Book Reviewed: The Origins of Early Christian Literature by Robyn Faith Walsh

Synoptic composition The voice of Jesus has been obscured for over two millennia, and his vision skewed by gospel writers who transmitted his message to serve their own goals. Numerous academics and scholars, over centuries, have examined the historical events to assess if the gospel narratives are real or fictious. The essence of the problem is that the four canonical gospels, Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John were composed within the Roman Empire between 70 and 110 CE as biographies of Jesus of Nazareth. Mark is supposed to have been written around 70 CE, later, Mathew, and Luke in that order, and finally John around 105 CE. The fact that the very first gospel was written 40 years after the death of Jesus calls into question, the veracity, and the integrity of the sources, and the so called “oral traditions” whereby the event narratives were passed on by a small community of people over 40 years. In fact, the Christian communities in the first century were scant, sparsely populated, and lived in different parts of ancient Israel. Jesus’s acts and sayings were remembered more as biographical and historical events than as a religious doctrine. The most significant event in the scholarship and the hermeneutics of gospels is the founding of “Jesus Seminar” by a group of biblical scholars led by Robert Funk in 1985 under the auspices of the Westar Institute. The seminar actively investigated the teachings of Jesus, which is illustrated by about thirty-three parables in the first three gospels, also known as synoptic gospels, because they include same stories, often in a similar sequence and wording. They are contrasting to the gospel of John whose narratives and the tone are different. The current opinion among scholars is that gospels are based on two sources, the Marcan priority that proposes the gospel of Mark was used as a source by the other two (Matthew and Luke). And the second is the oral gospel traditions (also referred to as sayings traditions or the Q source) In this work, the author takes a fresher look at the writers of the synoptic gospels in which she suggests that the writers were literate spokespersons for their communities. They were documenting intragroup "oral traditions" and preserving their perspectives of the fellow Christ-followers like the Markan, Matthean, Lukan, Nazarenes, and other Judeo-Christian communities of the first century. It is observed that these are educated peers who specialized in biographical work. Some of them did not understand of being "in Christ." A study of ancient biographies of historical figures, and novels, this study demonstrates that the gospels are creative literature of the first century. These ideas of the author are largely speculative and do not provide convincing evidence to show that Mark was an intellectual figure. The book is written in academic style which may help divinity school students, and other readers interested in the study of the first century synoptic gospels. The take-home message from this work is that the gospels are the work of few authors who documented the life of Jesus as a biography, and not as a religious message.