THE BEGINNINGS OF CHRISTIAN LITERATURE BY ROBYN FAITH WALSH A.B., WHEATON COLLEGE, 2002 M.DIV. HARVARD DIVINITY SCHOOL, 2005 A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN THE PROGRAM IN RELIGIOUS STUDIES AT BROWN UNIVERISTY. PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND MAY 2014 ©Copyright 2014 by Robyn Faith Walsh ii This dissertation by Robyn Faith Walsh is accepted in its present form by the Department of Religious Studies as satisfying the dissertation requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Recommended to the Graduate School Date__________ __________________________________________________ Dr. Stanley K. Stowers, Advisor Date__________ __________________________________________________ Dr. Ross S. Kraemer, Advisor Date__________ __________________________________________________ Dr. David Konstan, Advisor Recommended to the Graduate School Date__________ __________________________________________________ Dean Peter Weber, Dean of the Graduate School iii Curriculum Vitae Robyn Faith Walsh was born in the early morning hours of June 26th, 1980 in a sweltering Melrose, Massachusetts. An only child, she spent the early years of her life reenacting scenes from old Hollywood musicals, collecting natural ‘curiosities’ from the surrounding woods and believing that she was a cat who lived under the dining room table. Her thorough commitment to role playing and cataloging augured a future as a researcher and academic. Growing up outside of Boston, she attended private Catholic schools where she was regularly told her failure to comprehend theology and her entrepreneurial exchange of school supplies made her a “bad Christian.” In high school, she enrolled in an independent study curriculum and took courses in ancient Greek philosophy. She went on to enroll at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts, where she majored in Ancient Studies (Classics and Religious Studies) and minored in Africana Studies. She was inducted into the Phi Beta Kappa society in her junior year. She graduated summa cum laude and was class valedictorian. After graduating Wheaton, Robyn attended Harvard Divinity School where she studied early Christianity and Roman archaeology and obtained a Masters in Divinity. She then began her Ph.D. work at Brown University in early Christianity, eventually moving into the Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean program with a concentration in early Christianity, ancient Judaism and Roman archaeology. In the spring of 2012, Robyn served as a lecturer at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. From 2012-2014 she returned to Wheaton College as a visiting instructor. Beginning in the fall of 2014, she will begin a tenure-track position in New Testament and Early Christianity at the University of Miami. iv Acknowledgements It is difficult to convey the extent of my gratitude to the people have who supported me throughout the process of completing my degree, and this dissertation in particular. In many respects, the last few years have been tremendously challenging and the kindness and encouragement of my friends, family and colleagues has been extremely moving and means a great deal to me. First and foremost a warm thank you to Stan Stowers for his many kindnesses and (seemingly limitless) patience. I greatly admire his clarity and judgment, and I appreciate the guidance he has given me over the years more than I can say. He is a brilliant scholar but, more importantly, he is incredibly intellectually generous and unfailingly supportive of his graduate students and colleagues. I owe him much. I may have never told her this, but Ross Kraemer is the reason I pursued a career in the field. I read her work for the first time in college and I was hooked. To find myself at Brown working with her a few years later was surreal. Her questions and insights continue to challenge me more than any mentor I have had, and the care and concern she has for her students is something that I can only hope to emulate. More than anyone else at Brown, David Konstan has become as dear to me as any friend and I consider him family. Both personally and professionally, I have never known someone more selfless, open and, most of all, equipped to handle a crisis. His “Q tips” for this dissertation were invaluable. He continues to be a great source of wisdom and inspiration. Nancy Evans and Jonathan Brumberg-Kraus took me under their wing over fifteen years ago and to this day they are my most trusted colleagues and, I am fortunate to say, close friends. Their good humor and enthusiasm helped sustain me through the last year in particular. I attribute much of this project to their advice, guidance and encouragement. There are a number of other mentors who have contributed to my development over the years, and for whom I hold a great deal of esteem. I am especially grateful to Nicola Denzey Lewis, Helmut Koester, François Bovon, Laura Hess, Pura Nieto Hernández and Susan Harvey. During the course of my research, I consulted many colleagues and appreciate their time and insights. A special thank you to Bill Arnal, Russell McCutcheon, Merrill Miller, David Frankfurter, Ron Cameron and Sarah Rollens. I would also like to thank my doctoral colleagues and dear friends at both Brown and Harvard, particularly Jennifer Eyl, David Berger, Robin McGill, Cavan Concannon and Emily Schmidt who suffered through many conversations about this material. I would also like to acknowledge John Robichaux for his support and companionship in the earlier stages of my graduate career. v To my friends, Nick Doolittle, Ashley Taylor Doolittle, Nancy Wagner, R.C. Hammond, Amaren Colosi, Bridgit Murphy, Michael Bellafatto and Heather Wilson, thank you for being unconditional sources of love and strength. Also thank you to my godchildren, Jessica Mack, Claire Wagner and Mateo Doolittle. I was fortunate to be hired as an instructor at The College of the Holy Cross and Wheaton College as I worked on this dissertation. I received invaluable training at these institutions and had a number of wonderful colleagues. My students also drove me continually to sharpen my thinking in ways that have helped me improve as a teacher and writer. I am especially grateful to Meagan Gagnon, Jonathan Gerkin, Matthew Guruge, Nicholas Ricciardi, Dan Lautenschlager, Arden Haselmann, Kaela Feit, Brian Jencunas and Emily Sampson. Finally, I scarcely know how to begin to thank my parents, Thomas and Kathleen Walsh, for their love, encouragement, patience and perseverance. They have been unwaveringly selfless and devoted to supporting my ambitions over the years. If there is anything I ever need or any help that they can give me, they are always there at a moment’s notice. I admire them more than anyone and I love them very much. And, while she can’t read this, I nonetheless want to thank my long-suffering dog, Sarah. She has endured many years of patiently (and not so patiently) waiting for me to finish one thing or another and reminds me not to take myself too seriously. Lastly, I would like to dedicate this work to the memory of François Bovon and my former student, Paige Hicks, whom I think of everyday and who remind me of why it all matters. ! ! vi Abstract This dissertation offers a reevaluation of the Synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke) and a hypothetical document thought to be common to Matthew and Luke, known as Q (Quelle). Scholars have often imagined the social environment for these texts to be a communal in some measure, with authors writing narratives about Jesus that mirror the social and theological interests of their communities or “churches.” I challenge that this approach stems from the mistaken premise that the cohesive and widespread social movement painted by the gospel writers was a historical reality. I demonstrate that accepting early Christianity’s own myth of origins has resulted in an extremely idiosyncratic approach to early Christian sources when compared with allied studies of ancient literature. By contrast, I establish that ancient Mediterranean authors tended to write within a competitive field of elite cultural producers, creating narratives that more or less conformed to established genres. Rather than attempt to read the gospels and Q under the related assumptions that they reveal cohesive communities and preserve strands of authentic material about Jesus, I situate them more coherently within a wider field of Greco-Roman literature as an example of “subversive biography,” in which a marginal figure is forced to succeed through the use of his wits and wonderworking skills. This study also demonstrates the extent to which Romanticism continues to exact a strong influence on the field of early Christian Studies. I argue that the gospels and Q have been analyzed in twentieth and twenty-first century thought with an uncritical German Romantic communitarian framework that has imposed anachronistic, Romantic ideas of an implicit Volk (people, nation) or inspirational Geist (spirit) onto the text. This is a critique of current scholarship that has application not only in Christian thought, but also other religious traditions and texts studied within the academy.! ! ! ! ! ! ! vii ! ! ! Table of Contents ! Chapter One: The Myth of Christian Origins …………………………………. 1-51 Chapter Two: The Romantic “Big Bang” ………………………………… 52-89 Chapter Three: Authorship in Antiquity ………………………………… 90-135 Chapter Four: The Gospels as Subversive Biography ………………………… 136-172 Chapter Five: Redescribing Q …………………………………………………... 173-216 Bibliography ……………………………………………………………………. 217-246 ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! viii CHAPTER 1 THE MYTH OF CHRISTIAN ORIGINS When Thomas Jefferson took up a razor in order to piece together his Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth his goal was to strip away, quite literally, the vestiges of ancient philosophy and so-called gnosticism that had convoluted the work of the “simple evangelists.” In a letter to John Adams he boasted that the “primitive simplicity” of early Christianity was as plain as “diamonds in a dunghill.” Pasting together strategic passages from the canonical gospels, he imagined himself liberating the text from the “logos and demiurges, aeons and daemons” of Christian Platonists.