The primary literary alternative to viewing the Gospels as biography is to view them as intentional fiction,41 a suggestion that I will argue has little to commend it.42 (This observation is not meant to denigrate the value of ancient novels for insights regarding ancient writers’ literary techniques; but these same techniques appear in historical genres as well.)43
The true heyday of novels begins in the late second century44 (not surprisingly the period when apocryphal gospels began to flourish). Nevertheless, first-century readers recognized the genre of novel (the hellenistic “romance”),45 occasionally (though not usually) including novels about historical characters.46 At the same time, ancients usually distinguished between narratives that were intended as fictitious and those that were intended as historical.47
Whereas the apocryphal gospels and apocryphal acts betray characteristics of novels,48 as we noted earlier, the four canonical Gospels much more closely resemble ancient biography.49 Ancient novelists did not usually seek to write historical novels; most focused on fictitious characters.50 A small minority of ancient novels51 built them around historical characters, but none of the examples typically cited involve persons from recent history. This pattern does not at all fit what we find in the first-century Gospels.
Moreover, the use of historical characters and even some historical information was a far cry from historical research and sources (such as Luke’s use of Mark and Q in his Gospel) that characterized biographies. The excesses of some forms of earlier source and redaction criticism notwithstanding, one would also be hard-pressed to find a novel so clearly tied to its sources as Matthew or Luke is.52 Works with a historical prologue like Luke’s (Lk 1:1-4; Acts 1:1-2) were historical works;53 novels lacked such fixtures, although occasionally they could include a proem telling why the author made up the story.54 As we shall show later (especially chs. 11-16), the extant first-century Gospels reflect too much authentic Palestinian Jewish background, sometimes including even obscure cultural details, to be ancient novels.
Further, novels typically reflected the milieu of their readership more than that of their characters,55 a situation quite different from histories and biographies that were readily adapted for readers but focused on historical content. Greek novels often focused on ethnographically or geographically remote subjects not easily checked; this cultural distance allowed the appearance of greater plausibility without requiring genuine research.56 Some novels were realistic,57 but many were inconsistent or uninterested in local color.58 By contrast, local color pervades the Gospels so thoroughly that we sometimes wonder how well Diaspora audiences understood some of the details.
The majority of ancient novels were also “romances,” in which the two major characters were lovers who persevered in faithfulness despite obstacles, with erotic desire playing a leading role.59 Even the Christian apocryphal acts work to accommodate this pattern (except within a framework of chastity),60 but we see nothing of this interest in the earlier, canonical Gospels and Acts.
Finally, novels were written primarily to entertain rather to inform.61 A few62 functioned as religious propaganda as well as entertainment, but entertainment remained a key element, and religious propaganda certainly was in no wise restricted to the genre of novels.63 Nor is entertainment the exclusive domain of novels; historical works intended primarily to inform were nevertheless typically written in an entertaining manner.64 Most ancient works sought to entertain; the question was whether they also sought to inform, which novels did not.65
In contrast to novels, the Gospels do not present themselves as texts composed primarily for entertainment, but as true accounts of Jesus’ ministry. Despite some differences in purpose among themselves, all four Gospels fit the general genre of ancient biography: the “life” (often just the public life) of a prominent person. Such biographies were normally written to praise the person and to communicate some point or points to the writer’s generation. That biographies, like novels, could seek to propagate particular moral and religious perspectives does not challenge the distinction between them; biographies were also often propagandistic in a more general sense, intended to provide role models for moral instruction.66
