Episode Details

They were written by GrecoRoman elites in the 2nd century, and Paul radically influenced their writing!?

Christians sitting in the pews have long had the idea that the Gospels were written by four individuals, at least of three of whom were Jews (Luke may not have been), and two of whom were part of Jesus’s inner circle (the other two got their information from an apostle). And those modern people in the pews read the Gospels as if they were written at the time that the events happened: as if those accounts were a transcript of a reporter on the TV news, telling us what happened earlier that day.

Scholars over the past couple centuries, on the other hand, have recognized that many people (authors; editors, copyists) were involved in putting together each of those Gospel accounts, and that the writing took place many decades after the events happened.

Today we talk to a scholar who is part of a growing awareness (consensus?) in the scholarly community that there was a much longer time-line and a greater degree of cultural separation between the events that happened and the authors that wrote them: that the Gospels were not written by blue-collar Jews in the first century, but instead by highly-educated GrecoRoman elites in the second century.  Our guest is Dr. Robyn Faith Walsh, and her book is The Origins of Early Christian Literature: Contextualizing the New Testament within Greco-Roman Literary Culture..

Questions that we put to her included:

• are the Gospel writers writing about real people that actually existed
• is Jesus a historical person
• are the Gospels a reliable source for everything Jesus said or did
• did Paul influence the writing of the Gospels
• why did Matthew and Luke not even hint at the idea of Jesus being the Logos (they use genealogies to root Jesus within 1^st c. Palestinian soil)
• the Calendar Inscription of Priene … re-purposed by Christians to refer to Jesus (“subversive biography”)
• the laity might have problems with your thesis, but what has been the response in the scholarly world
• what do you mean by “first century Paul” and “second century Paul”
• why was this failed Messiah and his movement so different from the many others at that time?

As always, tell us your own thoughts on this topic …

Find out more about Dr. Walsh and this book at her web-site.

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