My playlist of Robyn F. Walsh (and related) yt talks
I recently got a reply from Dr. Richard Carrier about Dr. Robyn Walsh's claim that Paul referring to James as a disciple of Jesus is the best evidence that a historical Jesus actually existed. Carrier replied that this state of Paul has been misunderstood in the Greek - and since the grammar is awkward the meaning is actually quite clear that Paul considered James to not be one of the 12 apostles nor a biological brother of Jesus - rather James was just another follower or disciple as a student in the general sense.
Dr. Walsh remarks that she actually thinks the Gospel of Mark was before Paul but the two are closely related in the sense of emphasizing Christianity as not requiring following strict Jewish law. Her book "The Origins of Early Christian Literature" argues that modern Biblical scholarship came out of the German protestant academia that also focused on created a German "volk" or spirit-community voice, rivaling the ancient civilizations of Greece, Rome and Egypt. This German "volk" bias was then transferred to the Gospels, wrongly assuming an uber-"community" oral tradition origin of the Gospels. As Dr. Richard Carrier points out, the "sayings of Jesus" as folklore actually don't appear in Paul, even though Paul's letters are generally considered to be the first sources for any kind of historical Jesus.
So then Dr. Walsh elaborates in her book (really her Ph.D. thesis published as a book) that the writers of the Gospels would have been relying on other literature as their primary sources - along with a circle of intellectual literati at that time, in contrast to some supposed oral tradition.
Nevertheless when we consider that the recent 70 A.D. destruction of the 2nd Temple of Jerusalem caused an influx of Jewish slaves into Rome - and thus a sense of "imperial guilt" - with the so-called "coliseum" (of lion eating Christian fame) being built from the financial booty of Jerusalem - there was a "liberal guilt" market for the anti-hero Jesus Gospels. Dr. Walsh, in her youtube talks, even has some presentations of her time in Rome visiting the coliseum and giving more details on its actual background.
So much of her Ph.D. is focused on Bourdieu's concept of habitus meaning a kind of subconscious cultural psychic economy of worker traits that a person embodies. Thus the literary training necessary to have written the New Testament would have required a literati class embedded in a culture of fellow writers, with the initial publication being in a "writing circle" of feedback. This meant that certain tropes were used for the Gospels - tropes already common to prominent literature at the time, as Dr. Walsh details. One of these tropes is anonymity of the authors of the Gospels - another trope is embedding eyewitness testimony as a secondary "critical distancing" device to establish credibility. Each Gospel then had a different cultural focus and intention.
Much of her book then is comparing the Gospels to other prominent Greek works of literature - and her most prominent and singular case study is the discovery of a satirical piece that closely mimics the Gospels. As she explained in her yt talks - she searched and searched and no one else had made this discovery of how closely this satirical work mirrored the Gospels. Satyrica is the title of this work and the focus of her chapter four.
Much of her book then is an argument by example and thus based on correlation. But it's a strongly argued work - and there's really no reason to question her claims. She goes into great detail for her claims and on the face of it - the claims make sense on their own terms. What makes the book unique is to just put the New Testament into the context of what she calls "imperial literature" and how the Gospels fit a niche of a growing "anti-hero" market.
For example in the letters of Paul, as I have blogged recently, the so-called "Christ's Hymn" is a four verse summary of the whole Gospel message as an anti-hero teaching. The Gospel of Thomas, as Dr. Robyn Walsh points out, actually also appears to be based on some of the earlier or "pre-Gospel" teachings of Jesus. So just as Paul was writing as part of the Stoic community - the earliest teachings of Christianity had more closer affinity to the Logos of Pre-Socratic teachings.
Did I study each work of her book? No - she seems to repeat or rephrase her claims and as her claims are not that radical, her evidence or examples do more than necessary to back her claims up. So I obviously missed some of the finer details - and as Dr. Walsh admits in her yt talks - this book was published several years ago now. She has been cranking out tons of articles each year since - or chapters in books, etc. Unfortunately most of these academic journals are fairly obscure and thus not easily read online unless you were at say some kind of bible college.
I just ordered a book from a new Ph.D. scholar who had reviewed Dr. Walsh's book (Daniel B. Glover) - I read a couple academic reviews of her book.
How does the model of the ya ad (‘community’) at Qumran figure into her analysis? Given that the Gospels are Jewish compositions, and each of them display at least some influence by apocalyptic Judaism, it is not unreasonable to look to the Qumran context for illumination of the evangelists’ compositional practices, as well as their relation of literary, social, and religious contexts. Second, given the radical nature of authorial freedom in Walsh’s model, I wondered why the Synoptic evangelists were so conservative with their use of material. Were they simply imitating their sources, or were they, to some extent, also beholden to the historical tradition that they may (or, according to Walsh, may not) have personally investigated (cf. Luke 1:1–4)?
This scholar's book was published also by an academic press but only one library had his book - in my state. And I could not access that library via interlibrary loan. So I ordered the book directly from Baylor University Press and it is a hard-cover - so as an academic hard-cover book it was very expensive! But this fellow is a top expert and turns out he's having a new book published by Fortress Press out of Minneapolis - tied to Augsburg college, a bible school close to University of Minnesota. In fact Augsburg College library is where I discovered Peter Kingsley's Ph.D. thesis published by Oxford University Press in 1996.
My favorite part of her book is the chapter on the Logos of course. She compares different definitions and uses of the Logos. I had a section of my master's thesis called "Restoring the Lost Logos" and I have my own "noncommutative" nonlocal negentropy neidan understanding of the Logos.
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