Transcription
Robin Faith Walsh, thank you so much for joining me today.
It's my pleasure. Thanks for having me.
I think you wrote one of those books that all of us want to write when we are going through a PhD. And it's a book that is about the gospels, but it's not there's not that much about the go. Okay, it's it's about it's a lot about the gospels, but a lot of the the content of the book isn't strictly about the gospels, right? But it's one of those books that is just I think completely paradigm shifting and wonderful and I'm really glad I read it.
Um, so I'm I've been struggling to like figure out how to frame this conversation because there's so much here and I don't want to lose people when we get into the depths of like German romanticism. Um, but I thought maybe we could start as you do in the book with some of the myths that we tell about the field because I think what you do is explore this really fascinating sort of intersection of where the myths about Christian origins came into contact with the school of people obsessed with looking for myths and obsessed with reading myths. Um, so those two things are like the two things we need to cover in depth today. But could we maybe start with like some of the mythology around Christian origins? And like what does it mean that we, as a discipline, biblical scholars have so often just believed the myths of Christian origins kind of uncritically?
Well, you know, actually I it's interesting. I I'm not sure it was uncritical. It was just the the starting point from the questions were so embedded in the questions that people felt were necessary to ask at the time. So I know that sounds vague, but uh one thing that comes to mind for me is that we all every group wants to tell narratives and tell stories about where they came from and um why they are significant, what makes them different. Um, you know, give themselves kind of a storied history. I mean, it's kind of why I think people like the what is it like 23 and me or like ancestry. You know, like um it literally doesn't matter like who my great great great great grandparents were um because like they would be strangers to me, right? But we still kind of look these things up. And I use it as a justification for being a Red Sox fan um, you know, because I have like this Boston family that's been going to Fenway since it was built. Um, so we all do it, right? And so the thing that I started to look at with the Christian origins idea was the first the first of all is like Christian origins. Even the idea of trying to find origins is in itself a really interesting um process and instinct and desire because that's a choice and it's a social choice. We don't have to know these things and it doesn't have to be our starting point. But it always seems that if we can identify an origin or trace something back um as far as we can go, it gives it a certain authority that then we're able to trade off of to make certain kinds of claims back to like who we are and justifying perspectives. And in the case of things like religion, it is a very us or, you know, moral claims and um justifications. So I wanted to look at that and, you know, it really struck me. Um, I I think one thing that's significant, I've actually been working on this for my next book um is I recognized that I was at a point in time in the field where I could see around me these things were naturalized. Of course Christian origins um of course XY we could talk we can untangle some of those things which I try to like of course there were Christian communities. Um, of course Paul founded his churches, right? Like there were all these claims being made. Of course you translate a certain word this way and not the other way in Greek. But you I I was coming from um I was the first person in my family to go to a four-year college. Um, you know, my parents eventually got advanced degrees but they did it, you know, the slow my dad did it through the GI bill. You know, they did it the the slow way. Um, I was raised uh Catholic, but I was a very very bad Catholic. St. Like I I have my parents found my old workbooks in the basement and I was drawing mustaches on Mary and like I was clearly had no idea what was going on.
The worst Catholic.
I was the wor I was the wor I was quite bad. Um, and and not because I wasn't like a good kid or didn't mean well, but like I also was like a feminist without knowing I was a feminist at the time being like, why can't I be pope? You know, like I I didn't get any of it. And um, so when I went to college, I didn't go to study religion. I thought I was going to be a physician um because that's the area my family is in. And um I started studying Greek. I think I told myself it would help with the MCAT, you know, and then long story short, like here I am. I started studying this stuff and I couldn't let it go. It was just so interesting. Um, but I do like the ancient world as a whole as you point out. I don't just look at the Bible. I really look at it in context of the ancient Mediterranean. Um, but I I couldn't figure out like I I would take classes and I could tell that the professors, especially um when I was at Harvard Divinity School, they were starting from a starting point that had all kinds of presumptions that I did not hold any of those presumptions. I did not understand why it was faith versus works when I looked at the Greek, for example. I didn't understand why certain passages had to be interpolated out of Paul because clearly Paul would never say this until I started to realize, oh, you're making Paul look like Martin Luther, right? Like I had to figure these things out along the way. And that's what drew me to trying to trace the field back. We all have to do it in field. You have to read previous scholarship and you're supposed to understand different trajectories for how different methodologies develop in the field and where they come from. Um, but I don't know that we always go all the way back. And I could tell that part of that was also um an acclamation or expectation within the field itself. Like you want an A in class. So if your teacher tells you this is interpolated, you figure out you repeat that it's interpolated. And I I had I guess back to drawing mustaches on Mary, I had a resistance to that. It didn't it didn't seem um self-evident to me to do any of things. Um, and so that's when I really started trying to look at where do these ideas come from? And so, um, we could talk more about German romanticism, but I started to realize how much perspectives on Christian origins and making certain claims about the antiquity of, um, not just Christianity itself, obviously, it's an ancient thing, but certain perspectives or interpretations or passages or ideas could be traced back and and therefore be authorized in a certain way. Uh, understanding how that was all wrapped up with conservatism in Germany. And then, you know, uh, what happens in the 20th century, all that was very to me.
Yeah. So okay, here's a really good, I think you use a really good example in the book. Um, you talk about Hero Paul, which I think is like one of our most important kind of founding myths that often we carry forward. Could you talk a little bit about who Hero Paul is, how we see him and like even what like in Paul's letters if you actually read them closely, what you actually see?
You see a guy who's not doing very well.
Yeah. You know, I went I went to grad school to study Paul. Um, the reason I did the Gospels actually was because everybody around me like there, you've probably noticed like in the field there'll be like waves of like everybody does one thing. Like right now it's book culture. Everybody's doing book culture.
Yeah, that's true.
And like, but when I was coming up was like everybody was doing Paul and I was like, Pratz, you know, like that's what I came here to do. Um, but then I had been doing some work on Mark and so I sort of I shift tracks. Um, but so with Paul, when you read his letters um, you know, he's trying to be really strategic. He's trying to um insert himself in a particular way with authority because he's obviously trying to claim a certain authority through his, I mean, let's just call them what they were, like divination practices. He's seeing the risen Christ. Um, so he but he didn't know him. He didn't know Jesus. So he's um trying to like feel out a way to give himself that authority, but like at heart, this guy is a Pharisee, which means he interprets scripture for a living and he's brilliant at it. He's really, really good, but he's also clearly been educated at his, what we would call middle Platonist. He knows his philosophy and so he's um and I think it's natural to him. Like I don't think he's trying to like appeal to Gentiles. I think he's just educated in the diaspora and he can read through the Septuagint a way to reimagine the significance of Christ relative to all these Stoic ideas and other things that he um has in mind. Now, this is at a period of time in the first century during the empire, second century, when people are really interested in these kinds of interpretations. They're interested in Judean stuff. Um, you know, even the Jewish holy books are considered very, very ancient and important to non-Jews um and to the Romans. And then um I I think Paul is able to, you know, use this kind of skill of interpretation to bring these things together. But these groups he's talking to, you know, we have this idea, I call it the early Christian big bang at various points. Like we have this idea that Paul like says, you're the Corinthians and boom, they're the Corinthians and it's his Corinthian church. But but when you read it, they're like, there's a guy who's like shacking up with his mother-in-law and they clearly think because Paul said that they're going to have pneumatic bodies and they're already spiritual bodies and they're already sharing in it, that that means they could do whatever they want because they're they got a free pass. They already have the free pass, so they're good. So they're going to the brothel and he's like, "No, no, no, no, no." You know?
It's like the Maury Povich of the ancient world.
It's really kind of cool. I love Corinthians for that first and second Corinthians for that reason.
Yeah. Um, but then even like a group where he's like kind of cool, like Galatians. Um, like he also is like, "I hear you're circumcising. I hope the knife slips." Like they're not getting along. He keeps talking about super apostles and opponents. Like there are other people doing the same thing he's doing. Maybe with not like the bona fides of like I'm a Pharisee and, you know, super educated and you can hobnob with me and feel like you're in a college seminar. Um, you know, maybe not on the same level, but other people are all like, you know, I I sometimes use influencer culture as an analogy because it works these days with my students, but he's an influencer. Like he's doing there's a lot of people doing the same thing, but it doesn't always work, you know? And so the idea that he founded these cohesive communities that then spread out throughout the ancient Mediterranean and, you know, eventually result in the triumph of Christianity, it doesn't work um when you actually read the letters. But what something like Acts of the Apostles does um or the way that he's canonized later on, it creates this hero figure where he is that founding father, um, you know, of the religion. You even get ideas of like, you know, he was a Christian, you know, anachronistically. He was never a Christian. That word didn't exist. Uh, he thought the world was ending. He was not worried about, you know, group dynamics in the sense of like institutionalization. He thought there was going to be a great conflagration, like Christ was going to come down with a heavenly army, you know, and like he thought the world was ending. So um, you get later with the Pastorals and everything like you get an idealization. You get that with Acts of the Apostles because you had to go back and create a world in which he was that founding figure. And so that's why I call him Hero Paul.
And Hero Paul.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And then yeah, you're already kind of referring to like that veneer, the big bang, that later veneer of the Pastorals and Acts of the Apostles. And we get this nice little tidying up of the tradition to turn it into sort of a coherent like mythology, I guess you would say. But one of the other things that it does is it helps us see Christianity as something totally unique. It helps us see this as like unprecedented. There was nothing else like it. There are no comparables because it came from God. Could you talk a little bit about that maybe?
Sure. You know, I I meditate on this a lot because um we do have this idea that it is like you say unique um that these narratives were unique and it was something about that specialness and that uniqueness that struck people and grabbed people and then very quickly you move to language like conversion, right? Um, and it feels like a wholesale turning where um people just like heard this narrative and it was inspirational or grabbed them and so therefore they changed their whole lives and uh understood it as like capital T truth. Uh, and that's kind of a broad stroke, but that's essentially the the the idea. Um, but what starts to undermine that is when you look at other narratives from the same time period or you start to um sort of atomize something like the Gospels into, you know, we spend a lot of time us today, we have a different idea of what fact is um or what truth, again, capital T truth is. Um, you know, we we can't in theory publish something without fact-checking and footnotes and you're not allowed to plagiarize and like we have all these standards today um, a framework for reporting something or for telling a story. Those were not the same operative um fundamentals in antiquity for any kind of literature, right? Um, or storytelling necessarily. There were a lot of reasons for this. You know, people weren't as connected as they are today. There weren't it wasn't as easy to fact-check things. Um, people weren't as worried about specific details, right? And we also tend to treat the Gospels um as reporting instead of literature.
And so uh one thing I talk about often because it's pretty vivid and I think helps illustrate it is the empty tomb. Like Paul tells us that he has he tells us so little about the historical Jesus that when he actually does say something, you're sort of like, you know, you assume he heard it from like Peter, right? Like you, we could talk more about why that is. Um, but he says Jesus was buried, which is exactly what you would expect from someone who's crucified. Um, but we get the empty tomb story in the Gospels. But like the idea of the body disappearing, the physical body appearing into some kind of apotheosis that was so common in antiquity. It was so common and like even empty tomb stories are so common. I don't think anybody in antiquity or would run into that part of the Gospels and be like, I don't know. You know, like it it would have been like, oh, I know what this the symbolism means. You know, you're kind of riding a wave of these signposts in literature and antiquity. Uh, and these writers are also trying to make their story understandable and palatable and comparative. Uh, so just little things like that when you start to look at the broader ancient Mediterranean, especially during the empire, you start to realize the Gospels fit well, not just the Gospels, but Paul, the Gospels, what we call the New Testament and early Christianity fits very coherently um within a set of practices. You know, we use the term religion um, but it eventually but into a set of associations. I know you worked with John Clappenburg, so that word is um, you know, very uh has a lot of meaning behind it, but um, it's sensible. It's very sensible. It's a narrative that would have appealed for a lot of different reasons to a lot of different people and um, the practices themselves fit again, very coherently within the ancient world. Um, what people make of it later on. Now, that's a different story because you know, once we get into second to fourth century, things kind of kind of changed. But that's the case with everything, right? Like um, but for Christian origins, yeah, Christianity was like what we call Christianity was like new on the scene, but it wasn't exactly different. It's funny. Like I was I was definitely raised with with this sort of story that one of the reasons we know this is true is because there's nothing else like it. And I think when I was so surprised to to read the church fathers and realize like they knew there was other stuff like it out there. So much time like they spent a lot of time trying to say why why Christianity was unique. And is it I think it's Justin Martyr who starts talking about like how it's demons that came in and like put these stories into Greco-Roman culture. I interviewed Richard C. Miller as well and I can link to that for people watching. So he started showing he showed me a ton and I read his book about all of the many many comparable comparable features.
So >> yeah, so we have these we have these myths, we have this kind of story that, you know, is becoming a unified whole in the second to fourth centuries. Let's jump to the modern relatively modern world to the German romantic period. Um, because on my bingo card for this year, I did not have the fact that the Brothers Grimm fairy tales would give me a new insight into the reading of the New Testament. Um, you know, when I was a kid, it was like those, you know, you get the Brothers Grimm fairy tales. I hope people like watching and listening know exactly what we're talking about. Um, but you know, the famous ones like Cinderella, like stories like that, Robin Hood or sorry, not Robin, Little Red Riding Hood. Um, and like you'd read these as a kid and you might either get like the kind of condensed sanitized versions, but every now and then you'd come across a really old version.
Yeah. Like my grandma had one, you know, from when she was a girl and it was like really like disturbing. But um, the Brothers Grimm in Germany, part of the German romantic period, start start to study fairy tales. And this is where your your work goes and kind of gives us some really interesting insights into how biblical studies evolved. It's the way that we read these stories of early Christianity. Could you talk about that a little?
Yeah, sure. So, it goes back to this origins idea again um where especially, you know, you it was an education for me too, working a little bit um on this portion. I can tell you why I went with the Brothers Grimm too. There's another story there. Um, but, you know, figuring out how like Germany becomes unified around this period. It was kind of like a bunch of little, I think I use the term statelets in the book, but it was like little kingdoms that like kind of come together and sort of like talking about when the New Testament starts to come together as a canon, like once you start to compile sort of disparate texts and figures and peoples together, there is this search for a unified narrative, right? But the problem was um when the Germans who are now like the newly newly found Germans, uh look back into like antiquity into history, there are two cultures that dominate, the Greeks and the Romans, right? Like they do, and the Egyptians. But the Greeks and the Romans for like continental Europe and nobody else is like is writing anything apparently. Like nothing is really preserved. You might find out about like, you know, some wars Rome had with Germania and like some like, you know, uh there are some warriors with like there's like something Verix or I can't remember his name. You might remember, but like
No, I don't remember.
Long names I can't, you know, remember. Um, so they they would have like little touchstones maybe with like a figure or two, but of course, like it's a Roman story that they're getting handed down. So what happens to the German people in that Roman story?
You know?
Yeah. Of course. Yeah. Right. So what you start to see around the same time um in the field, people are looking at Christian origins. Now, back then, you didn't really have disciplines in the academy the same way we do now. So you could be somebody who like studies Christian origins and reads the New Testament, but you also sort of dabble in like fairy tales, right? Or you're also sort of working on um, you know, like Aramaic too. Like you could just kind of do whatever you wanted. Um, there wasn't like a set kind of like this is your discipline and here here are the parameters of it. And so um, you see kind of two things start outside the academy but also kind of adjacent. You had people start to like make up texts like, oh, look at I found a long-lost German author of the first century. Like here's this beautiful epic poem, just like Homer. Like people would magically find texts that would eventually people would figure out, you know, were forged. But the other thing you start to see um is kind of like this search for a national identity through these texts. And so one thing that starts to happen within the academy broadly speaking is this search for the oral stories of the people that didn't write the things down. So for the Germans, the oral stories, and that should sound familiar. Um, we can talk about oral tradition theory for the Bible too if we want to. But there starts to become this methodology or this approach of looking for oral stories because if we don't have the written stories, if we don't have our version of Homer and we've proven that this one that was found is fake, maybe we have oral stories. So what the Brothers Grimm as an example start to do is they claim they're just collating collecting the oral stories of the German people. And there's a different kind of point of emphasis. It's not about like the built environment, the way that Greece and Rome tend to emphasize, you know, like turning stone into marble and like the grandeur of like technology and building structures and everything for those cultures and philosophy and so forth. It's natural springs and the forests and nature and witches and wolves and, you know, rando princesses and like those kinds of stories. Um, so like more people of the land and like folk tales, like literally folk meaning the people, folk tales. Um, the reason I went with the Brothers Grimm is pretty much everybody's heard of them.
Yeah.
Um, my editor at Cambridge who published the book told me that they were her great uncles. So they actually weren't originally in the first draft of the book. And I was like, "Oh, really?" Like, "Let let me put in a little section." So I put that in for her.
Wait, the Brothers Grimm were her great uncles?
Yeah, they were related to her somehow.
Wow.
And so that's why I was like, this is fantastic, you know?
Yeah, that's cool. So, it's a nod to her. But then when I started to research it, I realized that
Um, like their methods were, I mean, like I should be careful because I it's going to make them sound bad, but they weren't doing anything that like an academic wasn't like this was normal for their time period, but like they weren't going out in the field and like formally taking statements from like, you know, the little old woman in the shoe. They were um, like they were like talking to their girlfriends. Like have you ever heard a story like the cleaning woman would show up and they'd be like, "Hey."
Um.
You weren't interviewing Little Red Riding Hood.
They weren't. And like if they wrote a story and someone like an academic like said, "Hey, this is BS." They would like they were really good at writing nasty letters and they would like write really mean letters to people and like shame them to like stop bad mouthing. Like it's really interesting that they are
Hilarious.
Yeah, that's fun.
Um, yeah, so like just looking at the messiness again, it's not just about them. I'm actually like, you know, they should be studied on their own just for like how interesting their methodologies were. And I'm not saying that the stories they collected were not like well done. You know what I'm saying? But like
This idea that like these are the fairy tales of the German people. There was a moment when that was super important um politically, nationally. Um, and, you know, again, at the same time, the people are like, we're going to find the oral traditions of the Christians. There's a for me, there was a lot there like, oh, every like it treats Christianity like a nation um to use the same methods and like that seems to be what everybody in Europe was doing at the time. Like Shakespeare's the spokesperson for England, you know, like the fairy tales become like the thing for the Germans like everybody kind of develops their own national identity that goes back to to an idea of art.
And with that, you talk about the way that authors are viewed not as kind of creative agents in their own right or but much more as like people who compile these kind of stories and bring them together and like almost representative of a community, just like like formalizing things that everybody knows. And that does that does that make sense?
Yeah. They're like spokespersons or like a filter, you know? It's almost like they don't matter. Like they just happen to be the person recording the community's perspective or the shared stories, uh, you know, the oral storytelling. But that's not what you have when you look at the Gospels. It's just not. I mean, I I don't deny that there could be some elements of like, you know, oral storytelling present in the Gospels. It's not that. I'm not trying to do an either/or, but um, we talked about the empty tomb as one example. That is a literary feature.
Of ancient writing.
Um, there are other elements of the Gospels. I mean, like they follow more or less um, the structure of an ancient biography at a time when these were being produced. Um, you know, they're very concerned with hitting certain notes of using um, you know, for example, Greek and Roman philosophy in a very certain way. Um, so they are very much of their time period. And then I happened to notice over time that scholarship on like the Mark and community, Matthean community, and so forth, every single one was different because they were trying to mirror read different choices that the gospel writers were making as like, oh, well, you know, Matthew has harsh words against uh the synagogue. Therefore, the Christian community is excommunicated from the synagogue and that's why they wrote this story and include it. But it was never the same. It was never consistent. There was kind of a sloppy methodology there in my mind of like, you know, it's like how I would read at that time in my 20s, like, you know, emails from an ex, right? Like you would try to figure out like, you know, this is what they really mean.
What are they not saying here?
Yeah.
Exactly. Uh, and know he's he's really thinking that like, so it was just kind of it kind of had that vibe to me. Um, and it didn't make sense when you looked at like Greek and Roman literature. And the fact that what I find so interesting is that you have with the synoptic Gospels like three authors writing the same story in three different ways, like authors do. You know what I mean? Like
But we were spending so much time on like the community and the oral tradition and all these things that were so like characteristic of this 19th century model.
Yeah. That was there mostly because again, those were the questions people thought they needed to ask at that time because those were the questions everybody was asking um and it just didn't seem logical to me that that was the starting point. So you mentioned this this author called, it's it's Schwegler, right? Who um, so he comes up with the idea, kind of building on this stuff that I guess was in the air in German romanticism to say that really what we need to do is study language and and literature in order to see the community behind it. And what we get um, I'm I'm repeating a little bit, but I just want to make sure me and the audience gets this too. So essentially like what
You can remind me too. I wrote this book a few years ago. There you go. Maybe I read it more recently. Um, but yeah, essentially what you get then is when you're studying, let's say, the synoptics, you're studying three different gospel authors with slight discrepancies in how they tell their stories. Therefore, using this kind of methodology, you're actually studying three different communities. And one maybe Matthew's community is a little more Jewish and Luke's community might be more Gentile and like
And this kind of this kind of model, not only was like a way to read the Gospels, it just became kind of a given in Christian origins, I think, is that right? Like the communities model is very common. Can you talk about that a little bit?
Sure. I mean, as it relates to the romanticism piece, just to kind of
Make that connection. Like this was a time too, like the word community itself was a word that was being used for, you know, and again, folk, like for the people, right? Um, folk tales. Um, so it was very much treating um by treating each one of these texts as a community, it was doing a couple of things. One is justifying the methodology we just talked about. Um, and so you could have a discrete community of folk, Christian folk that you could then talk about. Back to Christian origins. If you just have these texts, you have Paul who's not doing very well, right? We don't even know what happens to him. And he has sort of like amorphously formed communities and he's even writing to communities like the Romans that he's never even met, right? So that's like not even his. Um, and so like this idea of his community is already sort of fraught. It's problematic. Then you have these Gospels that pop up and if they're just written by authors who are sort of experimenting with the subject matter and we can talk about why that might have been um, that's not helpful for Christian origins because like where are the people? Because so far in the first century, you just have kind of like poorly formed, like, but by the way, like social development, like that's social formations, that's normal. It takes some time, you know, to but you want it to be more like
Big bang.
Bang bang, you know?
And you wanted
It just happens and then like half of Jerusalem's converted by the end of chapter six or, you know, the other thing I started to see happening too was like it always was so strange to me like
Sorry, this is a side note, but like a New Testament textbook, right? Where does it start? The Gospels.
But the Gospels are that's not how this started. It started with Paul. So we already create that mythology of formation and origins by starting with Gospels that are dated like late first century, if you're lucky. Some people date them to the second. Now.
Yeah.
And we treat that like a history to then as our starting point when the starting point is Paul.
Yeah.
For for all intents and purposes for like our extant evidence.
And so then if you start with the Gospels, who were the first converts to the Jewish movement? The poor around Galilee, you know, like the downtrodden in and Judea. And so I think there was an idea too, well, the gospel writers had to be part of a community and recording the oral tradition because the earliest followers of Jesus are not elite Romans according to Paul's letters, though they kind of are. That's a lousy story. Like, you know, we don't want this to be like some kind of bougie influencer religion. It's got to be like it's gotta because he's not writing to poor people um to like sponsor his trip to Rome in Spain. Like he's writing to people of means. Um, anyway, like it has to be the starting point has to be what that story told us, right? And so of course the Gospels can't be just from like a literate coin writer of the late first century. It has to be the Christian communities that were the illiterate downtrodden masses. So the whole method reified um a story we were telling ourselves about canonization and and structure.
And in that, the miracle is also kind of it also reifies the miracle by like these illiterate people produced this mass movement. Like what else could this be other than God?
Yeah. And they preserved all these oral stories. And, you know, we even had um like something like the Jesus Seminar in the 20th century where it was like, we're going to vote on which are the literal words of Jesus. Never mind he spoke it spoke Aramaic and these are in Greek. What like whatever um, you know, but like there's a certain theater to all of that that's really interesting to me too. And so again, it wasn't like a
I actually now forgot your original question, but it wasn't like a a pessimism on my part as much as a, wait a minute, you know, like I I don't get it. I I don't get how we how we are um reifying this particular methodology. What was the original question though?
Uh, no, I forget too, but I think it was I forget. I think it was about communities, but that's why there you go. Yeah. So I And the other thing it does too, by the way, is make Christianity bigger, right? Yeah. So um, it makes like if every text is a community and this includes not just the canonical text, but non-canonical texts as well. If every text can be a community, that's a lot of early Christian diversity um at a time when what's going on it in Europe, Protestantism,
Right?
Yeah. Right.
Um, you know, so like they look just like us. Um, and and so it really mapped on to um again, something that seemed very sensible, very naturalized uh at its moment, but I don't think works for the ancient Mediterranean world. So, well,
This is a sidebar that was a little painful for me as I was reading it because like I am definitely like I do talk about early Christian diversity or I talk about early Christianities sometimes and it's like I think what you would say, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think what we're actually getting is diversity of literature, not so much diversity of social groups, right? Maybe those literature do come from diverse social groups, but we don't really know.
Yeah, the book I'm working on right now has a whole chapter on that and it's been really interesting because I get so it'll be fun because I'm getting a little bit of pushback on this because I think the the language of early Christian diversity, it's very well-meaning.
And can be very helpful and especially um at a time when I think it's important and has been the case for a couple of generations of scholarship now to not talk in terms of orthodoxy and heresy. Right? Was always kind of the idea like there's the Gnostic stuff and that's heretical and then there's the canon and I think that started to break down in the late 20th century, especially as a result in part of finding Nag Hammadi and and other things. Um, and so it's well-meaning uh because it's like inclusive and diversity is a good word and, you know, like all, but I again, historically uh I have some
Well, it's just the same methodology, right? It relies on the same methodology.
Yeah.
Yeah. I think I think we're making a mistake there. Um, and so I'm working on that right now.
That's interesting. Well, I'm excited to see where where this goes because there's there's a lot there. That's cool.
Um, well, we should talk about what we actually do have, which is not diverse Christian communities, but diverse authors, or should I just say an author author's network is the one thing as you say, that's the one thing we actually do have behind the Gospels are networks of authors. We can see similar networks of authors in antiquity. Um, but nobody really ever talks about that. Can you talk a little bit about the author networks that may have created the Gospels?
Well, one thing I tried to look at was basically what do I know about um how people wrote in antiquity. Um, because I would see a lot of this discussion about like, well, the community that's obviously there and so forth, like everything that we've been talking about. Um, but I wouldn't see a lot of conversation uh that was happening in classics about like, what did it take to publish something? Maybe this is actually um thinking about this for the first time, but maybe this is coming from Pauline studies, as I did, like there's a lot of um scholarship and discourse and Pauline studies about like, how can you tell he's gone through the prolegomena, like how can you tell his education level um, you know, his rhetoric, like there's a lot of studies on his rhetorical strategies in his letter and his letter writing structure um, and so then this shows that he had this kind of particular education or I studied Philo too um, because he's one of our only other middle Platonists and, you know, obviously he's interpreting the Septuagint similarly um, he's a better writer um, you know, he's far more educated, far more than Paul would have been, but um, those kind of comparisons, right? To to look at um, how can we situate socially, economically, but also culturally these figures? So it's work that had been done for Paul and his letter writing um, but not really work that had been I thought sufficiently done for the gospel writers. So like, what does it actually take to produce a book? Um, and how did people do this? And so I said in the book that I wanted to move away from the idea of the community of oral tradition of the assumed religious context being the most formative. Again, not saying there weren't these things. I'm not I don't know why you would write a gospel if you weren't part
Yeah. Right.
Of an ecclesia, right? Like I'm not saying these are randos. In theory, they could be, but I don't think that that makes a lot of sense. So I'm not saying that there's not an ecclesia, a church that they're a part of. I'm not saying that there isn't an oral tradition that they're recording. There very well could be. I don't know how to find it, but someone else can do that. Um, I don't have to do everything. So I assume that there is like an oral tradition there, too.
Fine. Fine. Like that. That's all fine. But I wanted to really look at like concretely what did it take to commit this thing to paper um or commit this thing to writing um and how would people have done this? And so I just say that the most formative network, social network for these writers were other writers. And some of them were not Christian because they were going these guys have gone to school. They may not be the greatest writers in the world when you compare them to like someone writing in Attic Greek. They're writing in Koine, a common Greek. When you spend time if you study Greek, like reading other writers and you come back to the Gospels, you're like, Gosh, like I can see why classicists don't love it.
Kind of snobby about it.
Yeah, but I get it. Like sometimes I get it and I have to like, you know, phone a friend and be like, remind me like why these are good um, I I'm sorry, it is a snobby thing, but when you read other Greek writers, these
They're not the best.
Even Philo and Josephus, like we have much better Jewish writers, even.
Oh God. I mean, like and like Paul's not too bad. Like Paul's okay.
Yeah.
Um, Luke's, they they lack a little, they lack flair, you know. Um, but I've been working on this too because I think it also is an interesting moment in Greek writing, by the way, like in the first century, second century, where we do get snobby about it, but it was just kind of a more accessible, like workaday, like like the analogy I've been making with some people lately is like Hemingway.
Yeah. Like nobody says Hemingway is an idiot. He's hanging out with James Joyce, you know, like he was doing something different. It was a different kind of moment, right?
Um, so they're still good writers. They've still been educated. They have still gone to school. I can tell they read Homer, right? Because that's what you do when you go to school. Like we all have to read Shakespeare at some point in high school. Like everybody has to read this stuff. Like that's how their work exercises would have been. And they would have studied new comedy. They would have understood character structure. They would have understood like character types and stock characters and like how to write dialogue. And they've probably read some philosophy. So they've been reading the Pythagoreans and Platonist texts and they know the words. They're using technical terminology. They know how to pass on lists of teachings from, you know, um, philosophical leaders. They've been reading the Septuagint for sure, you know, like I can tell everything that they've been looking at. Not everything, but I can tell like a basic idea of how they've been educated and what they've been looking at and how they've metabolized that into this writing. And the way that people wrote in these social networks was to read all these kinds of writings in their schooling or on the side, you know, however they they want to do it. And then you would exchange. I mean, there are no copy machines, there's no printing press. Like if you want to share this, you copy out portions or the whole of your writing at great expense, by the way, um, to share with people to publish to circulate within a certain network of or you read it out loud um to get feedback and then you make some edits and then maybe your buddy reads your version and says it stinks and then he writes his version. Um, and like you just kind of have these networks of literate people sending these things around and sharing them. Um, and so that was a very different model than our Christian big bang, you know, so forth model of like more elite educated writers, you know, in the aftermath of the Jewish war at a time when the Jesus movement has been around for a few generations, at a time when it becomes clear that uh Jesus isn't coming back anytime soon, um starting to write a biography of Jesus when previous to this, at least according to Paul, nobody really cared about the historical Jesus. I hate to say it that way, but like that's not that wasn't the discourse. The discourse was about Christ and the significance of Christ and, you know, uh this was predicted and, you know, etcetera, you know, but the fall of the temple then precipitates like a whole different, yeah,
Approach.
Yeah. I was reading uh I I forget who it was. It was like an older book on the Gospels, but it was um an explanation of like why we get things like the infancy Gospels. And it was basically the explanation was like people had heard about Jesus and they had some questions like, what was he like when he was young? But like this author didn't make the next step.
To be like, wouldn't the Gospels be in response to the same thing to somebody being like, "What was Jesus like?" "We don't really know." "Well, let me write a story about it." It almost sounds, it almost sounds like, for what you're saying, tell me if this is totally out to lunch, but like the Gospel writers could have sat in an upper room in Rome over the course of a week together and written the Gospels, and we, we wouldn't actually be any wiser. Is that a fair assessment?
Yeah, totally. I mean, like, that's the funny thing about it, right? Like, we always give, uh, like a decade in between, like Mark first and 70, which...
Right. Right.
Yeah. It turned 70, the temple fell, and he was like, "Let's get this thing on paper."
Yeah.
Yeah. Like Mark 13.
Yeah.
Um, and then like 10 years later, Matthew, 10 years later, Luke, like we create a ladder.
So that, and then you can be like, "Oh, but then oral tradition before that." And, you know, like, we create that scaffolding.
Um, yeah, it gets harder and harder to teach that every year.
I start to teach, and they just look at me like I don't get it. Well, and the dating is based, like, largely other than the temple stuff, but the dating is based on like the assumptions that if you have a community and they develop these new theologies, then we need like 20 years for, you know, then another 10 for John to develop. Where did that come from? You know, like, this is exactly what we're talking time for people to come up with this kind of stuff.
Yeah. Um, but like, in theory, yeah, these guys could have been like, "This could have been a homework assignment. They cheated," you know, for all we know.
They, Mark was in the middle and they were just...
Yeah. Yeah. It's like that Mr. Bean meme.
Um, yeah. Exactly.
Yeah. But, you know, we just don't know.
Um.
It's sort of feudal to guess.
Um.
But like, you point out something really, I think, valuable, which is like the fact that we so easily replicate...
70.
Yeah.
And then 80. And because it takes 10, what, you know, this is our own mythologizing within the fields of of these. I mean, it's not an completely unfounded crazy thing to say. I'm not saying that. But it's, it's that kind of thing again, coming from like, as an outsider to the field, looking at and like, "Why?" You know, like, you don't want to be a jerk, but what, um, we need to come up, I think, with alternative models. I'll say that.
Yeah, I think it would be helpful.
I feel something similar with, um, Brent reading Brent Nongre's stuff about dating papyri, and it's a lot of the same kind of stuff. I was like, "We just make these assumptions," and then the field gets built on assumptions built on assumptions built on assumptions. And you start to pull those apart, and it's like, "Holy crap, we could be wrong about all this stuff."
Yes, it's great. Yeah, it's fantastic.
And he has a great blog, too.
I want to ask about the Satiricon. Let's, let's take a, let's take a detour here because I, uh, you, you give several examples. I also like the last, if people are listening to this podcast like in order, the last one will be Helen Bond, and we also talked, I talked quite a bit with Helen about ancient biography and some of the examples. Um, but she, I don't think she talked about the Satiricon, and it's fascinating. I found the connection.
I'm the first one to have done it, um, because I, I remember reading it. I was at a classics library researching and, um, for a variety of different things, and I came upon it, "The Widow of Ephesus with three crucified men." And I, I continued to read and I was like, "Has nobody..."
Like, somebody, somebody noticed this?
Um, and I spent like an entire week like, "Somebody, somebody saw," like, "Got to find somebody who..."
You assume it's going to be a German from the 1870s or something.
100%. I assume it was the German or like, I was looking for, there's a scholar named P.G. Walsh. No relation. Um, but he tends to like, you know, he, I, he speculated that Apuleius may have known, like Christianity may be present in The Golden Ass, some reference to Christianity. So I was like searching for somebody. And so I, I think I'm the first one.
I don't, it's tropes. It's, I don't know what, but the the resemblance to the Gospels are a little uncanny for for somebody reading.
It is. So, it's a really interesting text. The Gits, I, I think attributed to a writer named Petronius, who was supposed to be in, um, sort of the, the sp under the sponsorship or in the network of Nero. Um, but that's one of these kind of like, the Gospel writer names being ass, like it's a later attribution. And there was a, there are a couple of articles in the Classical Quarterly from a great scholar I don't, um, know personally, but name, um, Yulrich Roth, who was pointing out that, um, the dating makes no sense, and that actually the Satiricon seems to be a collection of sort of almost like vignettes of stories, hence like, you know, satire, so different, you know, um, jokey stories. Some of them go back to what they call Ephesians tales. Some of them are are quite old, kind of replicating thematic things that people found entertaining. Um, but that it's probably second century, in part because there are some references within it, whoever wrote it, that make it pretty clear that they were aware of the letters that of Pliny. So whoever wrote this was probably actually more like in the network of Pliny and, uh, aware of his letters. Um, there are, for example, three enslaved persons that Pliny writes a letter of manumitting these three enslaved persons, and the same names in the same order appear in the Satiricon. So, um, you know, pretty convincing that this is not a first-century product of Nero. It's a second-century anonymous, anonymous text. Um, so however you date it, first-century Nero, second-century, either way, it's in the ballpark of early Christian textual production. And, um, there are several stories in it that have echoes, thematic echoes to the Gospels. So back to the idea that the Gospels are engaging in, um, you know, literary play, and that they're aware of their task beyond biography. So, um, one is that story, "The Widow of Ephesus," that I mentioned. And so in that story, a Roman guard, um, is looking over three crucified men, and he hears a woman weeping in a tomb. Um, he goes inside, and this woman's husband has died, and she's kind of locked herself in there with what they call her maid. So, a servant, um, mourning over his body. And so, um, he goes in there with her for three days and three nights. They order a bunch of food, they get some wine, like they Uber Eats it. Um, and, uh, they start hooking up. And so like by the end of three days and three nights, these two are an item. Um, when he leaves...
And her husband, it's her husband's grave, right? Or something?
Yeah, it's his.
Yeah.
Um, and so when they finally leave after three days, so like, long weekend, um, it turns out that the family of one of the crucified men came and stole his body off the cross. And the punishment, uh, for somebody deserting their post in the Roman guard was death. So he starts freaking out. So then they decide to take the body of her husband, who's been dead the right number of days, and put him up on the cross in in his place so the guy, so then they can run off together. Um, but there's just like, there's too many like thematically, right? You've got like the tomb, you've got three men crucified, the Roman soldier, blah, blah, you know, like, there, there's too many things. Um, so that was just one. Um, you have a figure, another story of a guy named Trimalchio. And if you haven't read like Trimalchio's story, and especially if you like ancient studies, go read it because it's hilarious. He's kind of like a new money figure. Um, he's like, like somebody who's won the lottery but like doesn't know what to do. Like, you know, he's, he's the equivalent of like somebody who blows like their lottery winnings on like all the wrong things. And like he tries to look like super sophisticated and like rich, but he gets everything a little bit wrong. Like his clothes are all a little bit wrong. He like tries to play like an elite game, and he gets it wrong. Like everything is a little bit wrong. He has a dinner party with a bunch of friends. He hears a crow. He understands that that means he's going to die. So he gives everybody his will and testament, which is that he wants them to eat his body after his death. Like, it's the Last Supper. Like, it's the same kind of theme.
Um.
Is that the one that there's a woman that anoints his feet? Or is that a separate?
I don't remember off the top.
Okay. Okay.
Um, but yeah, there's like the anointing. Anointing is another.
There's so much. Like, let's just give you those two.
Um, but yeah, there's so many. And so then, of course, you're left with that question, is the Satiricon aware of the Gospels?
Fun of it is, is that these are just like, back to "The Widow of Ephesus," like that story of like the ravenous widow, that that goes back a long way. Like it's not a one-to-one equivalency. Like it's an old story. Um, so, you know, there are echoes there as well. There's just so many. But it just shows you, like, the the literary overlap that takes place in the first and second century, that people are borrowing themes, employing them, you know, innovating off of them. Um, it's just super common.
I remember a story that I read from The Lives of the Caesars by Suetonius, and I used it for one of my videos, but it's about, um, oh gosh, I'm going to forget the Caesar again. And I think it's maybe Tiberius who goes to, um, Alexandria and spits on a blind man's eyes, and the blind man is healed. And it's interesting, like, the first question people always ask is, "When was that? Was that later?" And, and yeah, it's like, you know, late first century, early second century. Okay. So like the Gospels were first. And it's interesting, we've already talked about how kind of tentative some of those Gospel dates are. Um, I like, one of the things that I find myself wondering as I read this is the direction of the relationship. If we push the Gospels into the second century, all of a sudden the Gospels could be, I think, pulling from some of this stuff, or maybe it does go the other way. Like, it's just a world where the Gospels are in dialogue with this stuff at at least. Is that, is that fair to say?
I agree with that. Because even if you look at, um, one thing that I've, I, uh, do some video sometimes for Bart Ehrman's, um, Biblical Studies Academy, and I just did a talk on Roman medicine this month. And so I was doing some research. Um, so Asclepius temples were kind of like hospitals in antiquity.
Um, this is not an exact one-to-one correlation. I'm just kind of making it easy.
So you could go to an Asclepius temple if you were ill and make a sacrifice and create a votive, um, to the deity. Sometimes Isis, um, had the same status, but you would sleep in the temple and hope for healing because you would get a dream of the deity healing you or something along those lines. But, um, one sort of underappreciated factor in all of this is that sometimes you would have, um, sort of testimonials that would be almost like billboards posted at these temples if someone had been healed. So sort of like, um, in Miami, if you drive down the highway, there's a lot of these like, "I got a million dollars from my from law firm," blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So it's a little bit, it's a little bit like that. Um, so I just pulled a few of them, and a lot of them, like, there was a woman who had been hemorrhaging, um, for X number of years, and she got to the Asclepius temple, and they healed her. Um, somebody who had a withered hand, and they went to this other temple, and they, you know, like, so it's not to say, like, chicken and egg, which one came first.
Yes. Yeah. Yeah.
But the idea that, you know, people were ill in antiquity, and it's not like some people had a different solution than another. Everybody was kind of seeking, you know, relief and and some form from deities, whether it's, you know, under a Christian context or another one. And so the Gospel writers, you know, picked, to my mind, they picked illnesses, for example. Um, the demonic stuff is, you know, the bad pneuma. Um, the unclean pneuma is a different thing. That also happened. Uh, and in Roman literature, all over the place. But with the illnesses, they were particularly illnesses that were difficult to heal. Um, that were not something that a midwife is going to fix, not something that, you know, you're going to have some kind of bizarre lizard-based concoction that is supposed to heal you, which, you know, like, those ancient medicine is very, very interesting. Um, some of their solutions. Um, but the, these were not things that would be easily cured. Leprosy, right? Um, and so the Gospels really went for things that would bring someone to the god, that would bring someone to a temple, um, in another context for healing. And they, they were ailments that, you know, many people face, especially later in life. We have to remember life expectancy is like 20. If you made it through the childhood illnesses, uh, if you didn't, like, break a leg, um, or get like, like I've had strep throat where like, you know, "Get me a rock, you know, I'm going to end it."
Um, sorry.
You know, like, not to be too, but like, if I didn't have antibiotics, seriously, it would have been gone a long time.
We might all be. Yeah.
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I would have had like a sinus infection that did me in.
Um, so if you could make it to a certain, I mean, like most people's eyesight goes by, what, 40?
You know.
Um.
Most people start experiencing arthritis. If you've had a broken bone that doesn't heal proper, I mean, people, cancer exists, you know. Um, people have ailments and they don't always know, um, what they are exactly, but, you know, especially as people age, uh, or, you know, are suffering from chronic pain, they're going to look for relief. It's just natural.
Coming back to kind of where your, where your book ends, um, you call the Gospels subversive biography. Can you talk a little bit about what that means and how you kind of came up with that category?
Yeah. So that was, um, work I did with, uh, David Consent, who, um, just recently passed away. He was a wonderful classicist, um, at Brown, at NYU, um, at the end of his career. And, um, we would, I actually translated some of the Latin Greek novels with him. Um, so we would just have these, and he became like, I lived in his house when I wrote my dissertation. I lived in his basement, um, with, uh, his wife, um, and they were very, very generous and helpful. And so, um, we would talk about, you know, you still have to, even though there are genres in antiquity in the way that we think of genres. So we often will talk about something like ancient biography. We're putting that category on a set of stories that tell, usually, the cradle to grave, um, accounting of somebody's life, some, you know, hallowed figure of one kind or another, or important figure. So we put that label on it. It's not like in antiquity, they didn't know like what a paradoxical text was or what a biography was, but they weren't like bound to a genre. So put those categories. Um, but David and I would talk about, um, so the Gospels are are coming from somewhere, not just in terms of borrowing themes or borrowing stories from say Homer or whoever, um, that are out there. They also have to have a sense of like a trajectory of literature that they're engaging. And so back to the idea of biography, they seem to be more in, um, a developing category in the first and second centuries as well, um, where you had more stories of sort of underdogs, not just the Caesars. And so a good example is Aesop, right? Like back to fables, but, um, Aesop was a major figure, um, in antiquity as well, but he's, you know, like not very attractive, and he's getting by on his wits, and he's, um, kind of like, again, subversive. Like he's sort of, I'm trying to think of an equivalent, but he is that underdog figure that's still kind of a hero, but in reverse. Um, and so Alexander the Great, who was like the subject for everybody and kind of the default manly example and, um, everybody kind of brought everything back to Alexander the Great. Uh, there was something called the Alexander Romance that develops at the same time as some biographies of Alexander. So we talked about how there were two poles, and then this is reflected in that chapter, um, where you have on one side, like a life of Alexander where he is like the bravest, the strongest, the most handsome. He heals all of his friends because he learns potions. He can, like, there's like a horse nobody else can like tame, tames the horse and, um, like, yeah, he was a drunk and he murdered his best friend, but it was because he was so manly. Um, like he had to drink beer to cool himself down. He was just running so hot all the time because he was such a manly man, like, you know, really hero stuff. And then the Alexander Romance was more like he was kind of fugly, and he was just like more clever, and he would get by by like speaking almost like in parables, but like, you know, like tricking people. Um, and so you could just see that there's this kind of like, you have the Aesop, Alexander Romance on one hand, and then you have like these biographies on the other, and the Gospels kind of fit in this other category.
Yeah.
This is the underdog. You know, you never even know what he really looks like.
Um, but we know that like the predicted Messiah was not supposed to be a handsome man, you know, according to, um, tradition. Um, and so you, you have a guy getting by through his wonderworking, through his wits, um, and comes to an untimely end. I mean, Aesop is also killed. Um, you could even maybe put someone like Plato, even though it's earlier, kind of in that same like tragic anti-hero sort of.
And it's like the good, the good moral character that sort of shines through as well, right? It's like, even though Aesop isn't really physically very attractive, there's so much goodness in him. It just like comes through.
That's the idea. Like, it's his message, and it's his cleverness. That's what makes him attractive. Um, I, I say this with, you know, the acknowledgement that Peter Venman was like my first like childhood crush, but it's like, you know, Bill Murray versus like Chris Hemsworth, you know what I mean? Like, it's, it's, you know, you can find them both appealing, uh, in some way.
That's a heck of a contrast. I like.
Yeah, but you get the idea. Like, it's, it's like, uh, you know, we, we still tell these kinds of stories. Like, you know, the Ghostbusters versus like Marvel, right? Like.
They're all heroes.
Yeah.
But some do it by their wits, and, you know, uh, others do it by their brawn. And so you, I think you still see the same thing, um, in antiquity. People still enjoyed those kinds of stories. We repeat them all the time. So I wanted to, uh, after all of this kind of like tearing down or, you know, re-examining this the framework of the field, I wanted to offer like, well, then how do we understand these writings beyond my sort of like talking about this the Satiricon elements? Like, how, how can I talk about how we move forward?
And so that was just one strategy I wanted to put out there as a way to classify on the.
Yeah, no, that's that's fair. I was, I was also thinking about, um, I can't remember if you mentioned this one, but Philo's Life of Moses, which I talked a lot with Helen Bond too, um, and there's an interesting like, an interesting kind of corollary there as well that you point out in the book, because you kind of, as as the book's coming to an end, you point out really beautifully that we have Philo who does so many of the same things as Paul, writes about so many of the same things as Paul, um, even writes this Life of Moses that does look a little bit like our our Gospels, um, and yet nobody talks about Philoic communities. Nobody talks about, is Philo representative of this group in Alexandria who, um, are the Therapeutae community?
That's right. Yeah.
Nobody, nobody talks. I, the example that I gave that I got from Stanley Stowers was, um, Philoic, you know, like, we don't talk about Philoic communities, Philoic communities. We don't do it. Um, because we're not trying to create the same social environment, reconstruct the the same social environment. We know that these are authors.
Yeah.
Who are engaged, again, like social networks. They have various social networks. I mean, Philo is related to the, uh, emperor, um, through marriage. Um, but like, you know, these guys have multiple connections. It's like, you know, Venn diagrams. Um, but with the Gospels, we're always just so much like, "Church, Christian community," like, nothing else.
Yeah.
And it's, it just doesn't work. It just doesn't.
Historically.
We have a way of approaching language that we translate things differently. We look at texts differently. We create these stories differently. Um, we read the Gospels differently. We read, read, coming back to Christian origins, we, we read Christian origins differently. And I guess the place that it kind of leaves me as we kind of wrap up this conversation is like, where, where do we go from here? Where do you, like, how are you, how are you thinking about the Gospels now once you start to pull away all of this baggage? Um, I know you made a start obviously in the book, but where do you see this conversation needing to go?
Well, I think one interesting thing is if we can let go of the Christian community, let go of using the Gospels themselves to then reconstruct the social environment, like assume that the literary environment is the social environment. Uh, if we don't make that assumption, and we do look at, uh, comparative evidence from how we know things worked in the ancient world elsewhere. So without assuming the, um, uniqueness of early Christianity's social environment in the way that we have, I mean, one thing I'll just foreground that we've talked about, um, in passing today, is what would it mean if Christianity was more of a quote unquote religion, you know, in its earliest forms, but the Christ movement was more characteristic of like what we might call an upper middle class or like new money in the second century, especially.
Yeah.
Um, so if we move away from the downtrodden of, you know, Galilee into Roman, like a bougie class of Romans.
Yeah.
And, you know, I, I wouldn't be the first one to kind of say, "Hey, uh oh," like, this kind, there have been scholars who in the past have like passingly noticed this. Um, but I think it's worth reconsidering because that's a very different origin story for Christianity.
Yeah.
Than the one that we currently have that, um, is in some ways, I think actually like more intuitive, frankly, as well. Um.
And that that really challenges a lot, I think, of a lot of our presumptions.
Um.
It's interesting. Sorry, I was just going to say, even like looking at Paul, Paul is obviously somebody of some kind of means who is able to have education and travel and and we see him as maybe an economic network. And then in the second century, we get a very similar figure in the figure of Marcion, who's like incredibly wealthy. Like, it's like all that we really do see is people who have this kind of privilege that that you've already that you've mentioned. I think, like, it's hard to see past that.
I know it's hard. That's actually, I've, I've been working on two book manuscripts and, uh, one is that, um, which is like what we're referencing here, which is like, what we do know that under the empire, you do kind of have, you know, like a nevo ree that starts to develop, like these are imprecise terms, but these are people who are like, previously something like a flax merchant in Asia, but like, you know, now they, they can make a ton of money because they have, you know, more, uh, you know, trade protection. And so this is somebody who's illiterate, but like, when you start making it big, you're not going to go hang out with the guys at the bar necessarily. Some people do, but you're going to want to start doing the things that are symbolic of your wealth. This is just normal human behavior, right? So you're like Trimalchio, who we mentioned before, he's new money. And so he wants to like have his fancy dinner party and wear like cool clothes and decorate his house nice, but, um, he does it all like a little bit tacky. Like everything is just like a little bit like not quite right.
Um.
Yeah, exactly. And, you know, so you could be, and there's a glass ceiling here, like if you're not part of the native aristocracy, they're not going to necessarily let you in. There are times later on in the empire where you could buy yourself like a knighthood, essentially, like, you know, after several generations, but there is a glass ceiling. Like if you're not already Cicero, like it's, you know, or like a Ciceronian family, like it's too bad.
Um.
And so you might not be able to sponsor Virgil to write your Roman history, but you could probably afford a Gospel writer.
A Mark.
Yeah.
You know, like.
And that's a very, again, different model of like a bougie, uh, aspiring class, like, you know, trying to keep up with the Joneses. You, you can't sponsor, um, you know, the local deity at the same level as the native aristocracy, but you could sponsor an ecclesia to Christ because no one claimed that one yet, right? Um, so it's interesting to think about it in those ways. I'm not saying that's the alternative model, but it's something I've been playing with, um, trying to figure out like, does, is that a better social explanation?
Yeah.
Questions we should ask at least.
Right.
Rather than like the wandering charismatic apostle who just like spontaneously converts, you know, masses of people. Uh, I, I think human beings are a little messier.
Yeah, absolutely.
Awesome.
Well, with that, um, we'll have to end, but I, uh, I will link to your book down below. Um, is there anything else that you would like to point people to, or I know you're doing stuff in Bart's channel. What else? What else you recommend?
I've been doing stuff for Bart at least till end of the year, um, for the Biblical Studies Academy, and, um, I do make videos, but I do a talk every month, um, and I do a lot, at least two postings a week, um, at the Biblical Studies Academy, so people can check that out. We can put a link. Um, I've had a lot of publications in the last couple years, um, so if you go to my Academia.edu page, um, you could always email me for the full copy because copyright, I can't put the whole thing up there. Um, some of them are open access. Um, and I just, I, I do stuff in archaeology and art history, too. So, I just had a few, I just had a publication come out in German, so if you speak German or read German, you can read that one. Um, but I also had a few come out, um, on, uh, Roman statuary and portraiture. Um, and so those are available. I had, um, an a couple of articles come out on Stoicism, uh, recently. I actually can't remember everything, but I, I have a lot.
That's pretty, that's a pretty impressive start. Yeah, that's great.
I usually do like five articles a year, so.
Um.
That's awesome. That's a good output.
I'm tired. Uh.
And then I'm also, um, forthcoming, going to be editing the, um, Cambridge Companion to the Non-Canonical Gospels. So I'm starting direction, too.
So, keep a lookout for that. And then, um, the two monographs that I'm looking at or writing right now. So, um, hopefully they'll be published soon. Those always take a few years to come.
Yeah, it takes a while. Amazing. Okay, I'll link to as much of that as I can down below. Um, and Robin Walsh, thank you so much for taking the time to join me today.
Thank you for having me.