- [46:01]
A
Yeah, he just goes nerd and he walks. He's a professor too, but you know, there's different levels and so it's. Yeah, just trying to mitigate some of the hardcore nervry.
- [46:13]
B
But if people are interested the Confidence Conference will be held on the 23rd and 24th of September from about 10am to roughly 4:30pm and it is priced at 59.95 to attend or 49.95 if you buy your ticket by August 26th. And I have to say just under $60 for an event like this, I am slightly surprised at because again, having attended academic conferences multiple times in the past, you're looking at a minimum of $200 and that doesn't include flights of and hotels.
- [46:43]
A
So 300 bucks for SBL that year. I keep complaining to people because I'm cheap.
- [46:49]
B
So all the details, including information about the speakers can be found at www.newinsightsconference.org. the plan is to make it a yearly event, so if you enjoy it this year, it will be back next year. And Bart and I are going to be talking a little bit more about the different speakers over the next few weeks. So you'll kind of get brief introductions to all of them. We were lucky enough to get Robin to do her own introduction, which is excellent. Robin, thank you again so much for sharing your time and expertise with us. This was an awful lot of fun.
- [47:19]
A
Oh, thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.
- [47:21]
B
You're always great audience. Thank you all for listening. I hope you enjoyed the show. If you did Please subscribe to the podcast to make sure you don't miss future episodes. Remember, you can use the code mjpodcast for a discount on all of Bart's courses over at www.barterman.com. misquoting Jesus will be back next week along with Bart. We'll have to find out whether he found the Holy Grail in the end. I can't remember off the top of my head what our topic conversation is. I think it's either the Trinity or whether Constantine actually converted. Either way, fantastic topic. Please join us then. Thank you all and goodbye. This has been an episode of Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman. We'll be back with a new episode now next Tuesday, so please be sure to subscribe to our show for free on your favourite podcast listening app or on Bart Ehrman's YouTube channel so you don't miss out from Bart Ehrman and myself, Megan Lewis, thank you for joining us.