Chapter 74 of 404

Folk Literature?

Not much more helpful is the suggestion that the Gospels represent popular or “folk literature” of the lower classes in contrast to the stylish, sophisticated literature of the upper classes.²⁸ While the Gospels’ oral sources were naturally transmitted in such a folk milieu, such forced categories prove unhelpful for genre criticism of the Gospels: they ignore the continuum between “folk literature” and the more stylish rhetoric and texts that strongly influenced them,²⁹ as well as differences among the Gospels themselves (Luke writes on a much more sophisticated Greek level than Mark).³⁰ Specific genre categories like “biographies” actually appear throughout the continuum.³¹

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