Part 1. Biographies about Jesus
It requires little acquaintance with the Gospels to recognize that they are works about Jesus. It also requires little acquaintance with ancient biography to recognize that its most conspicuous feature is that it nearly always focused on its personal subjects. It therefore comes as no surprise that most Gospels scholars today have embraced the view that the Gospels are ancient biographies.
But what does this identification mean, and what, if any, implications does it have for the Gospels as sources for studying the Jesus of history? First (ch. 2), ancient biographies are not novels, although, depending on how one defines “biography,” some specimens on the fringe of the genre may overlap. This does not mean that biographies lacked any literary techniques also used by novels; it simply means that biographers writing about recent historical figures were constrained by prior material in a way that very few novelists were. The Gospels are not novels, nor are they the kind of biography that we find in the lives of the poets, for which the more historically oriented writers often had only a few paragraphs of material to work with. (As to whether the Gospels, written within living memory of Jesus, would likely have sufficient information to work with, see chs. 14–16.)
Second (ch. 3), tracing the historical development of biographies in Greek and Greco-Roman antiquity shows that the genre developed in a more historiographic direction by the time of the early Roman Empire. First-century Jewish models in Philo and Josephus, for all their flaws, confirm this direction. Ancient audiences would therefore generally expect significant veridicality, or at least significant dependence on prior reports, in first-century biographic works such as the Gospels.1
Third (ch. 4), scholars debate how to classify various ancient biographies and where to assign the Gospels in any such classification scheme. Such proposed divisions are somewhat subjective, and classification schemes often overlap; different arrangements may be valid for different objectives. Insofar as our interests are historical, however, it is relevant to emphasize that the Gospels are biographies of a recent figure, composed in the early empire, and, like most other full biographies from this period, on the historiographic end of the genre broadly defined (even if on a more popular level than elite historiography).
Fourth (ch. 5), first-century audiences expected adaptations in biographies, lessons suitable for moral instruction, and an emphasis on the character of the biographees. They did not expect anecdotes to appear in actual chronological sequence, apart from (often) the subject’s early development and (usually) the events surrounding his death. We should therefore expect ancient biographies to blend, to varying degrees, fidelity to their sources with flexibility in their presentation.
1. Because “significant” is a relative term, I explore the ranges of dependence and variation in ancient biographies in parts 2 and 3 of this book.