Ancient biography gospels

We are all familiar with the New Testament gospels — Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. They provide some of the most important literary testimony about the life and teachings of Jesus Christ. Significantly, as often as we read the gospels, we may not always consider the style in which the gospel writers share their message.

Recognizing the literary style of various scriptures can enhance our engagement with the message of the scriptures. Just as understanding Isaiah's poetic style can help readers more fully appreciate his divinely commended message, so too, we can benefit by recognizing the features of the gospels’ literary style.

Ancient biography (or a modified form of ancient biography) is the literary type in which these writings were cast by the gospel writers. For more than a century biblical scholars disagreed about the literary style of the gospels. But recently there has been growing and wide acceptance that the gospels are ancient biographies. Rev. Professor Richard A. Burridge's book "What are the Gospels?: A Comparison with Graeco-Roman Biography" is a major factor in this new understanding.

However, we must realize that there are important differences between ancient and modern biographies. Modern biographies focus on character development over a lifetime. And they seek to be exhaustive in their representation of the character.

Ancient biographies, in contrast, typically assume that character is innate and unchanging. The ancient biographer need not share the entire life of an individual. Hence there is no reason to focus on the individual’s childhood since a few select stories or instances will highlight the unchanging character of the individual from birth until death. This may explain why we know so little about Jesus’ youth.

Ancient biographies also had other purposes. Many were written to:

First, compile words and deeds of great men. Second, preser

This article is part of a series entitled ‘Are the Gospels Reliable Sources?’. The rest of this series can be read here. The bibliography of this series can be found here.

‘It requires little acquaintance with the Gospels to recognize

that they are works about Jesus. It also requires little acquaintance with ancient biography to recognize that its most conspicuous feature is that it nearly always focused on its personal subjects. It therefore comes as no surprise that most Gospels scholars today have embraced the view that the Gospels are ancient biographies.’ 

Dr Craig Keener: Professor of Biblical Studies at Asbury Theological Seminary 

If the Gospels are eyewitness accounts, the question remains as to what kind of literature they are.  If an eyewitness wrote a fictional story, it would be very different to if they wrote a historical account. The majority of scholars today agree that the Gospels are ancient biographies. This was also the case all the way up to the beginning of the twenty-first century. Critics changed this thinking when they advocated that the Gospels were a unique genre, similar to folklore. They were challenged by scholars like Charles Talbert, in 1977, and Philip Shuler, in 1982, who both compared the Gospels with ancient biographies. Both Talbert and Shuler’s arguments had weaknesses, but they laid the groundwork for future study. Klaus Berger and his student Dirk Firckenschmidt also advocated that the Gospels were biographies, but it was Richard Burridge’s 1992 book What are the Gospels? that really made an impact. His arguments persuaded the vast majority of scholars that, to at least some degree, the Gospels were Greco-Roman biographies. Burridge identified four main features of Greco-Roman biographies: 

1)   Opening features – Title and introduction that highlight who the biography is fo

• Do the Gospels implicitly self-identify as information-based Greco-Roman biographies, comparable to Suetonius’ Lives of the Caesars? Are they likewise comparable to to Tacitus’ Agricola, Plutarch’s Cato Minor, Lucian’s Demonax, and Philostratus’ Apollonius of Tyana? Do the Gospels fit well within the recognized genre of Greco-Roman “bioi” (biography), or—in the case Luke-Acts—Greco-Roman historical monograph more broadly?

• • Craig Keener: “Most Gospels scholars today view the Gospels as belonging to the genre of ancient biography. Both supporters and detractors now recognize this general consensus…. Arguments concerning the biographical character of the Gospels have thus come full circle: the Gospels, long viewed as biographies of some sort until the early twentieth century, now are widely viewed as biographies again.”
  • Philip Stadter: “Philosophical biography brought out the moral character of its subjects and the relation of their teachings to their lives. Aristoxenus, a pupil of Aristotle, wrote on Pythagoras, Archytas, Socrates, and Plato; Hermippus in the third century wrote Lives of many philosophers, as well as lawgivers and other figures. Diogenes Laertius’ extant Lives of the Philosophers continues the tradition. Since such lives are usually heavy in sayings, as in Lucian’s Demonax, they may be difficult to distinguish from apophthegm collections. The Gospels also belong to this category, as does Philostratus’ novelistic Life of Apollonius of Tyana.”
  • David Aune: “Craig Keener argues convincingly that ancient readers of Greek and Latin biographies from the period of the early Roman Empire (e.g., Cornelius Nepos, Plutarch, Suetonius, and Tacitus) had the same expectation as those who read the Gospels, expecting them to preserve the gist of what their subjects had actually said and done.”
  • Vernon Robbins: “[There is c]omprehensive information showing the relation of Ne

New Testament gospels as historical documents

The historical reliability of the Gospels is evaluated by experts who have not reached complete consensus. While all four canonical gospels contain some sayings and events that may meet at least one of the five criteria for historical reliability used in biblical studies, the assessment and evaluation of these elements is a matter of ongoing debate.

Virtually all scholars of antiquity agree that Jesus of Nazareth existed in 1st-century Judaea in the Southern Levant but scholars differ on the historicity of specific episodes described in the biblical accounts of him. The only two events subject to "almost universal assent" are that Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist and that he was crucified by order of the Roman PrefectPontius Pilate. There is no scholarly consensus about other elements of Jesus's life, including the two accounts of the Nativity of Jesus, the miraculous events such as the resurrection, and certain details of the crucifixion.

According to the majority viewpoint, the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, collectively called the Synoptic Gospels, are the primary sources of historical information about Jesus and the religious movement he founded. The fourth gospel, John, differs greatly from the other three. A growing majority of scholars consider the Gospels to be in the genre of Ancient Greco-Roman biographies, the same genre as Plutarch's Life of Alexander and Life of Caesar. Typically, ancient biographies were written shortly after the death of the subject and included substantial history.

Historians analyze the Gospels critically, attempting to differentiate reliable information from possible inventions, exaggerations, and alterations.^&#