AJR Conversations I The New Testament: A Contemporary Introduction

Below is an exchange between Colleen Conway and David Maldonado Rívera on Conway’s book, The New Testament: A Contemporary Introduction (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2023).

DMR: Colleen, thank you so much for agreeing to discuss your recently published The New Testament: A Contemporary Introduction. As someone who teaches Introduction to the New Testament with some frequency and has not set up on a specific textbook, I highly appreciate how you took on this work. It must be a daunting task to develop a textbook for a set of texts that already count with a variety of “textbook genres” based on audience, academic setting, along other factors. What was your main motivation as you engaged in this challenge?

CC: My textbook writing endeavors began with Introduction to the Bible: Sacred Texts and Imperial Contexts that I co-authored with David Carr, a specialist in Hebrew Bible (and my husband). At my institution I teach a one semester Introduction to the Bible. I could not find a textbook that offered up-to-date historical scholarship, engaged with contemporary methods, while also fitting reasonably within a 15-week course. So I proposed to David that we draw on our joint expertise to write an introduction to the Christian Bible, both Hebrew Bible and Old Testament, that was fully contemporary and short enough to allow students to read both it and the Bible. When we were asked to revise that work for a second edition, I thought that it would be useful to build on those revisions to offer a separate textbook designed for a one semester introduction to the New Testament. For this book, a major motivation was to incorporate the insights of contemporary approaches more fully into the main body of the text, rather than relegating them to separate text boxes or the like. 

DMR: I am so glad you triumphed over the tyranny of the text box and the desire to know how much it can contain.

As a follow up, your decision to not include the twenty-seven texts of the New Testament while also featuring discussions of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, The Acts of Paul and Thecla, Tacitus among others, and inviting students to trust their curiosity as they explore the later history of the Jesus Movement, I found it to be taking a risk for the sake of pedagogical generosity. At least for me, this approach facilitates going through the textbook with solid time management in mind, while opening up various possibilities to bring other materials and media to the classroom. How did you reach that decision? Was there a particular moment when you settled on sending James, Jude, and 2 Peter to the bench?

CC: Here I followed my years of teaching with textbooks that were too long to assign for one semester, in fact, sometimes even for two semesters! I found that existing textbooks, though sometimes including each and every New Testament book, were too large and unfocused for students to truly read both them and the biblical texts to which they were being introduced. In writing a more teachable and focused textbook, I invariably had to make decisions as to what biblical books would not be included in any detailed way in class assignments. Obviously, students are most interested in learning about the gospels and the Pauline epistles. Beyond that, it was not as much a matter of what to exclude, but rather what to include. I find that the combination of Revelation, Hebrews and 1 Peter in their differing approaches to the social and political context of the empire works well in helping students grasp the diversity of perspectives and experiences of early Christ followers. Discussions of non-canonical texts like the Gospel of Thomas or Acts of Paul and Thecla make that important point even more sharply. They also help set New Testament writings in a broader context.

DMR: For those instructors who will teach later periods of Christian history and reception, your approach I am sure is heavily appreciated. It gives students a solid foundation and, as you say, an incentive “to seek out a wide range of perspectives and approaches to aid” their learning (225).

The attention you give in the first chapter of the book to matters of textuality (paratexts, the artifactness of reading technologies, literacy in the premodern world, Twitter as a way to explain literary genres and conventions, etc.) invites the student to both think of premodern writers and audiences and how we read now. You continue this approach by highlighting the dynamism of the Jesus movement by having students engage various texts in small groupings (i.e., 1 Thessalonians, Philippians, and Philemon are discussed in Chapter 3; Galatians and Romans in Chapter 4; 2 Thessalonians, Colossians, and Ephesians as one subgroup along with 1-2 Timothy and Titus as another subgroup in Chapter 6; Revelation, Hebrews and 1 Peter in Chapter 12). Were there pairings you tried in class before that did not make it to the book? Pairings you’d like to try in a future second edition?

CC: It is funny that you mention the Twitter example because even as I used it, I wondered how long it would be relevant. At this point, a second edition would need to read “X formerly known as Twitter.” But as to your question, of course there are many ways to group these texts in the classroom, especially the epistles. For instance, I have often put 1 Corinthians in conversation with Galatians because these two letters offer a contrast in Paul’s own writing that students can readily see: In his letter to the Galatians, Paul deploys the idea of freedom to convince the gentiles not to be circumcised. In contrast, when writing to the Corinthians, Paul leaves aside the theme of freedom while he contends with their claims that “all things are lawful (or right) for me” (1 Cor 6:12). One can still put these Galatians and 1 Corinthians together in the classroom, even while the letters are discussed in different chapters. Likewise, when one gets to the last chapter and the discussion of Revelation, it is productive to put Rev 2:14, alongside Paul’s discussion in 1 Corinthians 8-10 about eating food sacrificed to idols as well the narrator’s aside in Mark 7:19 that Jesus declared all foods clean. Students are intrigued by exploring evidence of competing ideas among Christ followers about what one should or should not eat.

So I can imagine that one productive addition would be to more explicitly highlight such differences, whether regarding food, responses to empire, or another topic. I am always open to suggestions from instructors who are using the book!

DMR: Thank you for the extra suggestions! I will definitely incorporate some of those to my next course. I really appreciate how the students in your textbook are always comparing texts, close reading, and drawing comparisons. One thing I have tried in my New Testament course is doing some material culture exercise (have the student copy amulets on papyrus with a reed pen, check out the facsimile copy of Codex Sinaiticus and try some transcription; pro tip: no ink usage in the classroom) and incorporate art and cinema as examples of contemporary reception. As you have arranged the textbook and your classes, what are some of your preferred supplemental class activities?

CC: Wow, I love these ideas for bringing awareness of the materiality of the ancient world into the classroom. I incorporate both art and film in my teaching. In fact, the cover of the textbook is intended as a teaching tool. I am fascinated by Julio Romero De Torress painting of the Samaritan woman from John 4. Her penetrating gaze and tight-lipped expression while a back-grounded Jesus addresses her invite discussion. Especially if the instructor puts this painting in conversation with other depictions of this scene (and there are many!) it helps students understand how visual media from different cultural contexts might shape interpretations of the biblical narrative.     

DMR: You made me think a lot about how to organize the narrative arcs of a course and how less conventional approaches may prove beneficial to students. For instance, focusing a bit more on the history of biblical interpretation and academic discussions, you introduce the students to Paul with an early encounter of his earliest extant letters. Right after this, students fully engage with current discussions  of “Paul within Judaism” scholarship by contrasting Romans and Galatians (Chapter 4). As you know, this is something that other textbooks tend to do to culminate their discussion of Paul rather than begin it. What advantages have you found with this approach?

CC: There are several ways that I break with many New Testament introductions. The first is that we read and discuss Paul before the gospels. It is important to me that students experience Paul as one whose work with Christ groups in the Roman empire occurred before the traditions about Jesus begin to circulate in a written narrative form. And, yes, I move to discussion of Galatians and Romans quite early because so many mistaken assumptions about Paul’s identity are rooted in interpretations of these letters. Introducing students to the history of scholarship on “perspectives on Paul” enables students to see that biblical studies, like any other academic discipline, is both historically situated and a continuous work in progress. In the case of Paul, students see him transform (through a scholarly lens) from a Christian convert who is antagonistic toward Judaism, to a Jewish Paul who nevertheless rejects elements of Judaism, to (most recently) a Hellenistic Jewish Paul whose apocalyptic interpretation of Jesus is fully situated within Judaism. For students, these shifting views of Paul are wonderfully illustrative of how biblical interpretations are never static and sometimes are tragically wrong. That said, I also emphasize scholarly humility, noting that future scholarship will no doubt bring additional insights to our understanding of the ancient world of Paul and other New Testament writers.

DMR: Considering the issue of the “contemporary” in the title, your approach reminds me of a brief essay by Giorgio Agamben, where he ponders about contemporariness as “a relationship with one’s own time, which adheres to it and, at the same time, keeps a distance from it” (Agamben, What Is an Apparatus?, 41). It appears to me that you have a similar approach in mind as each of the chapters of the book unfold. Your focus on the positionality of students, scholars, our academic field, and the texts in question is heavily emphasized throughout the work. What have been some of your experiences in the classroom that motivated the current shape of the book?

CC: My students, as well as many other students, typically have little to no knowledge of the Bible or the historical contexts in which the biblical texts took shape. Many of them are truly interested to “discover” the most basic historical details about the New Testament, for example, the fact the gospels were written after Paul’s letters. With my discussions of the historical context of the New Testament texts, I also had in mind instructors who may not have been trained in biblical studies, and whose primary research is in other disciplines. I wanted to provide them and their students with a concise resource to access updated historical critical scholarship.   

At the same time, I want students to grasp the wide-ranging influence the Bible has had and continues to have on our world. I hope to demonstrate the rich variety of questions that contemporary scholars bring to biblical texts because often these concerns are deeply relevant to my students’ own lives. Perhaps even more, I want students to learn to form their own questions that arise out of their own social locations. In this way, my textbook aims to open students to an ongoing, informed conversation about New Testament texts that can include them.

Colleen Conway is Professor of Biblical Studies at Seton Hall University. Her research interests include gender critical approaches to the Bible, the gendered cultural history of biblical traditions, and the Gospel of John.  

David Maldonado Rívera is associate professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Kenyon College. His research focuses on late ancient heresiology,  Christian historiography, and medievalism in the Caribbean. He currently serves as part of the book review team of Studies in Late Antiquity.

AJR Conversations I Violence and Personhood in Ancient Israel and Comparative Contexts

AJR continues its #conversations series with a call and response between Christine Luckritz Marquis and Tracy Lemos on Lemos’ Violence and Personhood in Ancient Israel and Comparative Contexts (Oxford University Press, 2017).

Christine Luckritz Marquis:

Tracy Lemos’s Violence and Personhood in Ancient Israel and Comparative Contexts contributes to the burgeoning study of violence and religious history. Deftly engaging and critiquing her field of specialization (biblical and ancient near east studies), Lemos situates her own work among often overlooked anthropological approaches to personhood. While she highlights the usefulness of certain philosophical approaches (common among North American and European scholars), she emphasizes the greater value for social historians of engaging anthropology on personhood, due in part to its attention to communal behavior and willingness to activate comparisons. Such positioning allows her to make synchronic comparisons that highlight the commonalities of cultures even as she notes the particularities of the Israelite community. The underlying ethic of her project is a call to her scholarly comrades to care more for people suffering than objects broken, whether those of the past or those of our own present.

Throughout the book, Lemos challenges her readers to address how notions of personhood inform and are informed by experiences and enactments of violence. She asserts that notions of personhood are most visible when the status of a human being is denied through acts of dehumanization. Israelites and neighboring communities used physical violence “to demarcate lines of personhood, to shift the status of a human being from that of person to that of non-person, and to highlight the superior status and claim to personhood of the one inflicting the violence upon someone else” (4). For the Israelites, in particular, “masculine dominance” animated social ordering not only in times of war, but also in daily life (18).

Having traced the contours of scholarship on personhood in her introduction, Lemos offers her own definition of personhood as “a social recognition of value” marked by the attribution or denial of legal rights and status through ritual performances (11). Equipped with this definition, she moves through multiple types of people with a focus on their embodiment to explore how personhood was constructed by Israelites in relationship with their larger ancient West Asian context.

She begins, in Chapter 2 by exploring how foreigners were treated amongst Israelites. Via a wide swath of evidence – from biblical texts, to reliefs and royal inscriptions, to legal and treaty documents – she explores the mutability of personhood that was central to Israelites, their Levantine neighbors, and the larger ancient near east. While outright denial of personhood is scarce in her sources, as she highlights, animalizing language was used to describe and debase foreigners (39-40). With careful attention to nuance, she differentiates animal comparisons that might be harmless from those meant to articulate and mark as less than human.

She also points out that such descriptions often escaped the bounds of language, especially in the context of war, resulting in brutal acts of humiliation and mutilation that left little doubt of the abused individual’s non-human status. Wading through horrific examples of violence, Lemos convincingly shows that such praxes were ritual performances, recognizable to communities of ancient West Asia. They negated the victim’s status as human while simultaneously actualizing the abuser’s personhood. That is to say, as she shows so well throughout the book, acts of violence created and destroyed personhood. Given the highly vulnerable nature of personhood, it is not surprising that she finds examples not only of foreigners, but also of native Israelites occasionally experiencing acts of dehumanization within their own community.

 With a larger background context of masculine dominance established (linked to enacting of violence and delineation of personhood), Lemos moves in the next several chapters through various subjugated positionalities – women, enslaved individuals, and children. In Chapter 3, she carefully exposes how subordination did not necessarily negate the personhood of women. Transgressions, especially those of a sexual nature, by women and the resultant response of the father/husband and larger community underscore how “partial and tenuous” women’s claims to personhood were (64). In severe cases, punishment might devolve into such mutilation that it resulted in animalization of the woman’s body, ritually marking her through violence as no longer a person.

 Moving from daughters and wives to the enslaved, Lemos argues in Chapter 4 that who was enslaved influenced the degree to which they were ascribed any personhood. Israelite men who might find themselves enslaved due to debt were far more apt to retain their personhood than a male who was perpetually enslaved. Having already shown the limitations to personhood that women might suffer, Lemos underscores the more tenuous situation in which all female enslaved individuals found themselves. But the enslaved foreigner, regardless of gender, was the only type of slave who was utterly denied any personhood both legally and socially. While she does not use the term, it is clear that intersectional realities produced multiply oppressed individuals with little to no personhood ascribed them.

 Chapter 5 turns to yet another precariously situated body, that of the child. As Lemos pours over available evidence and potential interpretations, she makes clear that all readings indicate that children lacked personhood. Exploring the sacrifice and cannibalism of children, Lemos distinguishes children from all the other subjugated positionalities she addresses in the previous chapters. Even the enslaved foreigner, for example, could have been granted personhood in their own land, but children throughout the ancient West Asia could not. Lemos also argues that child sacrifice occurred among the Israelites, despite its limited mentions within extant texts. In her view, such limited mentions of children actually further underscore how much an afterthought the entire existence of children often was.

 True to her chosen methodology, Lemos turns in her final chapter to comparing ancient Israelite constructions of personhood to several recent American contexts: Abu Ghraib, the prison industrial complex, and police maltreatment and murder of Black and Brown people. Moving through each case, she shows how a notion of personhood built around dominance and violence by a hypermasculinized few is always fragile and precarious for all. Given the many dark and violent examples Lemos engages, she ends her compelling argument on a positive note. Framing an alternative model of dominant personhood on the protest actions of Bree Newsome, she asserts that just because personhood has often been constructed through abuse and dehumanization throughout history does not mean it must be so. She closes by encouraging her readers to construct personhood around mutual recognition and respect towards building a more just and equitable world.

 Overall, Lemos makes a compelling case for understanding personhood among Israelites and in the broader ancient West Asian world as constructed through violence that subordinates some while creating a dominating status for others. Her attention to multiple experiences across so many types of evidence is part of what makes her argument so successful, but one of the few places I wanted more nuance was in mapping the differences between enslaved individuals. In her (justified!) desire to counter scholarship that flattens the horror of enslavement by merely equating it to labor, Lemos firmly asserts that enslavement was very different. But her own evidence betrays that there was more slippage between the categories than she allows. Other laborers also suffered subordination and abuse alongside the enslaved. As she herself notes, laborers and enslaved individuals both might find themselves in precarious situations, and the very existence of debt enslavement makes clear that a laborer, subject to whom he worked for, might easily be manipulated into an enslaved status. While I agree with her arguments that we must not make claims that erase the horror of enslavement, I think her claims would have been strengthened further by highlighting how labor was more like enslavement in some cases than enslavement was merely like labor status. I only raise this small point because it aligns with the critical impact of her book: when personhood is scaffolded by violent dominance of some at the expense of many others, everyone’s worth is precarious and we all fail to flourish like we could.

Tracy Lemos: 

First, I would like to thank Christine Luckritz Marquis for the careful and thoughtful review of my book that she offers. It is always gratifying to read a conscientious engagement with one’s work. I was trying to do something rather unusual in this book, which was to assess a social phenomenon in two very different times and places. While there has been increasing interest among biblical scholars in examining how biblical texts have been received and interpreted in contemporary communities, that was not what I was doing here. I wanted to use biblical texts, together with archaeological evidence and a range of sources from elsewhere in ancient West Asia, to reconstruct the phenomenon of dehumanizing violence in a particular region and period of time—the first millennium BCE—and then compare that reconstruction with the same phenomenon as we see it in another place and time — namely contemporary America, especially the city streets where police officers shoot unarmed African-American men, prisons where incarcerated individuals are subjected to dehumanizing violence, and Abu Ghraib in Iraq, where American soldiers treated the bodies of prisoners like animal bodies. 

Luckritz Marquis is certainly right that this book is mostly synchronic in method when it comes to my examination of Israelite and other ancient West Asian sources. The reason for this is that the interconnections I outline between dehumanizing violence, masculinity, dominance, and personhood are hardly limited to one century or two of ancient West Asian history. My objectives in the work were to demonstrate that these connections existed and were extremely pervasive in the cultures of ancient West Asia, as well as to examine how different social groups—foreigners, Israelite men, Israelite women, enslaved individuals, and children—were affected by these interconnections. But I also argue that in certain social contexts in the contemporary world the violence-domination-personhood nexus is still very much prevalent. One could state, then, that the book has both synchronic and diachronic elements, as it entails a comparison of societies in antiquity with a contemporary society.

I am very pleased that my reconstructions of the patterns of violence in ancient Israel have generally been very well received and that Luckritz Marquis found my book compelling on the whole. Still, she did offer one main criticism, regarding my assessment of slavery, and it is an apt one.  The context for my assessment was that many scholars have tried to put a “silver lining” on biblical slavery, painting it as a kinder, gentler sort of slavery, so kind and gentle it was barely even slavery at all. I wished to refute this tendency. Our sources make very clear that slavery in ancient Israel could involve rape or coerced sexuality and beatings, even fatal ones, not to mention body control and compelled physical labor. It was also a highly stigmatized social position. The Israelites did not understand slavery to be just another form of labor. But I may have perhaps been so focused on detailing the violence of slavery that I did not emphasize enough how other forms of labor, too, could be exploitative and easily lead into debt slavery. 

On the other hand, I do think we need to derive our conclusions from the sources we have, which in the case of slavery are not just the Bible but the Samaria Papyri and other inscriptions, and a large set of material from neighboring cultures. It is certainly true that male and female day laborers and tenant farmers were economically marginalized and could be exploited. Nonetheless, slavery was seen by the Israelites themselves as a different and more catastrophic status, involving limitations and body manipulations to which laborers were not necessarily subject. Thus, while I do accept Luckritz Marquis’s critique that I should have recognized the potential exploitations of labor, it is important to highlight that the Israelites understood slavery as a separate status from other forms of labor and that they ascribed different levels of personhood to different categories of slaves—male versus female, Israelite versus foreign. Certain categories of slaves were offered the potential to regain their personhood but others seemingly were not. For example, a male Israelite debt slave, according to legal texts, was due certain protections and could revert to having the full personhood of other Israelite men if and when he was freed. Contrast this with the treatment of enslaved foreigners, who seem not to have been seen as persons and were not expected to be manumitted after a set term. In the end, then, although I do agree that my discussion of the personhood of enslaved individuals would have benefited from greater nuance at certain points, I contend that my overall arguments in the chapter still stand.

In my next book, I wish to extend my research on violence while shifting my methodology in certain ways. As a starting point, I will examine how Judeans responded to the ravages of imperial violence in the Babylonian and Hellenistic periods and, more specifically, how they responded to being the victims of dehumanizing violence. I will then compare this to the responses to dehumanization we see in several modern contexts. In other words, this work will include the comparative aspect of my 2017 book while delving more deeply into the nuances of Israelite and Judean experiences with violence in two specific historical periods. My goal in this project is to present an analysis of dehumanization from which scholars in a variety of disciplines can benefit.  Dehumanization is an incredibly complex phenomenon, after all, and I am fully convinced that scholars of antiquity have a great deal to contribute both to the cross-cultural and transhistorical study of violence in general, and to the study of dehumanizing violence, in particular.

T. M. Lemos is Professor of Hebrew Bible in the Faculty of Theology at Huron University and a member of the graduate school faculty and a faculty affiliate of the Centre for Transitional Justice and post-Conflict Reconstruction at Western University in London, Ontario. In 2022, she will be Gerstein Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto. She has published two monographs and co-edited three volumes, including the forthcoming Cambridge World History of Genocide, Vol. 1: Genocide in the Ancient, Medieval, and Premodern Worlds, as well as numerous articles and essays on a wide range of topics.

Christine Luckritz Marquis is a historian of late antiquity and Associate Professor of Church History and Director of the Masters of Theology at Union Presbyterian Seminary.

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.