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Christopher W Skinner, The Origins of Early Christian Literature: Contextualizing the New Testament within Greco-Roman Literary Culture By Robyn Faith Walsh, The Journal of Theological Studies, Volume 75, Issue 1, April 2024, Pages 221–223, https://doi.org/10.1093/jts/flad077
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More than at any time in perhaps the past 125 years, New Testament scholarship has been returning to serious questions about the nature of the canonical gospels and the processes behind gospel writing. Questions of early gospel reception (Watson, 2013), gospel genre (Bond, 2020), the role of the gospels within early Christian book culture (Larsen, 2018; Keith, 2020; Gathercole 2022), the performative and narratological milieus in which the canonical gospels emerged (e.g. Rüggemeier, 2017; Iverson, 2021), and the relationship between our gospels and early Christian memory (Kirk, 2023) have all been subjects of serious discussion over the past decade.1 And while these are only some of the important conversations taking place at this critical moment in gospels research, the aforementioned publications each make constructive arguments with serious implications for our understanding of both the gospels as texts and the ways in which those texts emerged. Robyn Walsh’s monograph enters into this fraught space with a bold and compellingly argued thesis that demands to be taken seriously: the gospels emerged, not from literate spokespersons who derived from specific ‘gospel communities’, but rather from elite cultural producers (by which she does not mean, those who were part of the ruling elite). In arguing for this thesis, Walsh aims to (1) issue a death knell to the concept of oral tradition that has guided so much gospels scholarship—particularly among the form and redaction critics; (2) deconstruct the idea of gospel communities as the paradigm of gospel production; and (3) establish a substantive connection between the way scholarship envisions writing within the classical world and the ways in which our canonical gospels emerged. At the heart of this work is a concern to situate the writing of the gospels in a historical and cultural context that looks more like the ancient world that produced them and less like the German academy that has shaped our discussion of them for the past three centuries.
