Because many people today believe in Christianity, studies of ancient Christian texts are handled differently than studies of ancient Greek or Roman religious writings. The field of classics is more strict with regards to what counts as evidence, while religious studies is more lenient. In this volume, Walsh applies the same standards used for studying classics to Christianity.

New Testament scholars often invoke oral history (for which there’s no evidence) or make appeals to the gospel writer’s religious community (for which there’s no evidence). They claim the gospels are unique and ignore the literary tradition they belong to. They claim Jesus is unique and ignore his similarity to Aesop, the Cynics, and the heroes of Greek novels.

Many Greek novels have plots including ritual anointing, crucifixion, a ritual meal, and resurrection, yet New Testament scholars ignore them. Greek and Roman authors often falsely claim first-hand knowledge of events, but when the gospels do it, religious scholars treat it as a fact rather than the literary convention it is.

Biblical scholars confuse the subject matter of the gospels with the gospel writers themselves. They confuse the characters in the gospels with the gospel writer’s community. They don’t consider the possibility that the gospels could have been written by Roman elites telling a supernatural story taking place in a foreign land.

Biblical scholars make several assumptions about Christian origins without evidence: that Christianity grew rapidly, was well-established, and consisted of a tight-knit community. Paul is assumed to be the figurehead of early Christianity, even though his own epistles indicate the early Christians weren’t a coherent group. Paul’s epistles indicate the groups he was addressing weren’t united, stable, or organized and he was struggling to be seen as an authority. Paul invokes a sense of shared community hoping to bring it about. He’s making an aspirational statement, not a statement of fact.

The gospels are myths Christianity tells about itself. Luke claims the church grew rapidly and religious scholars take this at face value, despite Mark and Matthew not backing up this claim. The gospels engage with the literary tropes of their era, not traditions passed down by an illiterate community. The gospel writers may have known members of the Jesus community, but this must be demonstrated, not simply assumed.

New Testament scholarship as a field is steeped in German Romantic ideas of community. The gospels are the only ancient documents that scholars think were a product of a community rather than an individual. It is often imagined that the writers of the gospels are simply recording the oral history of a tight-knit, illiterate, religious community, and thus who the writers are doesn’t matter. However, no ancient writings were actually produced in this way.

Very few people in antiquity could write, so we know a great deal about who the gospel writers were based on this fact alone. Ancient writers didn’t need to be part of a Christian community to write about Jesus, but they did need to be part of a network of writers in order to publish and circulate their work.

Writing was a specialist activity and consisted of a spectrum. Some people could write letters or contracts without having the skill to compose an original work. Every writer’s most important social network was his fellow writers and literary critics. Writers referenced and built upon each other’s works. Imitation and innovation were encouraged.

Writing is a product of the individual writer’s education, training, and personal interests. In the ancient Mediterranean, only those of the governing or aristocratic classes could typically afford a tutor to teach them how to read and write. Romans preferred Greek tutors so their children would be bilingual. Stoics, who were also creative writers themselves, were preferred. The wealthy would often employ an educated slave or tutor for their entire household. Owners would often educate their slaves to increase their value. In the aftermath of a war, educated captives would become aristocratic slaves.

Basic public instruction was available at “street schools” held on street corners for boys until the age of 12 for those who could afford it. Prosperous tradesmen or artisans would send their boys to these schools long enough to learn the basics of bookkeeping, before pulling them out of school to work at the family business. Due to the expense, the majority of Romans were not instructed beyond basic job-related literacy which may not have included the ability to read or write a letter. The lower classes wouldn’t have been able to read or write at all unless it was required for their job, and even then, they’d only know the bare minimum necessary.

Learning was typically reserved for urban centers and writing materials like papyrus and reed pens were specialist tools. Most would start by learning Greek. Very few would go on to advanced education which included rhetoric, word study, imitation and recitation (often of Homer). Whole texts often weren’t available, so they worked off partial texts and synopses.

One could have a successful career in the courts or government just by being a good speaker and not having a lot of exposure to the world of books. Having enough literacy to write a receipt, draft a bill of divorce, etc. is not the same as being literate enough to write a work of literature.

One required additional instruction under a specialist or independent study to be able to compose original literary works. Both of these options required wealth, social connections, and time.

One could also gain admittance to a library or study house where fellow intellectual elites could exchange ideas. Judeans would train with Greek and Roman texts in addition to the Torah. Greek was an essential part of literacy at the time.

Once someone was ready to write an original piece of literature, they would then need a sponsor to produce the text, circulate the writing for critique, and hold recitations or private readings, and ultimately publish the work.

Publishing in the ancient world isn’t the same as publishing today. Texts were copied by hand and would only become popular (continue to be copied and circulated) with the support of the literary community. Without a literary circle promoting a work by letter writing, recitations, and word of mouth, a text wouldn’t get copied and would disappear into obscurity. Therefore, the most important social circle for any writer (including the gospel writers) was their community of fellow writers.

According to Pliny, knowledge and even memorization of passages of the work of others in your literary circle was a common expectation. Thus a writing could come to be known through fragments of it memorized by the literary community.

In the second and third centuries CE, an increase in literacy led to a new kind of text aimed at the middle levels of society that included cooking manuals, riddles, binding spells, pagan and Christian material, and romantic novels. Businessmen and managers at Oxyrhynchus had libraries containing Homer, the Medea, Plato, love spells, medical recipes, as well as the letters of Paul, and the gospels of Mathew, Mary, and Thomas. Just because this literature was directed at a middle class audience doesn’t mean it was written by members of the middle class, however. It was still most likely written by elites.

Even though the gospels aren’t as sophisticated as Homer or Vergil, they still required specialized knowledge to create. Luke was likely aware of Vergil and other ancient epics. Like Vergil, Luke claims to have a patron, establishes a divine genealogy of a dynastic family, interprets visions and prophecy, and writes about a founding figure establishing a new community.

Philo describes a group called the Therapeutae which scholars consider to be at least partially, if not wholly, rhetorical. If the Therapeutae don’t exist, there’s no reason to assume the communities described in the gospels actually exist either.

The Satyrica, written about the same time as the gospels, shares communal meals, anointing rituals, crucifixion, missing bodies, cannibalism, and empty tombs, as well as terminology. However theologians tend to ignore these parallels and only focus on similarities between Christian and Jewish texts, as if Judea wasn’t part of the Roman empire.

Anonymous authors and claims to supernatural knowledge were a trend at this time. There was also a trend to depict simple country folk as having superior ethics. This doesn’t mean the gospels were actually written by simple country folk, however.

The Satyrica shares a literary context with the gospels. Regardless of whether it was written before or after Mark, the Satyrica is obviously in conversation with Mark. This has been difficult for scholars to admit since they treat the gospels as separate from other Greco-Roman writings, but once you accept the possibility, pieces start falling into place. If the gospel writers belonged to a community of writers who read, memorized, and critiqued each other’s work, overlaps make sense. Due to the nature of publishing in the ancient world, it may not even make sense to ask which came first. They could be based on each other.

Some similarities include ritual anointing of nard during a banquet foreshadowing a funeral (Sat 78.4, Mark 14.8), and the crowing of a rooster taken as an omen of death (Sat 74.1). Satyrica 112 contains the story of a soldier guarding crucified robbers who abandons his post to romance a widow mourning in a tomb. He leaves the tomb after three days to find that one of the bodies was removed from the cross. The widow then allows her husband’s body to be used to replace the missing one.

Empty tombs and resurrected dead were popular in ancient writing. Phlegon of Tralles wrote of the resurrections of Polykritos, Eurynous, Philinnion, and Rufus of Philippi, a high priest in Thessalonica, who died and rose on the third day and who performed rituals and miracles. These stories aren’t exactly like Jesus, but are variations on a theme. Plutarch called the various empty tombs and supernaturally missing corpse stories a tale that all the Greeks tell.

Common motifs of these stories include cataclysms, darkness, ascension, deification, son of God status, shining manifestations, fear over the events, a commission to write about what happened, and eyewitnesses. At least 29 such figures who disappeared and were worshipped as a God have been noted. (Walsh refers us to “Mark’s Empty Tomb” by Miller for the full list).

Early church fathers Justin Martyr, Origen, Tertullian, Minucius Felix, Arnobius, and critics like Celsus all acknowledged that Jesus’s resurrection was patterned after Roman and Greek traditions. The empty tomb trope signaled the deification of Romulus, Alexander the Great, Castor and Pollux, Herakles, and Asclepius amongst others. Without this context, the empty tomb of Jesus wouldn’t have made sense.

The gospels came at a time when the Roman Empire became interested in Judean sacred texts following the Jewish War. (The fact the gospels get much wrong about Judea and Judaism suggests they weren’t written by locals.)

Claiming eyewitnesses existed and writing anonymously are commonplace rhetorical strategies used by other novels, biographies, and philosophical writings of the time. Logos (the Word) was a Stoic idea incorporated into Judaism and later Christianity.

Walsh classifies the gospels as belonging to the genre of subversive biography that emphasizes an anti-establishment figure who is outside the dominant culture such as the Life of Aesop or the Alexander Romance. Ancient biographies such as Plutarch’s Life of Homer were often indistinguishable from fiction. The purpose of the ancient biography was to demonstrate the virtues of the subject and encourage readers to likewise be virtuous.

Xenophon’s Memorabilia, a collection of anecdotes about Socrates, may be the first subversive biography. It contrasts civic biography by focusing more on clever sayings, use of parables, irony, and wit than deeds such as military or political conquest. The chronological order of events doesn’t matter as much and the story can be told thematically.

Like Socrates and Aesop, Jesus comes from a humble background, is able to best those in power with his wit, is unjustly sentenced to a public execution, but ends up enjoying posthumous fame.

I think Walsh makes an excellent case for the gospels not being unique, but rather fitting into the literary context of their time. The gospels should not be assumed to be historical, but rather should be treated the same as the Alexander Romance, the Satyrica, or the Life of Aesop. If New Testament scholars want to be taken seriously, they need to abandon their reliance on imaginary oral traditions and instead embrace the more evidence-based approach used by classics scholars.