CHAPTER 5 - The Gospels as Biographies
CHAPTER 5
The Gospels as Biographies
“The Gospels are biographies. They tell the story of the career of Jesus in order to persuade the reader of his significance.”
GRAHAM STANTON1
“. . . the very fact that they chose to adapt Greco-Roman biographical conventions to tell the story of Jesus indicates that they were centrally concerned to communicate what they thought really happened.”
DAVID AUNE2
A work’s “genre” is its literary “type” or classification. This classification provides the culturally conditioned, conventional expectations according to which a work would normally be read.3 Ancient readers recognized various genre categories; 4 in fact, sometimes they sought to be too precise about such categories. 5 Although as categories genres are fluid and overlap,6 they are not always completely artificial. Ancient writers could adapt them, but genre conventions did provide ranges of definition for those who chose to follow them.