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M. David Litwa. SBL Draft Paper. December 2020 M. David Litwa, Australian Catholic University, Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry How the Gospels Became History: Reflections on a Recent Monograph (20 min) Tag(s): History of Christianity (History & Culture), New Testament (Ideology & Theology), Myth (Ancient Near Eastern Literature - Genre) My work How the Gospels Became History: Jesus and Mediterranean Myths was published by Yale University Press in June of 2019. In this brief paper, I address its reception in recent academic reviews, responding in particular to criticisms. These days—when there is such a flood of new books to read—it is an honor to receive a review at all, and I am deeply grateful for those who took the time to write them. First, a brief summary of my thesis. In the book, I argue that the canonical gospels contain a host of mythoi, a term by which ancient Greeks understood fantastical tales. Ancient historians included fantastical tales in their writings on a regular basis, but they did their best to give them the air of historicality through a set of historiographical tropes. Among these I include (1) objectification (describing individually experienced phenomena as if they were fully knowable and observable by others); (2) synchrony (noting well- known persons or occurrences); (3) syntopy (mentioning known places on the map); (4) straightforward, matter-of-fact presentation (which often frames the description of fantastical or anomalous events); (5) vivid presentation (which includes the addition of random and circumstantial details); the rhetoric of accuracy (akribeia), which includes (6) the introduction of literary eyewitnesses (such as the Beloved Disciple) and (7) staged skepticism among the eyewitnesses (as in Matt. 28:17; John 20:25); (8) alternative reports (as in Matt. 28:13); (9) stated links of causation (as in Matt. 28:15); and (10) literary traces of a putatively past event (such as tomb tokens). I make the additional claim that historians who dealt chiefly in mythoi, such as Diodorus of Sicily in the initial books of his Library of History, crafted a subgenre of historiography which I name “mythic historiography,” and that the gospels are most analogous to this subgenre. At present, I turn to reviews which have been published so far. Andrew Steck Andrew Steck addressed my book in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review (https://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2020/2020.05.26/). He offered a clear statement of my thesis and praised the book for demonstrating that the evangelists inherited and imitated the Greek and Roman historiographical tradition. 1 M. David Litwa. SBL Draft Paper. December 2020 Steck understands that I am not arguing for genetic connections between texts. At the same time, he urges more attention to the “cultural context” of the historiographical works treated. This point is well taken. In my introductory chapter, I introduce the general literary context of the late first century CE when I discuss the phenomenon of mythic historiography. Then in my second chapter, I introduce some of the major players whose writings serve as my main comparanda: Diodorus of Sicily, Plutarch, Suetonius, Philostratus, and Iamblichus—in addition to the evangelists. Admittedly, however, I do not discuss the literary and historical context of every work or story that I treat. I do introduce the question of Homer and Homeric authorship in Chapter 1, but I do not give a full discussion of figures like Lucian, Livy, Tacitus, Horace, and so on, nor do I discuss their specific cultural contexts. So I agree with Steck on this point: more could be said and should be said in future comparisons. On the other hand, I disagree with Steck that a broader consideration of the historical context could have made plausible genetic connections between my “literary examples.” That was never my aim. It was sufficient for me to show the broader literary culture and presuppositions among ancient historians who had stricter and looser views about the historian’s craft. Steck also criticized the organization of the book. I arranged the material according to episodes in the canonical lives of Jesus. For some reason, Steck considered this organization to be neither “sequential nor systematic.” I would agree that there were other ways to order the discussion. I could have treated the material in terms of an absolute chronology of authors and texts. I doubt, however, that this approach would have been more clear, since I take it that most of my readers are more familiar with the outline of Jesus’s life than they are with the chronology of ancient historical works. It is also true, as Steck notes, that I sometimes compare stories from different centuries. I feel a certain liberty in bringing in a Homeric tale simply because Homer was so widely known in the early imperial period.1 Apart from my introduction of Homeric comparanda, however, I do not normally range far from a hundred years on either side of the late first century CE. Other historians may disagree with me, but I dare say that the craft of historical writing did not change much between, say, Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Philostratus. Indeed, when it comes to the notion of plausibility structures 1 See, e.g., Karl Olav Sandnes, The Challenge of Homer: School, Pagan Poets and Early Christianity (London: T&T Clark, 2009); Lawrence Kim, Homer between History and Fiction in Imperial Greek Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Maren Niehoff, Homer and the Bible in the Eyes of Ancient Interpreters (Leiden: Brill, 2012). 2 M. David Litwa. SBL Draft Paper. December 2020 and historicizing techniques, there were basic continuities from Herodotus to Herodian. I do my best to show these continuities in my introduction. Stricter proximity in time may have been an issue if I was arguing for genetic links between texts, but this was not the case. Alan Kirk Alan Kirk’s six-page engagement with How the Gospels Became History in the Review of Biblical Literature is both learned and significant. He notes that “This [book] is one of the more original and thought-provoking books that I have read recently. It is essential reading for everyone wanting to keep abreast of contemporary currents in gospel scholarship” (6). There are just a few points where I think Kirk misunderstood or misrepresented what I wrote. For instance, it is imprecise, if not wrong, to say that I take “Greek myth as the principal referent for gospel narratives.” Rather, I choose historicized mythoi—primarily Greek and Roman—as my comparanda. Due to my focus on Greek and Roman material, Kirk claims that “The effect is to exaggerate the influence of Greek myth on gospel narrative.” My point, however, was not at all about the influence of particular myths on the gospels, but to show that the evangelists and Greek historiographers like Diodorus and Dionysius, for instance, used a historiographical form for re-presenting mythic (by which I mean fantastical) cultural lore. So the point is not that I “subsume”—as Kirk says—“gospel narratives to Greco-Roman mythical patterns,” but that I attempt to show how the cultural schemas and techniques of mythic historiography are already present in the gospels. Kirk then turns to a criticism of the bios genre which seems less about my book than about a current scholarly trend (“a recent spate of studies that appeal to the bios genre,” 2). In my book, I state: “Literary genre is a fluid category, and texts can inhabit multiple genres” (How the Gospels 53). It is odd then how Kirk can say that my book exemplifies “genre essentialism” and “genre determinism.” I affirm that the gospels “best approximate ancient biographical (or bios) literature” but I do not specify rigid “taxonomic indices” or insist that the gospels have all or most of those indices. I unashamedly view the evangelists as creative authors, despite the traditional nature of their material. In principle, I admit that they occupied different—I would not say “very different”—positions “on the sociocultural grid” (2, my emphasis). Nevertheless, if they produced the literature that they did, then they were in the category of elite cultural producer along with the likes of Diodorus and Dionysius. I do not agree with Kirk that the evangelists wrote 3 M. David Litwa. SBL Draft Paper. December 2020 “at a substandard literary level of koinē” (3). I call koinē “the common speech of the day” (How the Gospels 55). I do not need to explain why the evangelists’ language was “substandard”—a view which I consider to be outdated and unnecessarily judgmental. It is true that I offer “no particular account of the origins and history of the evangelists’ tradition”— nor did I intend to or need to do so in order to argue my thesis. Thus for Kirk to take the imaginative leap that I ascribe the tradition to “mythical reimaginings” (3) is unfair. I would be happy to allow memory a role in the construction of gospel tradition, but I would tend to favor what Jan Assmann calls “cultural” over “communicative memory.”2 The Evangelists were not dealing with the fresh, oral memories of eyewitnesses, but with memories already based on and qualified by liturgical and ritual forms and broader cultural schemas. Cultural memories can seem like they were based on eyewitness reports given the amount of detail (think of Philo’s Life of Moses), but most if not all of such material is based on stories shaped by cultural schemas and contemporaneous structures of plausibility. Kirk is simply wrong to say that I “exclude” Hebrew Bible narrative by focusing on the Greco-Roman material (3). To a certain extent, I see the same dynamic of historicizing discourse active in texts like 1-2 Samuel, 1-2 Kings, 1-2 Chronicles—or rather their Septuagintal forms.

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