 Welcome, everyone. We are pulling double duty this week. Welcome to another live special edition of We Are Being Transformed. I want to thank all of you who watched the prior specials with Dr. Dylan Burns and Dr. David Brackie. Those were lots of fun. And tonight's going to be no exception to that. So in case you are not familiar with the show, welcome. This is We Are Being Transformed. Here we explore the liminal spaces, the contours of reality, the myriad of ways people interact with the world through the vehicles of ritual, cult, and lore. Tonight, we will be speaking to Robin Faith Walsh. But prior to that, we do have a very special guest, a big influence on the show, a great frontman, I would say, like the David Bowie of the Gnostic, kind of milieu of online Gnostic radio. I'm talking about none other than Miguel Conner, who is joining us from the virtual Alexandria. Miguel, welcome. Thanks for having me. You're doing great work. Thank you. I appreciate that, especially coming from you. I've been listening to you for quite a while. I always like to say that if Irenaeus was writing in the 21st century, and he was creating a Gnostic succession of heretics, Miguel would be the Simon Magus on that list. He's influenced so many of us, like Earl Fontanel from the Shwep, often imitated, but never quite duplicated, great consummate radio voice. And he's interviewed the best of the best in terms of Gnostic scholarship. And it's been new for a long time. So in case you're not familiar with Miguel, Miguel, why don't you tell the audience a little bit about yourself? Well, great intro. I can only say yes. I am the host of AMBITE. Sometimes it's Gnostic radio. Sometimes it's Gnostic radio, depends what I'm doing. And yes, like you, I've always had a passion for these ancient heretics, an alternative Christianity, and trying to find what the hell was going on, that atomic bomb called Jesus. Obviously, I think my point of departure is that I'm interested in, I love classical Gnosticism. I could just do it all day long. That's what I, for me, fun reading is reading translations of the Nagamari Library or whatever. But I'm also very interested in how Gnostic thought developed, evolved throughout history. How it affects us today, if at all. So that, of course, beyond interviewing scholars, I also interview a lot of other figures, too, because Gnosticism has manifested in some very strange ways throughout history, from the Cathars to Kabbalah, to Sufism. And even in today, it's manifested. And this is supported by scholars like April DeConnick or Jeff Kreipel at Rice, manifested in a lot of sex and cult movements. I even did a presentation last night on A Course in Miracles. And then when you study A Course in Miracles, step by step, you go, hmm, this is very interesting. So the Son of God fell from heaven because he had a thought and he wanted to be separated from God and created this world. Wow, that sounds a little familiar. Oh, it's Sophia. Oh, it's the primal man from Hermeticism. So I'm interested in that stuff. And of course, that goes into ufology, alternative healing modality. So it gets very woo-woo, but I think, again, this is important because I feel religions aren't dead things. There are living things that evolve throughout time and manifest in art and culture and the way we think and so forth. Without Gnosticism, there probably won't be any yung. And without yung, much of our language and the way we approach reality might be different. So that's really it. Absolutely, well said. Thank you for that answer. Yeah, it really is interesting how that basic, for lack of a better term, Sethian myth that you find in the Apocryphon of John is still resonates today and it finds itself manifesting itself despite what the heresiologists wanted to do in terms of stamping it out. In a strange way, really shepherded it along into the 20th and 21st century with artists like Philip K. Dick. And like you mentioned before, yung with his red book, and you do really focus, that's one of the things I love about your show, that you do focus on this sense of the alienation and almost existential dread that Gnosticism these days tends to represent for us. You see that a lot in film as well, obviously. I know you and I are big fans of the greatest Gnostic film of all, the Lego movie. Yeah, classic. So yeah, classic film. But yeah, I mean, if anybody wants to learn more about that, they can definitely go to Aeon Byte, Gnostic Radio, The Virtual Alexandria, thegotabovegod.com, right? Tell them what you have there on your website. You have courses too there, don't you? Yeah, I've put some of my presentations bundled up into a course, call it The Virtual Alexandria Academy and it's about, it's more than 20 videos, includes materials, downloadables, quizzes and it sort of breaks down Gnostic groups, Gnostic thought, Gnostic rituals and practices, which of course, we're all interested because even 10, 20 years ago, there was really no reconstructions of Gnostic rituals. And now again, through the work of David Bracky, April DeConnick, David Litwa, we're starting to break this down. There was even an interesting, I did an interview with the fellow John Michael Greer and he talked, there was a scholar in the early 20th century named Jesse Weston and she was brilliant. She was up there with JRS Meads and all these others but she's been forgotten because, well, let's be realistic, she was a woman but when you look at her work, she was up there respected by her peers, all that and she wrote a paper saying that if you look at the grail myths and you compare them to Hippolytus's reconstruction of the Nicene ritual, they're the same. It's like blow by blow by blow. So that kind of stuff is very interesting and it makes sense. These rituals didn't just vanish, they were probably coded, saved, historians and theologians throughout history drew on them and recreated them. So that's a fun stuff. It's always fun. Yeah, absolutely. I always love a show where I can go and learn something new and shows like that are like the Schwep Esoterica with Dr. Sledge, of course and of course Anne Byte. Just something like, I love going there and I love to like peruse stuff and I'm like, what does that even mean? And I just love going down the rabbit holes that you have there. It's amazing. Yeah, have fun. Have fun. I mean, who knows if they're true and some things that go out of style come right back into style. I mean, remember there was a time when saying that the Gnostics came from Egypt was almost scoffed up by academia. That was maybe 10 years ago. It was just ridiculous. Now it shows that yes, it's the Sethians, Nessians are definitely pseudo or proto-Egyptian movements with a, you know, with a Christianized slant. So this is fun seeing how these things ebb and flow. Right. It's also very interesting. When I was talking to Dylan Burns last week, he introduced me to a book by a scholar named Zeke Mazer who sadly passed, but he has a book about the interplay in the dynamics and Plutinus' mysticism and possible points of contact with, you know, the Scythian Gnostic ascension texts. So it's very interesting stuff and just we forget that, you know, it's not just the heresiologists who are talking about these guys back then. That's the, you know, you got Plutinus writing about them and the Aedes and, you know, these were people who were just, they weren't like separated from society. They were very much in dialogue with the norms of and the culture of their time, much like this Gnostic revival we have in the 21st century. So Miguel, anything else you wanna plug? I know Dr. Walsh has entered the room. So we are going to talk some Paideia, which is a boring subject that more of you should look at in terms of the stuff on my channel. But Miguel, take it away. Yeah, check out the God above God and there's all the good resources there. And yeah, look forward to listening to your interview. She does great work. Amazing. Let's bring her in so you can say hi. Let's all get us all together and just to kind of, so Dr. Walsh, we are bringing you in now. Welcome. Hi. Welcome to the show. Hi. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Hi, nice to meet you both for the first time. Nice to meet you, Dr. Walsh. Enjoy your work and watching you in different channels. Thanks for everything you do. Oh, that's kind of you to say thank you and really nice to meet you. I was eavesdropping obviously backstage, some really interesting stuff. I didn't even get into the weird stuff. I didn't even get into ufology. That's where Gnosticism is a lot of fun. I think I heard you mention the hermetica, which is, you know, like I have it. I've looked at it, you know, hats off to you if you're wading into that material. It's not easy stuff. No, no, but it's a blast. It's so weird. It's so, I mean, yeah, Gnosticism, the texts are so trippy and psychedelic. It's like, almost go back into the 60s or so. Yeah, I like to listen to, sorry. Go ahead, no. I was just gonna say quickly, I'm teaching a movie class right now and I keep saying to my students, why isn't this stuff, you know, you don't have to make an allegory. Just put this stuff to film, you know, we have CGI. What are we doing, you know? Like, I think it would be a big hit, but anyway. Yeah, when people ask about The Matrix, I go, have you ever read the original, the first version of The Matrix? It's called Plato's Allegory of the Cave, nothing original and then the Gnostics came and so forth. So it's all, everything old is new. Everything new is old. Yeah, and like you were saying about the psychedelic aspect, Miguel, I like to put on some, I like to darken the room and put on some Brian Jonestown massacre and read me some Zostrianos from time to time. You know, that's a thing I love to do. Yeah, yeah, that's a great story. The guy's doing all this Greek philosophy so he gets frustrated. So he decides he's gonna go out in the wilderness and die and let wild animals eat them. What a way to go. And then the Angel of Gnosis shows up and takes them on this journey across time and space. So it's fun stuff. Yeah, I want my Zostrianos movie now. Dr. Walsh has got me excited about it. I'm telling you. Let's get us the Nag Hammadi Cinematic Universe. That's what we need, so. Yeah. Well, Miguel, thank you so much for dropping by. Like I said, it's been an honor. Thank you so much. You are the consummate host. So I really look up to what you do and best of luck. Well, thank you. A nice meeting you, Dr. Walsh, and you guys have a great conversation. Much gnosis to you and have a good rest of your evening. Thank you, Miguel. Have a good one. Take care. So welcome, everyone. Check out Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio. Miguel has lots of great stuff to peruse there. And we are joined by the one and only Dr. Robin Faith Walsh. So Dr. Walsh is, I guess I'll just get the biographical stuff out of the way. Dr. Walsh is an assistant professor of the New Testament and early Christianity at the University of Miami. She has published articles in classical quarterly and Jewish studies quarterly, among other publications. Her most recent book, The Origins of Early Christian Literature, many of you may remember that this text has been quite cost-perhibitive for quite a while. Not any more. But yes, exactly, I'm gonna show you. You have the paperback as out. Yeah, thank God. Yes, very affordable, very much recommended paperback. 30 bucks, can't beat that for... I don't joke around when I say this stuff is groundbreaking in terms of paradigm shifts in New Testament studies. Lots of stuff we're gonna discuss here today, specifically chapter three through five. So I hope you have all been studying. But let's just kind of get into it. So go pick that up on Amazon. Dr. Walsh, how are you? I'm doing okay. I picked up a little bit of a cold from the toddler. So slightly drugged up, but hanging in there. So if I'm a little less, a little less articulate than usual, you'll know what's going on. But maybe it'll just be more fun. I don't know. We'll wait for the drugs to kick in. But I'm doing great. How are you doing? I'm doing great. I guess we started the evening off perfectly with the Gnosticism talk. So it'll go well with the cold medicine, I guess. Yeah, exactly. I think... New Testament studies is always better on... Yes, exactly. New Testament studies is always better on scissor. So let's get on with it. So Dr. Walsh, I wanted to posit something to you. Now, your book is very interesting in that you kind of reassess and give more credence and creative autonomy back to the authors, which is something that New Testament studies, if anybody's been studying it over the past 200 years, we know that there is this very romanticized idea about the contours of studying these texts, these Gospels. So I'm just going to read something to you and I want to kind of gauge your reaction. I want you to tell me what's great about this and what's not so great. So if you were to pick up... This feels like a pop quiz. Listen. Oh no, I just want to gauge your reaction. Just interesting, because this is how I used to see it before I read your book and Burridge and other people. So I just want to see what you think about this. So if you were to pick up Rudolph Boltman and turn to a random page, chances are you'd see something or read something similar to this. So the charisma of the Christ was proclaimed orally to the early Jesus communities subsequently. And then these oral sayings and pericapies were shaped by the community's needs according to their sits and leaving, their situations in life. The hearing of the charisma presented a challenge to listeners to accept their inauthentic existence and become a new being in Christ. Eventually these traditions were collected by literate scribes in the community who created a new form of literature, hitherto unseen, completely new, the gospels, the good news of Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ. So in the words of placebo, what's wrong with this picture? Well, I mean, not to put too fine a point on it, but how do we know that? Is the social mechanism by which these writings were produced? You can't quite say that it's from the testimony of the authors themselves, although Luke does have that preface where he describes having read a bunch of different literature, talking to people who've talked to people who were eyewitnesses have passed down some kind of knowledge. Although the problem with that preface is that we have many historians in the ancient world making similar claims, especially to eyewitness testimony, that's pretty common, especially if you're about to tell a bunch of remarkable stories or wondrous stories. And so his preface stands out perhaps slightly, but it isn't that unique, perfect, yeah, to bring the dedication to his patron. So they don't tell us that this is their procedure for writing this material. There is a certain kind of, I think, mixup between the kinds of people you find populating the Gospels and the assumption that that is a historical reality for the historical Jesus, but also early Christianity. And so you have to make a number of moves to make that work. And the description that you just read, I think you said it was from Boltman, did you say that a moment ago? Well, it's more like I've read a lot of Boltman when I was studying this stuff in college. It's a perfect, it would be like an A plus description. Yeah, because the traditional story we have passed on, again, sort of taking the Gospels at face value, taking something like Acts of the Apostles as a historical document uncritically, is that this must be the social, again, mechanism or the way that this knowledge was passed on, it must have been oral. And therefore, passed on over the generations until it reaches some kind of Christian community, always imagined as cohesive, insular, sort of autonomous, as I think it was the other word that you used, community, that then shapes the content, not because of the writer's interests, but because of the interest of the community. And so then the author of these texts just becomes sort of a spokesperson or a representative of community interest. And you have something like saying it's a scribe, for example, responsible for the content. The reason you have that kind of rationality or rationale for understanding how this material would have been written down is because of the awareness, and someone like Bulman would have known this, of how limited literacy was in the ancient worlds. Now, on one hand, you can say, well, that's why we know that there were oral stories passed on because literacy was so limited, except we know from the Gospels they're after the war, they're reading each other, at the very least, it appears that Matthew and Luke have read Mark. What you have there is not a model of communities in oral tradition, you have a model of actual word-for-word copying of one text to another. If you look at ancient authorship, the way authors were trained, because it's such a rarefied group that is actually literate enough to produce this kind of material. If you look at how other authors, at the same time period, writing similar kinds of literature, with similar kinds of interests, writing wonder tales, miracle stories about sons of God even, but also other remarkable religious figures, we don't tend, except for New Testament, to try to posit that these are oral traditions written by a literate spokesperson. And in the community, we always say, well, there's some kind of author who's making rational choices. And so to create this whole mechanism of oral tradition, community authorship, scribal context for writing these things down, this again, rarefied status falling down to like the one literate scribe in a town. All of that, as a historical description, is based on a lot of presumption and assumption. And a lot of it having to do with wanting, again, to preserve the kind of narrative you have within the Gospels themselves or within Acts or try to explain away literary similarities between the Gospels, again, down to lines that are copied between the Gospels, and then also subsequent differences by attributing those kinds of differences in content to oral tradition. It reifies that sort of myth of Christian origins that we actually do have something that is preserved from like the cradle of Jesus's teachings. That's what Kregma means, teaching. And it creates that mythology around this material, even though for no other ancient literature, A, do we have that kind of historical context for development, but also we just, it goes against what we know about ancient authorship in general or about ancient authors in general. And so what I've tried to do is say, I can't definitively prove anything in that historical description of authorship that's reliant upon oral tradition and literate spokespersons. I don't know who these guys were, exactly. I'm sure they're men. I'm pretty sure that they're men, so I'll say that much, especially because of the later attributions of the names, seem to reify that, but also mostly men are trained to be literate in the ancient world. It's not exclusive, but predominantly the case. So I know that they're men. Beyond that, they not even Luke tells me who he is and precisely, but what I do know in terms of historical re-description, I know how ancient teaching worked or school, we might call it worked, what the word we use is paideia and we can talk more about that. I know what it took to go to paideia. I know how much, again, as a historian, paideia would have taken to be able to write prose literature. I know generally how people published and exchanged texts, which I think especially the synoptic gospels are demonstrating the exchange of texts between authors or at least allusions to other authors and writing and overwriting other versions of stories. I know literary genres and antiquity that these gospels represent or at least resemble in some way, ancient biography, ancient paradoxography, the ancient Greek novel, all of these are operational categories. They didn't have the concept of genre and antiquity, but people understood that they were writing a certain kind of literature when they sat down to write, if they were an ancient author. Gospels correspond to many of these different kinds of approaches. So you can reconstruct the author pretty securely by looking at the technique, the style, the sophistication, the training, the points of reference and the exchange that's represented in these texts. And I would pause it and perhaps it's a radical thesis, but you can gain a lot more knowledge about early Christianity and what it was like by thinking about who these authors must have been rather than engage that very theological or at least theologically interested reconstruction of history based on ideas of oral tradition and spokespersons and communities, which I don't doubt there are probably, Christian ecclesia associated that these authors were associated with, otherwise why would they care, right? But I don't think it's the most formative thing. The most formative influence for these authors, I think, is that training, the Paideia, their knowledge of literature, their illusions to different kinds of literature and their display of skill as writers, not their desire to record oral tradition in the community, the the findings or interests of a community that, honestly, we just, we don't know is there. We just don't, we just don't know is there. And none of these authors tell us that that's the case. So it's almost like an Occam's razor thing. What's the simplest explanation and the one that I can really, again, as a historian make a few more definitive conclusions about. And I can talk about what a text shows me in terms of an author's training and knowledge. I can't tell you what it tells me about their friends or like what communities they may or may not have been a part of precisely or any of these other kind of, like how much oral tradition is involved. I can't definitively tell you much about that. And I try to be really reasonable about the extent of evidence, what I can prove and what I can't prove, or at least backup. And so that's something I try to be conscientious about and reconstructing this kind of history or thinking about how we can understand that social context for these authors. Well said. Thank you for that very concise answer. It wasn't very concise. I don't know if that's a take. No, I loved it. Cause it really gets to the next point that I think the book really succinctly points out that I like to make this analogy. Nobody reads Daphnis and Chloe and assumes that Longinus is writing for a pastoral utopian group of people, shepherds out in the middle of nowhere living this beautiful buccal life. They just don't like, but for some reason we tend to do this with the gospels, which is very interesting. We want to know something, like we want to know what was it like to be around Jesus? Like what was that early community like? And it's really frustrating to realize that you have like Paul's letters, never met Jesus and then the gospels, which are generations later. And so if you really want to know something about Jesus, it's very, very, very difficult. Now the problem is not to try to use these texts as some kind of metric for figuring out what's going on in the first century, right? But that's fine. I'm not even here to completely dismiss the idea of oral tradition. If you can figure out the literary reference points for the gospel authors, whether they could be citing paradoxography or citing other gospels or citing, you know, Virgil, then you might be left with some kind of, you know, data or a few lines or something that you might say, okay, maybe the community was saying these things, right? But I think that there's a better way to do that. My problem tends to be twofold. One is that if you assume the community authorship model that you were discussing a second ago, one thing that can happen is you see a lot of literature, and I'm not calling anybody out in the field, but, you know, having entered the field with several generations of books along these lines talking about community reconstruction, I was actually the student of a student of Boltmans. So I was coming up within this context. Every book had a different take on what that community must be, like reading the same exact text, right? How could they, we're not getting anywhere, right? With that particular model, but also there's so much precision-posited in these reconstructive models of the community through the text that I think really stretch credulity. So Matthew always comes to mind for me. I think I've talked about this in the past, but you'll have, well, there are these passages that demonstrate some conflict within factions of Judaism at the time. So this must mean the Christian community has been kicked out of the synagogue and they're angry. And so they write this text because they're angry at the synagogue. And I'm just saying to myself, how on earth do you know that from some lines that just represent a developing social movement that is trying to associate certain kinds of, again, factions like within a religious system for like kind of intro religious purposes, right? Like nothing to do with a community kicked out of a synagogue that's pissed off. Do you see what I mean? Like the level of specificity that kind of merges sort of baffling. Yeah, absolutely. And it also begs the question as well. If these are being created by elite cultural producers, which we will get to you in a second, we can't really posit anything historically beyond their in dialogue with each other and they're creating a compelling story. So like you said, how do we know that this is historical fact that these groups at the time are competing, maybe it's just as simple as Matthew wants to create a compelling story and he has Topoi that he uses to- Matthew thought, yeah, like Mark stunk. Like he read Mark and he's like, what is this? You know, I can write a better story than this or the thing with Matthew that worries me, I've cited this scholar before, there's a scholar named Aaron Roberts who has a book forthcoming, Shekche's two forthcoming books where she points out there's a lot of stoic philosophy in the gospel of Matthew, particularly around the concept of anger. The Jesus exercises anger in that text in a way that you don't see in the other gospels that correspond to first century ideas about this within stoicism. If you're so focused on a community model trying to figure out who's been kicked out of the synagogue, you're gonna totally miss those kinds of literary references, which again, add, I think more texture and interest to who's producing this literature without having to sort of obsess over using this literature as a lens to a community that again, may or may not be there, you sort of lose what the author may have intended with their very rational decision making as a literate cultural producer. Absolutely, it's kind of like we miss little things and like say John, for instance, where why is Jesus, we're not asking ourselves, why is Jesus working himself up into a mania to raise Lazarus? Why are they using these same words that you find in the Greek magical papyri? So, you know, as Brian Copenhaver pointed out in his book, The Book of Magic, but I digress, we could do a whole other show on that. I wanted to get back to this whole idea of an elite cultural producer and the concept of Pidea. As you pointed out, the main ingredient to be an elite cultural producer, to create literature was Pidea. In my discussions with Dr. Edward Watts, who literally wrote a book on Pidea, and sitting in school in antiquity, he really drove home the point that Pidea is not just education. This is a code of conduct that bounds social networks together. And this goes back to your idea of social circles. So, if you could briefly kind of give the audience who are watching, who are unfamiliar with Pidea, kind of brief overview. Sure. So, one just quick note is that when I talk about literate cultural producers, I think, or elite cultural producers, I mean, you think elite and you think kind of like rich or upper class or something like that. And I just wanted to dispel that at the get-go because elite in this case, just means kind of at a high level. So, that's why I tend to say like literate cultural producers sometimes, but elite as well, meaning they are very accomplished. So, Pidea is a kind of schooling. I agree that it also involves many other kinds of ways of developing social networks, including sort of corresponding to virtues, Roman ideals of virtue at the time. I mean, even like Pidea included things like wrestling, right? So, it's kind of like this idea of forming social bonds, absolutely. The way that I talk about Pidea in the book is to kind of just give a brief primer on it. It's sort of like, it is just sort of like going to school, but you could go at different levels. And I talk about it in those terms because I am talking about people who end up writing books, right? Or writing books, texts. And so, you would try to go to Pidea or at least engage in education, literate education, depending on need for the most part in the ancient world. Meaning you might go to school only long enough, say you need to be a bookkeeper before your family business. Somebody might send you to school long enough to learn how to do bookkeeping. Or if you're going to be some kind of scribe, you might go long enough to learn how to do those certain scribal activities. But there was no mandatory education in the ancient world. In fact, most people were born into households where you went to work as soon as you could help out within that family unit. There were street teachers and things like that, so you might get like a little bit of education. Or if you were a wealthier, you could hire a tutor to try to give that kind of instruction. But generally speaking, people who went to school long enough to learn to read and write, to have the means for access to even things like papyri and ink, this was a pretty rarefied group, as I mentioned before. And you would have to go to school for a pretty long time and learn all kinds of rhetorical training in addition to just kind of the basics of how to read and write and to create prose literature or poetry, I forgot, there's the drugs, poetry or verse literature. You would have to go to school for a pretty long time to do that. And you would learn to do things in Paidea like one of my favorite examples of a school exercise was think about Medea, like Euripides Medea. If she ran, this is not a real one, but something like write a monologue if Medea ran into Jason again, like at the supermarket and she just killed his kids, like what would she say? Or a better one, because they weren't running to each other that way, would be, she decides not to kill her kids. What would be the speech that she would get? The declination, right? Exactly. You would train in those ways. Or Paul, for example, shows that he's kind of reached, he's reached a pretty high level of that kind of rhetorical education. So you see him deploy not only philosophical ideas, which has been well-established in literature on Paul to this point, over especially the last few decades, but he often uses things like diatribe question and answer, which is exactly what you see like say in Plato, right? So he's learned that someplace. And so usually, especially if you're learning Greek, which we're talking about that for the gospel authors, they would have read Homer. They would have read Plato. We just kind of know what those school exercises would have looked like. And so you have an idea already there on what kinds of materials you would have learned on in this kind of preliminary education, leading into kind of, again, more rarefied status. So you probably would have been in school with a certain network of people. If you're wealthy, you're probably going to go on. And it's almost like a leisure kind of activity at a certain point for some. Others, again, would have stayed in school for a long enough to learn their craft or their trade and then leave. So we have a group of people able to write at the level that we see the gospel writers. They actually are all a little bit of different different levels, I would say. Luke has clearly read some Greek novels and he has a little bit more artfulness than Matthew and Mark do. It's a little bit of an aesthetic judgment, but it's also kind of true. You could just kind of tell Luke has a little more style going on. So he may have had a little more education than the others. But anybody who can write like that is already pretty high up there, I think, in terms of their ability to compose writing. Yeah, it's really interesting with Luke. I see Luke as kind of like, think of the concept of like cover songs. Say Mark is like the punk rock song, the original punk rock version, and then you have Matthew kind of doing more like a prog rock and then you have Luke coming along and doing like this really insane intricate math rock or synth pop rock. I heard, I got some clickbait the other day, because I'm a 90s chick. So I mean, like 90s early aughts and somebody had taken Nirvana and taken all the guitar riffs and like turned them into like a pop song, just by kind of, you know, and then all of a sudden it's like, am I listening to the Guru Buddha also? Like what is frightening? But, you know, you do have that kind of the different patina on each one, right? And that's what I mean going back to your first question. That's really interesting because rather than ascribing a theological meaning to the differences that you see between the gospel, we're just talking about the canonical gospels, nevermind the non-canonicals and you know, everything else that's out there. But let's just think about the synoptics just to keep it simple. Rather than making theological judgments and assumptions about communities of religious people forming the content of these gospels, you can make much, I think, more fruitful comparisons with other kinds of literature that exist in the imperial age when these are written to both explain why authors make certain choices, of course, but also why anybody else would be interested in these narratives other than, you know, a community of Christians, right? Because we know these things circulated. We know by the second century that someone like Pliny in his circle, they're at least familiar with Christians if not Christian literature. And then Lucian, you know, by the time we get to Lucian actually names Christians. Again, he may just be familiar with the group, right? In terms of the religion that there are Christians out there. But there's often some specificity in these texts that suggest to me that the gospels are circulating more widely than just within Christian circles. And it's an argument I made in the book comparing the gospels to the satiricon, which is a text that, you know, has things like a last supper and has three men being crucified. And all of it is sat, it seems like satire on a level that's so specific. You wonder if the author of the satiricon, you know, whether there's a disagreement within the classical, within classical studies on whether it's Petronius or an anonymous text. But whoever it is, whether it's Petronius or a second century author kind of doesn't matter. It matters a little bit with the dating, but the general point is, you know, this shows more than a passing familiarity with these texts. And you see the same thing with Apoleius. Some people, PG Wall, she's a scholar who's made that argument that, you know, the donkey was often associated with Christians by those outside of Christianity for various reasons. And there are other allusions to different characters within Apoleius who might be Christian because they're taught, they could be Jewish too, because there's discussion about this one, you know, these characters have at least one that comes from this one woman has abandoned all the other gods for one God, right? You see these allusions that sound like, especially the second century authors that there are these networks that are well literate networks that are well aware of this material and satirizing it. Absolutely, and well said. Thank you so much for that answer. Yeah, I think you see it even, Courtney Friesen has argued that you see it even in something like Book Two of a Leucopy and Clutophon by Achilles Tejas. Like the whole concept, the origin of Dionysus bringing the vine uses word for word in places what Mark is using in terms of the institution of the Last Supper. So not everybody's convinced by that. I tend to kind of be on that side. It's very compelling article. But Satirakon is a great example, just like you said. It's another example of somebody who obviously has a very high level of training, but he's dealing with low level on the ground kind of people things. These figures like you find in the Gospels, these Judean peasants and these kind of idyllic figures, you know? But in this sense, it's more of like a perverse, obviously situation, especially with the widow and the 52. The widow of Ephesus, yeah. Although I will say, so just two notes of like number one, back to your point before. No one tries to use Apollaeus to talk about what ISIS cult was like, right? You know what I mean? Like nobody uses it for the same purposes we use early Christian literature or at least try to in terms of reconstructing some kind of historical situation. It can inform our knowledge about reconstructing those periods, but it can't be the source of knowledge alone for that kind of reconstruction of religious practice or holdings or peoples, right? And in the widow of Ephesus too, the funny thing about that is that particular story type actually goes back even before the satiricon, which is interesting, but it's that the satiricon takes that very specific, you know, like the Roman guard over three crucified men, right? Not just kind of the ravenous widow in the tomb, but to take such detail, it just seems, again, Occam's razor, you know, like what are the odds that there isn't some kind of overlap here? Or at the very least, let's test it, right? Cause we haven't before. So I can remember in grad school, sometimes people saying like, well, I don't know if I should go into this field cause there's nothing left to do. And I think that's the complete opposite because there is so much comparison to do once you break out of this lane of only comparing Christian materials with other Christian materials or with, you know, Jewish scripture and keeping such a narrow field. I think if we broaden that field, it gets much more interesting. Very much so. That's one of the things I try to do with my show. I tend to take, I think a lot of shows tend to just focus more on Christianity and it's interplays with Judaism in itself. What I wanted to do with my show is I wanted to take a stance where I'm looking at these texts just like any other texts. I'm reading, I'm reading Mark just like I would read Cariton just like I would read. Obviously you have to read them within certain genre and boundaries, but I mean, they're all in dialogue with each other, just like you said. And I wanted to bring this up. We will get back to him, but I found this really interesting. We mentioned, you mentioned Lucian. So Lucian is very interesting because in his introduction to a true story, he says something very interesting. He's basically telling us what your book is basically telling us about these social circles. I trust the present work will be found to inspire such reflection. My readers will be attracted not merely by the novelty of the subject, the appeal of the general design and the conviction and versimilitude with which I compound elaborate prevacariations, but also by the humorous illusions in every part of my story to various poets, historians, and philosophers of former times who have concocted long, fantastic yarns. Writers I should mention by name, did I not think their identities would be obvious to you as you read? So he's writing for his audience. Yeah, these are like the Easter eggs of antiquity in a sense. They are, and they're frustrating for us, right? Because then I want you to name somebody so I can make what I think is a more secure comparison, but we often hold these texts to a standard, a modern standard of like historicity or even like citation practice that didn't pertain in the ancient world. So meaning like they didn't have to have their footnotes. Like they didn't have to have, you could plagiarize. It was, that was okay in the ancient world. Somebody might call you out on it, but how someone's not gonna be able to Google your facts. Someone can't like, double check, run your version of something through some kind of like plagiarism checker, right? You could make all kinds of claims and part of the game beyond that is like you say the Easter eggs, like the illusions to other kinds of literature. And it almost create, and that's that network that, back to again your first question, like I'm much more interested in that social circle, that literate social circle and what the illusions are and where those fault lines are. And I think that's much more formative and that's a great passage that you put up there. Because again, it tells us a little bit about process and about these authors that these are their objectives because this is what their training taught them to do. And generally speaking, human beings are pretty egoistic and an author wants to produce something that's going to be compelling, interesting that other people wanna read. And so the more you put, you pepper in those kinds of references and create all those layers, it's just more interesting for an audience to play with. So that is definitely part of the game. Yeah, absolutely. I hate to bring up another music reference but it kind of reminds me of that whole time period back in the early 70s where David Bowie was really influenced by Iggy Pop and the Stooges and he was really influenced by the Velvet Underground and Lou Reed. And he would take these little things and he would put his little mark on it and he would put little, basically we would consider it a rip-off but he would do the little licks and that's kind of like him winking at his contemporaries. Like you were talking about in the conclusion of your book in terms of Picasso and his social stuff. Yeah. Doing the same thing. He's kind of like, that's my take on it. And they're doing the same thing in antiquity. Like they're putting their own spin on things and that's very fascinating just how the creativity- Yeah. Well, I'm glad you brought that up. I wonder how many people make it to the end of the book but I do have kind of an afterword, I forget what I called it, some kind of addendum sort of to the end where I talked about two things and one was Picasso because he was very influenced by El Greco and he would often make allusions to El Greco's paintings that maybe he's just remembering or he's doing it as some, it doesn't even have to be competitive. It can be an homage that is demonstrating his appreciation especially as a Spaniard to another Spanish painter to certain kinds of ideas. But again, it's always layered because in that artwork, at the time, as I mentioned in the book, his partner was Francois Gilot, who was also a painter. And he had, there were lay motifs that he would use to indicate her. He always did with his partners, whether it's Dora Maher or anyone else later on. And so she's in there too and she was a painter. And one thing that I start off that section with is she's still alive. I think she's a hundred years old if she's watching it. I love you, but she's still alive and she's a real spitfire, she's fantastic. And there's a painting he did of her where she has a pencil tied to a string to the desk. And apparently academics write these long pieces like John Richardson and others about how like, oh, well, she used to tie her pencil to her desk when she was drawing because her children would come and knock it off. And she says, no, absolutely not. I don't know why he put that string there. I never drew like that. So you actually have somebody who says, so I titled it Strange Pencils because she says, that's a strange pencil. I never drew like that. So it's always interesting to see that combination of the homage, the professionalization really within an artistic endeavor, whether it's writing or painting or poetry. I mentioned poetry in that section too, with the craft, but also the historical element, right? And the inventiveness. And my point there was that, you know, the element of invention, we have to allow for that. And that's really difficult because we have to let go sometimes and understand that again, whether it's a poet or an artist or a writer, there's creative invention that goes on. That might just mean that that person is playing with ideas or making an homage to someone else. And if you can again, identify those fault lines, that's great, but if you can't, it doesn't mean that every single element back to like reconstructing community, how do we know that the gospel authors aren't just inventing something as part of their craft rather than it reflecting the needs of a community? So back to the rational activity of authors. I just think it's important to be aware of that when we talk about any kind of historical evidence. Yeah, absolutely. I just think it's really, honestly, a much more evidence-based approach is when you kind of think of like a romanticized vult and, you know, this voice, like you can pretty much paint anything onto it. It's kind of like Jesus' biography, right? It's like, you look for the historical Jesus you find exactly, you see, you find yourself, right? So we just- Yeah, we see that with Jesus' art too, right? Like he always looks like an idealized man for the century or the period or the people who are drawing him. Yeah, you see it in art as well as in literature. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So we're talking about social circles and these artists and in the modern day, I mean, in antiquity just as much in the modern day, these social circles tend to discuss things, they tend to be in dialogue. So we know just by virtue of the fact and you touch upon this in your book, just by many times, these works are in dialogue with each other by virtue of how works are published in antiquity. And they utilize certain genres, and like you said, genres of constructed kind of term, but we use that heristically to interpret text so they're doing the same thing back then. So one of the things that's very interesting in general audiences aren't exposed to enough is that during this period of time, which is an explosion of different forms of literature are established or an ascendancy at the same time, you have things like, like you mentioned the Greek novels, you have pastoral poetry, paradoxography, bioway, it's a multitude of things, fictional letters, like Paul is using a very, we don't realize that Paul is not just utilizing letters because I mean, that's a way of communication, but letters we have to understand that letters were extremely like popular in antiquity. Yeah, they weren't always private. I mean, they weren't always private on two levels. Like sometimes what you, like people often sent letters on what's called ostraca. So just like pieces of pottery, they couldn't get a hand of, so it's like a postcard, anyone can read your postcard. But what you mean, I think is like, understanding that a letter will be circulated, that it's not a closed loop on... Yeah, yeah. Yeah, you often have, you have that through, you know, I mean, Benjamin Franklin used to do that strategically, you know, it's very common. So I didn't know if we could just kind of briefly touch upon these literary techniques and the genres really quickly. You've touched upon a few of them, but just like you mentioned, these are creative people. These are cultural producers, literate people who obviously have a high education level, but also they're working within the parameters of an expected genre sometimes. So I didn't know if you could just talk about these genres a little bit more, if you can, and just kind of give us more of your view. Yeah, so the genre is, again, like you said, a modern designation. So, you know, lest I start talking about this and people are like, well, she just named six genres that the Gospels are. That's not what I mean. I just mean, they're touching upon, like you said, different strategies at different moments. And one thing that kind of throws us off is that we have this term gospel, and we understand that almost as its own genre now. But it's kind of like, you know, all this terminology, even the word we use for church ecclesia, that word existed well before Paul ever used it, and it meant something at the time that was different than how Christianity comes to interpret it after a number of years. So the term gospel just means good news, and that was, you know, the context for presenting this particular story. And so we've used that and turned that into a genre, but what we see characteristically of that particular kind of writing is allusions to what we might call biography. So especially, you don't have this in Mark because there's no baby Jesus in Mark, but Matthew and Luke especially, make sure to add in basically a cradle to grave story, which was quite common, especially for accounts of great men, great warriors. The example I often use that's, you know, we're thinking about imperial literature is Plutarch's Life of Alexander. I find myself going back to that example several times, not only because he gives very similar kinds of prefatory remarks about his intentions in writing the way we see with Luke, but he also has many sort of thematic elements that are very similar to what you find in the gospels. And even later literature, like the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, where, you know, as a child, he was always smarter than everyone else, you know, like the great hero, whether it's Alexander or Jesus, they can produce like even healing, you know, Alexander the Great is able to heal his friends because he learns potions really well. You have some kind of genealogy. So I saw you just had Matthew up there that established sometimes that, you know, your great hero was secretly the son of a God and the mother didn't know because the God disguised themselves as her husband or, you know, snuck in as an animal or something like that, right? You have the kind of- Yeah, you find that in Alexander Romance too. Exactly. Very interesting catfish story, very strange though. It is a real catfish story. The first example. I like that. You have these historical catfishing stories that explain why this guy is the way that he is. And then you have these sort of meditations on their character, on their virtues, kind of back to even the Paideia thing, you know, like how do they exemplify certain kind of values that make them worthy of the attention that they're receiving for this text or how did they become such a great fighter? How did they become such an ideal philosopher? How did they become such an ethical human being? And so there's almost like a proof text to that, whether it's through genealogy, childhood stories, but again, that cradle to grave sort of approach. So you see that. Paradoxography you mentioned, just to kind of give a few brief, again, you know, touch points, paradoxography was basically like an ancient Ripley's Believe It or Not. So you would have a lot of interest in giving just kind of a few details about a particular region or town even. You would see these collections circulate where you would have a list, even thematically, of things like here are all the people I've heard. So this is what the paradoxographers would write. Here's a list of long-lived persons. So, you know, I heard there was a guy in Thessaloniki who lived to be like a thousand three. I heard there was a guy in Corinth who lived to be, you know, like 971. Like you would just have this kind of thing. Amazing births were also quite common in paradoxography, which is interesting because often you would have a formula that would be during the reign of so-and-so, a woman gave birth to a baby with the head of anubis and everyone freaked out and threw it in the tiber. Like you would have these kinds, but that's exactly how Luke tells time too, right? You know, during the reign of Augustus when Carinius was governor, Mary, the virgin, gives birth to the son of God, right? But that formula is exactly the kind of formula you would have seen in miraculous births in paradoxography. So you have those kinds of accounts, accounts of especially like, you know, reanimated dead bodies, things like that. So people were interested in these kind of wonder tales. And when you think about the Gospels and we just kind of look at it birds eye view without thinking about Christian communities, about trying to reconstruct the historical Jesus without thinking about 2,000 years of church history, what you basically have are vignettes of Jesus going to places and doing miraculous things, right? So you can see the overlap between paradoxography and biography there alone. Cradle to grave story about a remarkable figure with that like kind of human interest element of what was it like in the Galilee? You know, what are some like fun facts about the Galilee? What are some fun facts about Judea? What are some fun facts even about like the Jewish people who live in Judea, which tells you a little bit about what's the audience? Is that a Christian community or, you know, a broad Roman community that's interested in Jewish stuff now that the temple has fallen and the war has happened? And you know what I mean? Like there's something else going on there that's worthy of evaluation when you start thinking in those terms and seeing again that kind of combination of different genre influences. And then of course you have the Greek novel, which also sort of existed before the Gospels, but also sort of reaches a height at the same time as the Gospels, because it is at that level that's more aspirational in terms of like not the highest kind of literary production, not Virgil and not Homer, not, you know, like, you know, like these great thinkers of the first century, you know, it's not at the level of say a Philo or somebody like that. The Greek novel was, you know, more accessible in terms of its language and its content. You know, Koine, Greek, common Greek in general, that's also the case. So you have in those stories though, you know, Shakespeare stole a lot. I think from the Greek novel, you often have, you know, like two lovers who are torn apart who have to, you know, find a way, usually they're in some kind of bucolic countryside and they're torn apart and have to find each other again, but in the course of that, there's usually a shipwreck or, you know, some kind of like the hero is forced to go on some kind of like journey. And you have that in Luke, right? He's got, I always mentioned, you know, he's got the shipwreck nobody else has. So he has a much more dramatic birth narrative, the one that we think about at Christmas time, you know, he manages to put a lot more art, but a lot more of that dramatic kind of novelist interest into his version of the story. So you can imagine, he maybe looked at Mark and said, well, this is just paradoxography. You know, let me take that as a structure for writing a novel and then, and writes more of a novelistic kind of novel biography. So yeah, that's basically how you can start to see genre influence. No, that's awesome. Thank you for that answer. That was a well put. And I think it's also interesting to note that these different genres, for lack of a better term, like you were saying in the Gospels, they kind of overlap the marvels and the, you know, all the different bio-way. You also find that in something like Achilles Tejas with Luke, he included a font. He includes paradoxography in one section. He includes, he includes a story from Aesop's fables when the two slaves are talking to each other. He's using a, you know, so like he's as another example of an elite cultural era, literate cultural producer who's kind of like taking things that he knows will create a compelling story, a topoi, and putting those together in very interesting ways. Yeah, I should mention, you know, sorry, but like, you know, and also Jewish literature, right? Like they're taking the scriptures, all of the gospel authors and fusing that in to this model as well. And so that makes it really interesting too. But, you know, we're focusing kind of on the Greek side of things for this conversation, right? Oh no, it's just as important, but it's a, I feel it's an area that a lot of channels explore already. So I wanted to kind of focus on this, but yeah, absolutely. And that brings us to another good example of a cultural producer who is using the Hebrew scriptures and these, if you wanna say like the cultural milieu of his time, Philo, you mentioned Philo in the book as a very paradigmatic example of this type of person, which I found very, you know, very useful and interesting. Cause, you know, like you said in the book, nobody like looks at Philo and says he's speaking for a phylonic Jewish school, right? He's pretty much like anybody who's like a phylonic scholar will tell you that Philo is pretty much just doing his own thing. So it's very interesting, but you look at the gospels and that's what we're doing with this theological kind of. Yeah. And you know, the funny thing about Philo is he, like you say, he does play around biography as well as the kind of utopian literature you mentioned before. So he has what he writes something that's usually referred to as the therapeutic tie where he talks about sort of an idealized religious community. And scholars have wondered, you know, did these communities really exist? But I've also seen some scholarship play with the idea is he describing an ideal Christian community. So you can already see, you know, like the methodological kind of gymnastics that people tend to go through, but nobody tries to say Philo is part of a therapeutic tie community, you know what I mean? Like you don't do that. Or if you assume that he has some kind of, the most you assume there is he has a knowledge of Judaism, right? And so that's one influential social circle or sphere or network that he's a part of that's influencing his content, but it's his knowledge of philosophy, his knowledge of the literature of the age, his associations with the aristocracy that ends up informing all his content as well without deferring to this notion that he is making choices for a community of people alone. Well said, well said. I know we're running short on time, Dr. Walsh. So I will just, if you have time for a couple more questions. Sure. Perfect. So let me see here. So I wanted to get into a concept that you coined with biography, subversive biography. So for the past 30 years since the pioneering work of Burrage, the Gospels are firmly considered Greco-Roman biography after a very long period of time where they were considered so generous and, you know, a completely new form of literature that just exploded. So with your term, subversive biography and the article and in the book that you expand upon it, how did these Gospels and their subjects subvert expectations? So what I argue in the article with David Constan and then I added some more on actually Esop in the book as well as a little bit more on Christian literature but I focused on Esop because he's also one of these kinds of subversive characters. You know, often there's an expectation when we were talking about the standards of biography a moment ago that you're gonna write about great statesmen or great warriors or, you know, great figures that are kind of in the positive side of things, right? They're great because they succeed. But I trace with David Constan a tradition of biography that is subversive in the sense that your kind of main character it either doesn't turn out for him the way that you expect again, usually a hymn or their success comes in unexpected ways that subvert kind of the powers that be. So in other words, Jesus, just to give the example you know, at the end he dies, you know and he doesn't come back, right? With his heavenly army and as a warrior in the gospel itself, right? He's killed by Rome. And so it's subversive in that he's an underdog. You know, he's often misunderstood. I mean, think about Mark, not even his disciples understand who he is or what he's doing for most of that gospel. He gets by on his wits. He gets by wonder working, by miracle working by speaking in parables. You know, that we see this Alexander Romance follows this model. Again, Esau follows this model. You see this picked up by later hagiographies of the saints. So, you know, within the Christian tradition you see a trajectory where it picks up this motif from this kind of class of literature and goes forward. And so what I argue there and I've also argued in another piece I have on what I call imperial captive literature is you have an interesting combination of Jesus becoming to use an overused phrase good to think with by these authors in the sense that if this literature is produced after the fall of the temple which is the consensus view of scholarship because of the references to the fall of the temple in the gospels, especially Mark 13, then you have a period in which there's going to be increased interest in Jewish stuff by the general Roman empire or the empire at large not only because this was a territory that was under dispute and conflict for quite some time but because from the spoils of that temple you have things like the Arch of Titus the Judea Capitacoin, you know, what we call the Colosseum is built. I mean, this was not a small victory on Rome's part and there was great interest we know in Rome at the time in Judean scriptures and Judean stuff and their literature. And this is why Paul is even remotely successful with any of the Gentiles he speaks to. And so, Jesus becomes again good to think with because here he is, a Judean who is a great interpreter of Jewish scripture who's a great ethical teacher who uses a lot of terminology and teachings that are familiar from what we would call middle Platonism from the imperial period but a combination of Platonism and Stoicism. So these are popular philosophical movements of the time. Some even associated him with things like cynicism and Epicureanism as well but he's reflecting Greek and Roman philosophical ideas and terminology as a character in the gospels. So there are a lot of points of reference in which he becomes compelling. And then whether you like Rome or hate Rome as a reader that he is killed by Rome becomes an interesting point to meditate on, right? Or to at least reflect on, you know does it display the depravity of Rome and like the overreach of empire that they were so unthinking that they, you know crucify the son of God not understanding what they're setting up because especially in the time period these writings are circulating, you know there's at least a very tacit if not explicit implication that he's going to come back and kick their butts. So there's an interesting problem there or even if you are a Roman, you know this is a compelling story about this underdog who is misunderstood and again crucified in this gruesome way even though he was a great ethical moral thinker and a great philosopher. And so there's a lot to wrestle with there in terms of that character development that he's subversive in each case because he is that underdog. He's not a great, he's not an aristocrat he's not even a citizen. He, you know, I know he writes something in the gospel of John but most likely not literate his followers are fishermen. I mean, this is somebody who represents you know, he's from the Galilee. This is somebody who represents a real subversive underdog kind of stratum of society and because of the nature of his death and the prediction of him, you know what's going to happen with the Jewish Messiah which he is supposed to be. There's a lot there for an audience Jewish, you know, Gentile, whatever to wrestle with with that character again, using all of those other elements of literary technique that we've been talking about to make an overall compelling story. Love it, love it, yeah. I just wanted to point this out. I pulled this up from Dr. M. David Littwa's book How the Gospels Became History. He compares Aesop and Jesus to the pharmacos pattern. So he argues that the existence of Aesop in the sixth century BCE is doubted by many researchers. The ancients however, never questioned his historicity regardless of what one thinks of their historicity. These stories followed mythic patterns specifically the pharmacos pattern. And I think that ties into your subversive biography, you know, concept. These are figures who are outsiders but they also have this kind of fascination through the Roman elites obviously who are reading these stories. Rome and the Greek and Roman philosophy has always had this obsession with what's called ancient barbarian wisdom. And they were really interested in these like foreign teachers. Like Jesus would have just fit right perfectly into that mold. You know, things that they're interested in, so. Absolutely. And you know, with the imperial captive piece too, I look to material, you know, material culture is kind of a sloppy term, but you know, like what's surviving in arts and artwork because what you also tend to see among the Romans is that when they conquered a territory or a people, it's almost like they fetishized it, which is very uncomfortable to think about, but you know, it is the case. So the examples that I give in that piece on captive literature is that, you know, after conquests in Gaul, they, you often see this figure called the captive Gaul that is, you know, like this defeated again, barbarian figure quote unquote, that's a terrible term, it's a term they used for, you know, these peoples that they conquered. And another scholar whose work I really like, that's forthcoming is Greta Rodriguez of Brown University. She's our historian who works on triumphal arches. And she actually looks very carefully at the different depictions of so-called quote unquote captives or barbarians that have been conquered by Rome on Roman triumphal imagery. And you know, it helps if the person you've conquered, again commentary on Rome is a worthy opponent that you've been defeated. Again, love Rome or hate Rome, there's a lot to talk about there. So sometimes captives are depicted as, you know, very beautiful because the idea is, and even Josephus tells us after the Jewish war, they picked captives that were particularly tall and good looking and hid their, you know, hideous wounds from war to march them through the streets as a triumph to say like, look at these gorgeous people that we've conquered. I mean, it's really horrible, but there was this idea of, you know, if they were particularly strong or even if they were particularly sort of back to that kind of barbarian motif, but sort of what's the word I want, like rustic, but in like a dangerous way, the fact that you could like face such a foe and still defeat them, it either talks about, you know, Josephus sort of reflects us even in his description of the fall of the temple. You know, he claims that Titus doesn't want it to happen but the Romans get too rubbed up and they destroy the temple against his objections. Again, love or hate Rome, there's a lot to unpack there about the limits of power. And so there's a lot, there's just a lot going on, whether it's in literature or again, artwork to think about how Rome is conceptualizing the other. And you don't even have to look to the ancient world to see that this still goes on. Putin does the same thing with Ukraine all the time, just as one example that we see in media popularly now. Yeah, absolutely. And I'm very excited that somebody's coming out with a book that explores the artistic side of those arches and columns because a few scholars that I really admire are Brigida Kale and Davina Lopez who have done a really fantastic job of looking at this artwork and reinterpreting Paul in terms of identifying with these subjugated people. Yeah. And what does Paul really mean when he, yeah. So it's very interesting. And I very much look forward to this book that you're talking about as well. Dr. Walsh, I have one more question. If you have time, I do- My kid's still not asleep. My husband, you might have seen him in the mirror, snuck in to give me the monitor because he's playing poker. So I still have time, but it looks like I'm going in there to check on a toddler for a couple of minutes. I remember those, mine's 12 now. So I remember those years. Yeah, he's very chilled. Yeah, he doesn't know he can leave the bed. So I'm still in a sweet spot because otherwise we'd have a secondary visitor here who is much more talkative than I am if you can believe it. Oh my gosh, mine was so tall that he would literally climb out of his crib and he would like just like walk into the bedroom and like, hey, aren't you supposed to be asleep? But I digress. So my final question is ultimately would the gospel, especially the author of the gospel of Mark, would the gospel writers necessarily have been Jesus followers themselves? It's a good question. And it's one that I like to debate in part because I think I'm guilty of this. The synopsis of my book mentioned, you know, they could be Christ followers or not, meaning that the people within the literary circle could be, but the way that that sentence, and I'm pretty sure I'm again guilty of constructing it is ambiguous. I think it's more likely than not that these authors were part of some kind of Ecclesia or group that we would identify as Christian or a Jesus group of some kind because even just on the level of, you know, how rarefied again it was to have this kind of knowledge but also access to even things like publication, paper, you know, papyri and ink, you have to have a particular motivation for doing it. You know, it doesn't sound even from his preface like Luke would have been doing this work if the awfulness hadn't paid for it, for example, right? So I think you'd have to have particular interest in producing this kind of literature. But again, my concern is the way in which we keep this as such an insular social model in our minds that that community or that circle, that Christian group, Jesus group is the only thing that could be influencing the content to the point of reconstructing the community through like literary choices that are being made by the author. So I like to think that a better way to conceptualize this, it's complicated but I think it's probably closer to a social model is that again, that education and the literary network is more formative but also that a literary network that may have included people outside of Christianity they were operative as an audience for this literature for the circulation of it or what we might call the publication of it. And so one thing I've been working on for the second book is to try to reconstruct certain literary networks as we know them just from illusions and it's like a little bit of detective work, who went to school with each other in terms of like more elite groups to try to think about what stratum of society can we place these people in terms of these gospel writers in terms of even just what we might call economic status but also social status and how do we understand these networks functioning these literary networks functioning because I do think that's gonna be much more formative in terms of gospel content, genre, decisions, everything we've been talking about in the last hour for what you find there. So yeah, I think that they could be more likely than not are part of Jesus groups is that what's dictating the content of the gospels though? I don't think that's why Luke tells time the way he does. I don't think that's why, you know, philosophical terminology sneaks in. I think Mark, I am one of those people that think that Mark is heavily reliant on the letters of Paul to write his gospel, especially the way that he uses terminology like Pnellma or Numa. I think that's straight out of Paul. I'm actually somebody who thinks that the so-called last supper is also straight out of Paul because Paul says he has a divination experience more or less where the risen Christ or the Lord tells him what happened at this meal before he died, and then you magically see it in the gospel writers. I think they were reading those letters. And so I do think that more formative are these other kinds of pieces of literature. And I think that those literary networks, we know include things that are not Christian, quote unquote. So why would we assume everybody associated with the circulation of these texts are Christian? It's not what the evidence is really spelling out for us. Well said, thank you for that answer. Like I always say, Mark is basically a failed novelist. He's like, he wants to be carried on so bad, but he can't be changed my mind. Dr. Walsh, this has been an absolute honor and pleasure just listening to all these different stories. Everybody can check out her book in a wonderful and importantly, most importantly, affordable paperback. Yeah, thank you for everybody who bought it when it was expensive, sorry, but we did it. We got it over the line. I used to tell everybody, just go to your library. Tell your library to order it. And if we get enough libraries to do that, they would make a paperback. So here we are. So thank you to everyone. Thank you everyone who bought the book and took one for the team, I appreciate it. Dr. Walsh, this has been an honor. I'll sign it if we ever meet each other. I'll sign, I'll sign their book, whatever you want. A free next one, something. But thank you for everybody who paid top dollar. But again, the book does feel like human skin, benefit, you know? There we go. Yeah, the hard copy felt very, very creepy if you're a fan of Hocus Pocus. It was like, it was right on target. Kind of like I'm reading the Necronomicon or 15th century phylo at home. Dr. Walsh, thank you so much for nerving out with me with all these obscure Greco-Roman topics. I really enjoyed it. I hope to have you back again soon. You have a wonderful evening and thank you everyone for stopping by, checking this out. I really do appreciate it. I really enjoyed these lives and the guests make the show, not the other way around. Thank you for tuning in, Dr. Walsh, Dr. Robin Faith Walsh. We will see you soon. Thank you so much. Thanks everybody. Thank you. Bye everybody.