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.
Walsh, Robyn,
"The Beginnings of Gospel Literature"
(2014).
Religious Studies Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.7301/Z0JD4V4T