Chapter 72 of 404

Suggestions about Gospel Genre

Readers viewed the Gospels as biographies of some sort from the mid-second century through most of the nineteenth century. This view prevailed until Votaw in 1915,¹⁷ when their differences from modern biography led most scholars to seek a new classification for them.¹⁸ Thus Burton Mack claims that in the early twentieth century scholars realized “that the gospels were not biographies and that they sustained a very problematic relation to history.”¹⁹ Yet as we shall see, this early-twentieth-century verdict about gospel genre has proved premature.

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