Recherche – Detailansicht
Ausgabe: | März/2022 |
Spalte: | 220–222 |
Kategorie: | Kirchengeschichte: Alte Kirche, Christliche Archäologie |
Autor/Hrsg.: | Walsh, Robyn Faith |
Titel/Untertitel: | The Origins of Early Christian Literature. Contextualizing the New Testament within Greco-Roman Literary Culture. |
Verlag: | Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2021. 225 S. Geb. £ 75,00. ISBN 9781108835305. |
Rezensent: | Phillip A. Davis, Jr. |
In this volume, which originated as a Ph.D. dissertation supervised by Stanley Stowers, Robyn Faith Walsh seeks to dispel any notion of the synoptic evangelists as simple but literate community representatives responsible for putting down in writing the commun-ity’s collection of oral tradition. For W. this picture represents an idealization of early Christian history influenced both by a second-century myth of Christian origins and nineteenth-century German Romanticism. She seeks to counter this position by contextualizing the evangelists as participants in a group of elite, creative »cultural producers« who drew upon typical ancient literary motifs and made use of a common ancient genre ( bios) to compose their Jesus stories. In this vein, W. sees the evangelists as inventive authors and expresses skepticism toward the influence of oral tradition.
The book is comprised of five numbered chapters, but the pathway for her argument is set up in a preface and introduction. W. reflects on her results in a short conclusion.
In the first two main chapters W. lays out her critique. In chapter 1, »The Myth of Christian Origins«, she suggests that scholarship typically imagines the synoptic evangelists »to be functioning within and for a group of fellow Christians akin to the illiterate and socially marginal Christ followers found in the gospels themselves« (21). W. counters that in this assumption scholars have failed to consider the elite, literate contexts in which book writing took place in antiquity. She suggests that scholars have uncriti-cally fallen for a mythic view of Christian origins, propagated for example in the Book of Acts, that idealizes the early Christian communities .
In her second chapter, W. ties the idealistic view of Christian origins to tendencies of German Romanticism. She highlights, for example, how the Nibelungenlied and the fairy tales of the brothers Grimm were conceived of as (oral) traditions that could not be traced back to a single author and prized as reflecting the Geist of preliterate social groups. Particularly in J. G. Herder W. sees a transition toward applying these conceptions to biblical traditions that comes to its fullest expression in form and redaction criticism in-sofar as they assume that oral traditions came to be set down and redacted under the influence of various early Christian groups.
In the final three chapters, W. locates the composition of the synoptic gospels within the realm of ancient book culture. In chapter 3 she argues, »Writing was ultimately a product of an author’s education, training, and range of literary and other interests – as well as the feedback received from relative peers« (110). W. briefly sketches the education and practices involved in writing, emphasizing that the ability to write literary texts required specialist education and familiarity with other literary texts. Once such a text was written, it was ultimately circulated among fellow elites – though she importantly reckons with various degrees of eliteness. W. thus postulates that the author of Mark, for example, is not beholden to a community behind his gospel, but rather that he »is engaged in a writing practice that views other literature and fellow writers as chiefly formative« (133).
W. makes this argument more concrete in chapter 4, as she turns to ancient literary topoi that appear in the gospels. In particular, she focuses on several points of overlap between the Satyrica and the gospels, such as a funeral anointing at a banquet setting, an omen marked by the crowing of a rooster, and an episode involving a crucifixion, a tomb, and a missing body. This leads to a series of examples from other ancient works as well. The differences between the Satyrica and the gospels on W.’s points of comparison are to my mind quite significant, but, on the basis of her other examples, that does not necessarily weaken her point that »a writer could take a set of conventional elements from broader Greco-Roman literary habit, preserve anticipated aspects […], yet still innovate and elaborate on a theme« (151). Beyond topoi, W. argues that anonymity and appeals to eyewitnesses were also typical rhetorical strategies in ancient writing. On anonymity, W. does not actually identify any concrete strategies (cf. 159) beyond noting the frequency of the phenomenon. Otherwise she shows appeal to eyewitness to be a frequent legitimizing maneuver and thus argues against reading Luke’s prologue as an actual description of Luke’s process.
In the final main chapter, W. proposes reading the gospels as »subversive biographies«. That is, the gospels are comparable with other ancient bios literature that »emphasizes the capabilities of a figure perceived to be outside the dominant culture« (170) in contrast to a bios that »focuses, rather, on powerful and respected individuals, such as those written by Cornelius Nepos, Plutarch, and Suetonius« (173). She finds parallels to Jesus’ engagements with »more powerful figures« (171) in the depictions of Socrates and Aesop in Xenophon’s Memorabilia and the Life of Aesop, respectively. All three figures stand for her as outsiders but prove to have the wit and wisdom to outdo and thus subvert the thinking and val-ues of the supposed elites.
All in all, W. offers a convincing step forward in considering what types of books the synoptic gospels actually are and how they arose by focusing on what we know about ancient writers, their education, and their processes versus what we might suppose about oral tradition and supposed communities behind the gospels. In particular, W. is right to emphasize the evangelists’ adaptation of existing topoi and the creativity that goes along with that. It is also notable that in emphasizing the role of the creative author she diverges markedly (and explicitly) from M. Larsen’s (2018) recent conception of Mark as a collection of unfinished notes.
A few points of critique may be mentioned. Despite her criticism of previous scholarship, and as W. occasionally acknowledges, central aspects of her argument have been anticipated elsewhere: the comparison of the gospels with classical topoi (e. g., D. MacDonald); the designation of the gospels as bioi not written for communities (R. Burridge); and the treatment of the evangelists as creative authors (e. g., M. Goulder). Relatedly, I doubt scholarship is generally as uncritical toward our sources as she sometimes lets on. In fact, it is perhaps due to a neglect of crucial insights from form and redaction criticism that W.’s big-picture study threatens to throw out the baby with the bathwater: There are surely redactional hints that the gospels are interacting with various, disparate Jesus traditions (whether oral or not) already in circulation (Mark 11:22–25 is one small example). How might she concretely relate such evidence to authorial creativity? Moreover, it is often the historically implausible details of the gospels that suggest their connection to some sort of community situation, such as Jesus’ establishment of an ekklesia with internal rules (Matt 16:18; 18:15). In this light, W.’s thesis swings the pendulum too far in one direction. Despite these criticisms, W.’s work forces us to carefully evaluate our assump-tions about the origins of gospel writing.