Chapter 78 of 404

Biographies

In more recent years scholars have been returning to the dominant historical consensus that the Gospels represent biographies in the ancient sense of the term.⁶⁷ Biography (the bios, or “life”) was one of the more common literary genres in antiquity; letters were even more so, hence it is not surprising that much of the New Testament consists of these genres.⁶⁸ Graham Stanton regards as “surprisingly inaccurate” the older views of Bultmann and others that the Gospels were not biographies.⁶⁹

To claim that the four canonical Gospels are biographies is not to limit the distinctiveness of the character they portray (sometimes the basis for denial),⁷⁰ but to contend that biography is the most obvious general category for an ancient audience approaching a volume about a single historical individual.⁷¹ Public “lives” (bioi) of important historical individuals include the lives of sages. Surviving Greek examples focus on philosophers, honoring founders of philosophic schools and preserving their teachings.⁷²

We have numerous examples of surviving biographies from within a few decades after the Gospels,⁷³ and others⁷⁴ much earlier. Other works related to biography appear even earlier, but with respect to genre the more historically-oriented works such as these biographies from roughly the Gospels’ era provide the most fruitful comparisons.

After carefully defining the criteria for identifying genre and establishing the characteristic features of Greco-Roman bioi, or lives,⁷⁵ Richard Burridge’s dissertation shows how both the Synoptics and John fit this genre.⁷⁶ (For one example, the lengths of all four canonical Gospels likewise fit the medium-range length — 10,000-25,000 words — found in ancient biographies as opposed to many other kinds of works.)⁷⁷ So forceful is Burridge’s work on gospel genre as biography that one reviewer concludes, “This volume ought to end any legitimate denials of the canonical Gospels’ biographical character.”⁷⁸ Arguments concerning the biographical character of the Gospels have thus come full circle: the Gospels, long viewed as biographies until the early twentieth century, now are widely viewed as biographies again.

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