Tag: robyn-walsh

Additions regarding mythicism and the Temple incident

I just finished revising several pages of the website in line with what I had to say in my last post about how a book by Robyn Faith Walsh overturned my picture of how the gospel authors created their compositions.

This was important because I want to make the strongest case possible for what really happened without relying on contested assumptions. Walsh (and other authors) have put in question the idea that the gospel writers were writing within and for particular communities of early Christians, relying on stories passed down in those communities. Rather, there is evidence the authors were addressing literate audiences, both Christian and non-Christian, and relying heavily on literary sources and tropes of the time.

The biggest change from this was on my page about the execution of Jesus. I deleted the passages about how the narrative of Jesus’ final days showed particular signs of oral transmission, an argument which I now regard as less convincing. I still think a story was handed down orally, but that Mark probably invented many of the memorable details.

While revising that page I also expanded the sections on Jesus’ cleansing of the Temple, adding new material that helped fill out what historical information I think we can take away from this story.

I made change to the page on Jesus as an Historical Person (formerly titled Jesus in History) as well, moving my objections to mythicism–arguments that Jesus was purely mythological and not a real person–to the beginning and clarified some of my points. I did this because mythicism seems to have a large following these days and I wanted to address it up front.

That’s it for the revising, now I can return to my draft of the next page for the site. This one is about the ideas Jesus’ disciples drew from in order to make sense of his death and the “appearances” of Jesus that followed his death. I look forward to sharing it with you.

As always, you can make comments on this blog post regarding the changes I outlined above.

My picture of how the gospel authors worked has been overturned

I just finished reading a book by Robyn Faith Walsh, The Origins of Early Christian Literature, and it has overturned one of my key assumptions about the gospels: that they are to some meaningful extent based on oral traditions about the historical Jesus. This suddenly brought me back to where my thinking was about 15 years ago when I last delved into recent works on the historical Jesus: that it is impossible with the materials at hand to say much of anything about Jesus as a real person. We only have evidence for him as a figure in literary works.

At that time the field of gospel studies was showing multiple parallels between the incidents depicted in the gospels and earlier Jewish and Greco-Roman texts, demonstrating at least that the gospel authors borrowed liberally from other textual sources to compose their works. At that point I decided that Jesus as an inspirational figure, whether as real as Mohandas Gandhi or as fictional as Sherlock Holmes, was sufficient for the purpose of living my life.

But I must not have fully absorbed the implications of that, as I still held unto the idea that the gospel writers probably used some oral sources about the real Jesus. They shaped them to fit their purposes and inserted them creatively into their narratives and we can’t easily recover them, yes, but we can make some important educated guesses, can’t we?

I am not sure. What Walsh offered me was a different account of how the literary borrowing worked, based on what we (she, not so much me) know about the production of other literary works at the time. In the “bios,” or lives of notable people, authors usually drew from other written sources and utilized familiar tropes. It was from a video of Walsh speaking about this that I first became aware of the empty tomb trope that I reference in my page on the resurrection.

After reading her book I now have in my mind a different picture of how the gospel authors worked than the one I had long held and been unable to shed. Rather than working within Christian communities to gather and rework oral traditions to advance theological agendas, they read other texts and addressed a wider literate audience not only to advance a theological agenda but to challenge prevailing norms, satisfy curiosity about other cultures, and even to entertain.

The upshot for me is that I want to go back over my writing on this site to date, especially the pages on Jesus and History and the Execution of Jesus, and be even more cautious about my assessments of the likelihood that particular events happened. I have been unsatisfied with my use of the term “near certain” anyway, because even though I tried to qualify it the term still seemed to suggest some degree of unassailability to my conclusions. So I will replace that term with “very likely” in my rewrites.

To my relief, in a video interview released just yesterday Walsh did say she believes at least one fact about the historical Jesus: that he was crucified. So something can be said. I do think we can go beyond that, even if not as far as I hoped. It will be interesting for me to try to sort that out with this new picture in my head.

A final word here that may clarify what I am up to. A friend mentioned to me his (not uncommon) view that accepting the core claims about Jesus is important as a matter of religious faith and not on the basis of tenuous historical findings. I can accept that view, but I am not exploring this topic as part of a search for something to believe in. In large part I am motivated by the hope that both believers and skeptics of Christian claims could at least agree on some points of what Jesus was about, given how our culture is currently riven in large part by efforts to claim the sanction of Jesus for political agendas. The other part of my motivation is my desire to see if my own spiritual orientation–which I have no desire to change, although I am open to it–can fit within Christianity, at least insofar as I understand that term.

As always, my thanks to those of you engaging with what I write here.

Alan