Robyn Faith Walsh is Assistant Professor of the New Testament and Early Christianity at the University of Miami. Editor of the Database of Religious History, she has published articles in Classical Quarterly and Jewish Studies Quarterly, among other publications.

'This breathtakingly original excavation of the hidden ideological commitments of New Testament scholarship challenges many of the dominant assumptions about how and for whom early Christian texts were written. Walsh's lucid prose and polymathic command of classics, literary theory, and modern history is not only essential reading for students of the Gospels, but a field-shaking intervention in how we think about the production of early Christian literature in general.' Candida Moss, Edward Cadbury Professor of Theology, University of Birmingham

• 1. The myth of Christian origins; 2. The Romantic 'big bang': German Romanticism and inherited methodology; 3. Authorship in antiquity: specialization and social formations; 4. Redescribing early Christian literature: the gospels, the Satyrica, and anonymous sources; 5. The gospels as subversive biography.

Robyn Faith Walsh is Assistant Professor of the New Testament and Early Christianity at the University of Miami. Editor of the Database of Religious History, she has published articles in Classical Quarterly and Jewish Studies Quarterly, among other publications.

'This breathtakingly original excavation of the hidden ideological commitments of New Testament scholarship challenges many of the dominant assumptions about how and for whom early Christian texts were written. Walsh's lucid prose and polymathic command of classics, literary theory, and modern history is not only essential reading for students of the Gospels, but a field-shaking intervention in how we think about the production of early Christian literature in general.' Candida Moss, Edward Cadbury Professor of Theology, University of Birmingham

• 1. The myth of Christian origins; 2. The Romantic 'big bang': German Romanticism and inherited methodology; 3. Authorship in antiquity: specialization and social formations; 4. Redescribing early Christian literature: the gospels, the Satyrica, and anonymous sources; 5. The gospels as subversive biography.