This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1967.

Conventional approaches to the Synoptic gospels argue that the gospel authors acted as literate spokespersons for their religious communities. Whether described as documenting intra-group 'oral traditions' or preserving the collective perspectives of their fellow Christ-followers, these writers are treated as something akin to the Romantic poet speaking for their Volk - a questionable framework inherited from nineteenth-century German Romanticism. In this book, Robyn Faith Walsh argues that the Synoptic gospels were written by elite cultural producers working within a dynamic cadre of literate specialists, including persons who may or may not have been professed Christians. Comparing a range of ancient literature, her ground-breaking study demonstrates that the gospels are creative works produced by educated elites interested in Judean teachings, practices, and paradoxographical subjects in the aftermath of the Jewish War and in dialogue with the literature of their age. Walsh's study thus bridges the artificial divide between research on the Synoptic gospels and Classics.

Anaxagoras of Clazomenae (circa. 500 B.C.-428 B.C.) was reportedly the first Presocratic philosopher to settle in Athens. He was a friend of Pericles and his ideas are reflected in the works of Sophocles and Aristophanes. Anaxagoras asserted that Mind is the ordering principle of the cosmos, he explained solar eclipses, and he wrote on a myriad of astronomical, meteorological, and biological phenomena. His metaphysical claim that everything is in everything and his rejection of the possibility of coming to be or passing away are fundamental to all his other views. Because of his philosophical doctrines, Anaxagoras was condemned for impiety and exiled from Athens. This volume presents all of the surviving fragments of Anaxagoras's writings, both the Greek texts and original facing-page English translations for each. Generously supplemented, it includes detailed annotations, as well as five essays that consider the philosophical and interpretive questions raised by Anaxagoras. Also included are new translations of the ancient testimonia concerning Anaxagoras's life and work, showing the importance of the philosopher and his ideas for his contemporaries and successors. This is a much-needed and highly anticipated examination of Anaxagoras of Clazomenae, one of the forerunners of Greek philosophical and scientific thought.