The Gospels

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I intend to argue that the New Testament Gospels are biographies! Until quite recently that would have been a surprising position for a modern scholar to take. True, that was the general view from about the second century A.D.¹ to the late 19th century. But, beginning at about that time, the view that the Gospels could be considered biographies was increasingly abandoned as inadequate and inaccurate.

In the 20th century, a new consensus began to emerge: The Gospels were not biographical or historical documents; instead, they were expanded versions of the early Christian kerygma, that is, the proclamation of the saving significance of Jesus. In this assessment, history—biography—took a back seat to theology. The quest for the historical Jesus was put on hold.

While it is true that the Gospels are not biography if measured by modern historical standards, I believe it can be shown that they are biography as that literary genre was understood in the Greco-Roman world. Indeed, the New Testament Gospels are a subtype of Greco-Roman biography.²

In short, while the content of the Gospels is couched in 016distinctively Jewish and Christian categories, both form and function are typically Hellenistic.

The message of the Gospels cannot be properly understood apart from its literary setting. Literary forms are a way of packaging written communications so that contextual meaning is provided for individual sentences and paragraphs. The phrase “once upon a time,” used to introduce some types of English folktales, provides a clear signal to the audience that what follows will be a story that is short, imaginary, interesting and particularly appealing to children. In much the same way, ancient literary forms, such as biography, aroused certain expectations in the audience. Since the message of a literary work is dependent on the “package” in which it is presented, it is important to appreciate its literary setting.

Most readers generally assume that the Gospels are a kind of biography. Why then did early 20th-century scholars generally abandon this view?

Each of the four canonical Gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke and John—focuses on the public career of Jesus, emphasizing his activities as a teacher, preacher and miracle-worker. In support of this programmatic presentation, each of the evangelists includes a variety of relatively short units of discourse and narrative, many of which originally circulated orally. In all, there are approximately 60 parables, three dozen pronouncement stories (brief narratives culminating with a striking saying by Jesus) and 30 miracle stories.

The evangelists place particular emphasis on the final week of Jesus’ life, when he traveled to Jerusalem with his disciples to celebrate Passover and, as clearly anticipated in the plot of each Gospel, to die. In a rapid series of events crowded into a few hours following the Last Supper, Jesus is betrayed by one of his own disciples, arrested, tortured, tried by a kangaroo court and executed.

Defeat is transformed into victory, however. The apparent tragedy of Jesus’ death is reversed by the triumph of his resurrection. This reversal plays a focal role in the concluding section of each Gospel. For this reason, one scholar has recently categorized the Gospels as “tragi-comedies.”³ Comedy here refers not to ha-ha humor, but simply to the fact that the ending is a happy one.

The biographical character of Mark is less pronounced than either Matthew or Luke. Matthew and Luke expanded Mark’s account by beginning before Jesus’ birth; they include a description of the supernatural circumstances of his birth, infancy stories and genealogies. Similarly, Matthew and Luke add various resurrection appearance stories to the end of their compositions. Luke even takes the narrative a step further by ending with an account of Jesus’ ascent into heaven, which was a widespread Greco-Roman mythological motif signifying postmortem deification.

None of the evangelists, however, pretends to be objective. Each writes with a program that is both apologetic and propagandistic. I do not use these words pejoratively, but simply as technical terms. The Gospels are apologetic because each author tries to neutralize or turn to his own advantage the enormous difficulties created by the death of Jesus, whom Christians regarded as the Messiah of Jewish eschatological expectation, a figure whose death was not anticipated. They are propagandistic because each tries to persuade the reader of the ultimate religious significance of Jesus in categories adapted by Christians from early Judaism (for example, rabbi, 017teacher, prophet, messiah, son of God and son of David).

The 20th-century idea that the Gospels should not be regarded as biography, however, stems from reasoning that is a little more subtle: namely the gradual realization that whatever history might be contained in the Gospels, even Mark—widely considered the earliest and once thought the most historically reliable—has heavily overlaid the history with theology, and that this theology represented later views of the religious significance of Jesus projected back into the stories of his ministry. Making a virtue of necessity, New Testament scholars began to see the positive value of regarding the Gospels not as historical but as kerygmatic.

Some scholars even claimed that the evangelists never intended to write a factual or historical account of Jesus’ career. Rudolf Bultmann, probably the single most influential New Testament scholar of this century, observed that “there is no historical-biographical interest in the Gospels, and that is why they have nothing to say about Jesus’ human personality, his appearance and character, his origin, education and development.”⁴

Other, somewhat more arcane, influences affected the scholarly judgment that the Gospels were not biographies. Some neo-orthodox theologians following the First World War asserted that “Christian faith cannot be dependent on the probabilities of historical research.”⁵ The unarticulated fear was that if the Gospels were regarded as biographies—that is, as factual reports of the course and development of the life and ministry of Jesus—they might be used as improper and illegitimate support for faith, a faith that might falter if the historical underpinnings were shown to be insecure. If the Gospels were regarded not as biographical but as kerygmatic—that is, not as factual reports of the life of the historical Jesus but rather as the proclamation of the ultimate religious and existential significance of the Christ of faith—then faith would not and could not be made dependent on the shifting sands of historical research. In the view of scholars who took this approach, the Gospels were not biographies, but expanded versions of the kerygma or proclamation of the significance of Jesus.

Finally, based on what were thought to be advances in research in Hellenistic language and literature, the Gospels were classified as folk literature (Volksliteratur), rather than as a true literary production. To understand the significance of this judgment requires a bit of background. Hellenistic Greek was thought to consist of a “literary language” (literary koine^a) and an “everyday language” (nonliterary koine). Scholars now realize that there were several types of koine Greek between these two extremes. But in the early 20th century, this led to a distinction between two antithetical tiers of literary activity in the Greco-Roman world: Hochliteratur (cultivated literature) and Kleinliteratur (popular literature).⁶ This model was bipolar; something was either this or that. It appealed to elitist literary critics who simply ignored all manifestations of popular language and literature. Classical scholars regarded the meager survivals of Hellenistic popular literature with disdain, and reserved the term “literature” only for the classics of antiquity.

While New Testament scholars recognized that the Gospels belonged to the category of popular literature, they again made a virtue out of necessity. In a celebrated article written in 1923, Karl Ludwig Schmidt “rescued” the Gospels by understanding them as examples of “folk literature,” with all the romantic associations that the term engendered, and by consequently assigning a positive value to their uniqueness and nonliterary character.⁷

So it was not so bad that 018the Gospels could not be defended as modern biographies.

Even if they could not be defended as biographies, the New Testament Gospels could be honored as a unique ancient literary form, virtually without parallel. Until recently, most New Testament scholars were convinced that the Gospels as a whole had no close literary affinities to any ancient Jewish or Greco-Roman literary forms, despite the fact that all the shorter forms used by the evangelists (parables, miracle stories, pronouncement stories, etc.) had either Jewish or Hellenistic parallels.⁸ Even today many scholars defend this position.⁹ But an increasing number are now abandoning this notion.

In one sense the canonical Gospels are unique. Written within the span of a single generation (c. 70–100 A.D.), the four canonical Gospels form a closely related cluster of texts. During the second and third centuries A.D., the production of various types of gospels became something of a growth industry in early Christianity. Surprisingly, however, none closely imitated the canonical Gospels. Scores of anonymous and pseudonymous gospels were produced during this period. The term “gospel” was applied to any and every type of literature that concerned itself in any way with Jesus. Most of these “gospels,” however, tended to focus on a single period of Jesus’ life (for example, his childhood or post-resurrection seminars with his disciples) or on the esoteric significance of his teachings. Some are collections of the sayings of Jesus (the Gospel of Thomas); some focus on stories about Jesus (the fragmentary Gospel of Peter); others are rambling esoteric homilies with little or no resemblance at all to the canonical Gospels (the Gospel of Truth and the Gospel of Philip).¹⁰

The Gospels are also “unique” in the sense that no other ancient composition, Greco-Roman or Jewish, is precisely like them. Yet there are, in fact, a great many other ancient “biographical” compositions, each of which is unique in the sense that it has no exact literary analogue—for example, the popular anonymous life of Secundus the Silent Philosopher,¹¹ Lucian’s Demonax, Tacitus’s Agricola and Philostratus’s Life of Apollonius.

The Hellenistic period was a time of great experimentation in literature. “New” genres emerged through the transformation and recombination in novel ways of earlier forms and genres.

But before pursuing this further, let us, at least in passing, note two scholarly perspectives that have recently changed and that now allow us once again to consider the Gospels as biography.

First, it has become increasingly evident that biography and kerygma are not as antithetical as scholars previously wanted to believe. Most Hellenistic historians were dramatic historians, trained in rhetoric rather than historical research; they blended fact with fiction in a way that modern historians often find mystifying and certainly unacceptable. Biography was even less encumbered than history with an obligation to be completely truthful. Some ancient biographies are almost entirely fiction—for example, the biographies of the early Greek sages in Diogenes Laertius’s Lives of Philosophers, and the anonymous biographies of famous authors written as introductions to their collected works. The early 20th-century denial of the biographical character of the Gospels was based, at least in part, on the illegitimate anachronistic projection of modern 019biographical standards and intentions back into the ancient world.

Second, the bipolar model of social and literary analysis is now recognized as obsolete. The newer, pyramid model suggests that the vertical bonds between people of different classes were much stronger than previously thought, and that the direction of cultural influences was from the top down, not from the bottom up. The literary culture of the highest strata of ancient society percolated down, albeit in weakened, attenuated and even eclectic forms, but nevertheless it did trickle down. The older categories of Hoch- and Kleinliteratur turn out on closer examination to constitute ideal types at opposite ends of a complex spectrum of linguistic and literary styles and levels.¹² While the Gospels must be classified as popular literature and therefore belong to the lower end of the spectrum, the fact that very few popular biographies of any kind have survived makes it difficult to adequately evaluate their relationship to contemporaneous high-literary culture.

If the Gospels are to be considered biographies, what are their models? They of course have their own interrelationships. The verbal similarities between the first three Gospels—the Synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke—are so close that some kind of literary relationship must exist between them. The problem is to determine who copied whom. Most New Testament scholars accept the two-source theory of Gospel origins as the most likely solution to the problem posed by the similarities and differences among the first three Gospels. According to this hypothesis, Matthew and Luke (following the composition technique of ancient writers of nonfiction) reproduced 99 percent of Mark in their own compositions. In places where Matthew and Luke closely agree, but where there are no Markan parallels, Matthew and Luke were probably dependent on a second source, “Q” (from the German term Quelle, meaning source). This source, lost except for the fragments preserved by Matthew and Luke, is often referred to as the Saying Source because it apparently consisted primarily of sayings of Jesus, but it contained few if any stories and makes no mention of the passion and resurrection narratives. According to the two-source theory, then, Matthew and Luke were influenced by at least two literary models, Mark and Q.

The Gospel of John remains an enigma. While scholars no longer agree that the Gospel of John was demonstrably dependent on one or more of the Synoptic Gospels, it is difficult to believe that the author of John was unaware of the existence and basic literary character of the Synoptic Gospels.

Although we know that Matthew and Luke used Mark as both a model and source for their own compositions, the question remains (leaving Q and John aside): Which model or models did the author of Mark use?

What about possible biographical models in the Hebrew Bible or early Judaism? Biblical scholars generally agree that “there are no genuine biographies in the Old Testament.”¹³ Klaus Baltzer attempted to identify and analyze a genre he called “ideal biography” in the Old Testament.¹⁴ These ideal biographies consist of “official,” rather than “personal,” accounts that focus on such features as title, family background, calling, place and time of installation in office, witnesses, installation formulas, area of competence, instructions, words of encouragement and the act of installation. While these topics provide the basis for sketches of various figures, like David, who play central roles in the narrative portions of the Hebrew Bible, the “biographical” elements never focus on individuals for their own sake but are always subservient to other, more overriding, literary intentions.

The legal material in the Pentateuch (Torah) is also interspersed with narrative sections. The narrative sections of Exodus tell us of the birth and early career of Moses (Exodus 2); and Deuteronomy concludes with Moses’ farewell address and an account of his mysterious death and burial (Deuteronomy 33–34). Yet this extensive section of the Torah can hardly be described as biography.

There are also many biographical sections in Joshua through 2 Kings, such as the narrative of the life and adventures of Gideon (Judges 6–8) and the Elijah-Elisha cycle (1 Kings 17 to 2 Kings 10). The stories from this cycle did have an impact on the Gospels. We know this because passages from the cycle functioned as models for particular episodes in the Gospels. For example, Elijah’s resuscitation of the widow’s son in 1 Kings 17:17–24 served as a model for the raising of the woman of Nain’s son in Luke 7:11–17. Elisha’s multiplication of loaves in 2 Kings 4:42–44 served as a model for Jesus’ multiplication of loaves and fishes in Mark 6:30–44.¹⁵ But this does not identify the genre of the Gospels as wholes.

Could Mark have been dependent on early Jewish biographical models penned in the Roman period? Almost certainly the answer is no. Even though Jewish authors wrote a number of biographical compositions during the Roman period, biography itself was never much in fashion among Jews. Moreover, the few biographies that were written by Jewish authors exhibit the striking influence of Hellenistic biographical conventions. The eclectic Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria (died c. 40 A.D.) wrote “lives” of several prominent ancient 020Israelites such as Abraham, Joseph and Moses, but these were highly influenced by Hellenistic literary and philosophical conventions. The historian Josephus (died c. 100 A.D.) produced biographical treatments of Saul, Solomon and other famous Israelites, but he too wrote in a Hellenistic idiom, as Louis Feldman has demonstrated.¹⁶ The anonymous first-century Vitae Prophetarum (Lives of the Prophets), a fascinating collection of thumbnail sketches of 23 Israelite prophets, is thoroughly Hellenistic in form.

With regard to rabbinic literature, Philip S. Alexander has observed that “There is not a trace of an ancient biography of any of the Sages.”¹⁷

This overview suggests that the Gospels could not have been based on Jewish literary models for the simple reason that Jewish literary culture never developed an indigenous biographical tradition.

If we look at Hellenistic biographical traditions, I believe we will find hypotheses that are more sustainable.

Hellenistic biography was an extremely flexible and varied literary type with many subtypes that continued to change and develop throughout antiquity. In asking whether the Gospels fit into this genre, it is necessary to emphasize the many striking differences between Hellenistic and modern biography. When we understand these differences, we can better understand how the Gospels fit into this genre.

In ancient biography, a chronological framework, when it was used, served to organize the external facts of the subject’s life, not to trace the development of his personality. His personality was assumed to be static. While some Greco-Roman biographies used primarily a chronological framework (like the famous Lives of Plutarch), others were arranged topically (like Suetonius’s Lives of the Twelve Caesars) with discussions of the various virtues of the subject, such as courage, fortitude and self-control. More often than not, even the chronological scheme was punctuated by topical sections. This is reflected in the Gospels, too. While they follow an apparent chronological order (except for flashbacks, like the novella on the death of John the Baptist in Mark 6:17–29), the order was essentially created by the evangelists themselves.¹⁸ Matthew gives the overall impression of following a strict chronological order, but it is clear that he has inserted five “sermons” by Jesus which he himself constructed from originally separate sayings (primarily from Q) linked together by catchwords or by common themes (see Matthew 5–7, 10, 13, 18 and 24–25).

In Hellenistic biography, extended narratives are characteristically episodic. The episodes often consist of constituent literary forms, however, that have a separate, independent existence. These forms include anecdotes (which rhetoricians called chreiai), maxims (called gnomai) and reminiscences (called apomnemoneumata). In the Gospels, scholars have identified a variety of forms that existed orally before their inclusion in written Gospels. These include pronouncement stories (another term for anecdotes, or chreiai, sayings of Jesus (many of which have the form of maxims), parables, stories about Jesus and miracle stories.

Next, Hellenistic biography was primarily concerned with famous people understood and presented as representative types, that is, as incarnations of group values, rather than as unique individuals. This emphasis inevitably made ancient biography idealistic rather than realistic. The ancients were more concerned with what a person ought to have been like than what he or she actually was like. Today this approach is used in eulogies and campaign biographies; none but the gullible take these for factual accounts. The most suitable subjects for biographical description were, therefore, men prominent in public—those active in the assembly, the marketplace, the gymnasium, the theater, the battlefield and the law court. Their lives could serve as visual aids for the norms and values of the state.

Matthew and Mark both begin with statements that place Jesus in what the authors considered to be categories of ultimate religious significance. For Mark he is “Jesus the Messiah, the Son of God” (Mark 1:1). For Matthew he is “Jesus the Messiah the son of David, the son of Abraham” (Matthew 1:1). The burden of both Gospels is to demonstrate the truth of those roles despite any apparent evidence to the contrary.

As I have noted, individual personalities were assumed, in the ancient world, to be fixed and unchanging. Consequently, the subjects of most ancient biographies are presented as static personalities who function as paradigms of traditional virtues or vices—usually the former, rarely the latter. The careful reader of the Gospels will observe 021that the character of Jesus does not change or develop as the story progresses. This static portrayal of Jesus’ personality is a Greco-Roman biographical convention. Moreover, the personality of Jesus is two-dimensional—that is, he is depicted almost exclusively in terms of external behavior rather than internal thoughts or reactions. This lack of concern with the inner life of the subject is another feature that distinguishes ancient from modern biography.

Also unlike modern biography, Hellenistic biography did not pretend to be objective, but often had predominantly ideological or propagandistic intentions. Both the authors and their readers were more interested in portraying famous people as moral examples embodying the appropriate virtues than as individuals with historical particularity. Biographies therefore tended to have two foci: (1) a famous person, (2) viewed, however, through the lens of the biographer’s moralistic or propagandistic intentions. Biography celebrated and emphasized the social values exemplified in the words and deeds of the subject. Similarly, the Gospels present the words and deeds of Jesus of Nazareth, but they do so from the perspective of the needs and concerns of their own day. This means that, like Hellenistic biography, the Gospels are neither exclusively historical nor exclusively ideological or theological documents. They blend both characteristics.

Finally, it will be instructive to consider death as it is dealt with in Hellenistic biography, on the one hand, and in the Gospels, on the other. Even though the origin of biography is connected with death as celebrated and idealized in epitaphs and eulogies, biographies written in the Hellenistic period (c. 323–31 B.C.) are generally not as interested in the deaths of their subjects as are biographies from the Roman imperial period (31 B.C.–476 A.D.). While an emphasis on the way a person’s life ends is a logical way to conclude a biography,¹⁹ that alone does not explain the focus on death in late Hellenistic and early Roman imperial biography. In the many anonymous lives of Greek poets, they are often depicted as dying lonely or tragic deaths (Euripides was torn to pieces by dogs; Sophocles strained his voice while reading Antigone and died). The same emphasis on death is also found in the late (third century A.D.) work on the Lives of Philosophers by Diogenes Laertius. At the end of the first century A.D., Plutarch (c. 50–120 A.D.) wrote a biography of Cato the Younger that focused on the nobility and resolve of his suicide in the Stoic tradition, which (according to Plutarch) was in conscious emulation of Socrates. Among the countercultural literature written by and for members of the lower classes, the popular “Acts of the Pagan Martyrs,” as well as many acts of the Christian martyrs (all written during the second and third centuries A.D.), also focused on the moral triumph of the persecuted innocent over the injustice and cruelty of magistrates or emperors who represented repressive regimes.

Thus, in the mid-first century A.D., when the Gospels were in the process of formation, there was a notable increase in the emphasis on death (particularly martyrdom) in Greco-Roman biography. Nero, like other Roman autocrats, had ordered the executions and suicides of many members of the Roman nobility. Perhaps related to this, short lives emphasizing the demise of famous men (a kind of martyr literature), a subgenre of biography, became fashionable toward the end of the first century A.D. Two contemporaries of Pliny the Younger (c. 61–112 A.D.) specialized in such compositions.²⁰

Moreover, one of the forerunners of biography was Greek epic tradition, which celebrated the valiant deeds of a hero whose death had rescued him from oblivion and made him memorable, thereby giving him “individuality.” The Greeks therefore placed a high value on the “good” death of the hero (Iliad 9.410–416). The exemplary death of Socrates had a powerful impact on ancient martyr literature, both Greco-Roman and Christian. Seneca’s view was typical: “To die well is to die willingly” (Moral Epistles 63). Nero later forced Seneca to commit suicide, as he did many Stoics, and so the aphorism Seneca penned came to characterize his own death (Annals 15.64).

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The focus of each of the canonical Gospels is on the death of Jesus. Indeed, they devote so much space to narrating the events associated with Jesus’ last days that one scholar has aptly described them as “passion narratives with extended introductions.”²¹

In some ways, it is surprising that atoning aspect of Jesus death is not more central in the Gospels, especially in view of Paul’s “theology of the cross,” which was developed before the Gospels were set down in writing. In Luke, the concept of the atoning death of Jesus is missing altogether. In Mark and Matthew, it barely appears.²² Luke understands Jesus primarily as a prophet-martyr whose death was due to divine necessity. Although this is emphasized in Luke, it is found all the Gospels.

It is probable that the courageous way in which Jesus met his death provided both authority and legitimation to his teaching. The passion narrative, in other words, provided a validation for the meaning of Jesus’ life. But the important point here is that the focus on Jesus’ death that characterizes each of the Gospels is a theme characteristic of a development in Greco-Roman biography during the first century A.D.

The many similarities between the canonical Gospels and Hellenistic biographical literature suggest that the latter provides an appropriate context for understanding the former. However, the differences between the Hellenistic biographical literature and the canonical Gospels indicate that the Gospels constitute a distinct subtype.

The obvious theological concerns of the evangelists should not, however, be allowed to obscure their historical and biographical intentions. The judgment of Martin Kahler, made in 1896, that “We have no sources for a biography of Jesus of Nazareth which measure up to the standards of contemporary historical science”²³ is no doubt true. That the Gospels would not satisfy the demands of a modern biography, however, is almost beside the point. The standards and concerns of modern biography are not reflected in any of the subtypes of Hellenistic biographical literature.

Finally, let me emphasize that the classification of the canonical Gospels as a subtype of Hellenistic biography should not obscure the fact that the content of the Gospels finds its roots in Jewish thought and forms. The parables, pronouncement stories and miracle stories are all forms that we find pervasive in Jewish and early Christian literature. The message is Christian; the background of the message, the soil in which it grew, is Jewish; but the form is Hellenistic biography.

This will not be so surprising when we recall that the Gospels were all written in Greek for circulation among Hellenistic Christian communities that dotted the Mediterranean world.

The recognition that the Gospels are a subtype of Hellenistic biography provides a literary perspective that enables us to understand and interpret them more adequately in several respects. First, the absence of personality development in the presentation of Jesus’ character from start to finish in each of the Gospels is attributable to the static conception of human personality reflected in the ancient world generally, a perspective particularly characteristic of Greco-Roman biography. Second, the Jesus presented in the Gospels is not simply depicted as a particular historical personality, but, even more significantly, as a blend of historical elements overlaid and transformed by the evangelists’ conception of him as a representative type (for example, messiah, son of God, king) who embodies the beliefs and practices of the Christian communities within which the Gospels arose and those of the authors that produced them. Third, the intentions of the unknown authors who produced the Gospels (originally the Gospels were all anonymous) should be understood neither as exclusively historical, nor as exclusively theological, but rather as a blend of both perspectives. These two aspects are so intertwined that it is often impossible to separate them, even if that were desirable. Fourth, the emphasis on death that characterized both the Gospels and many late Hellenistic and early Roman imperial biographies reflects a widespread belief that teaching could be validated and legitimated through martyrdom. These insights provide an indispensable context for properly understanding some of the features of the Gospels that may initially appear peculiar to perceptive modern readers.

I intend to argue that the New Testament Gospels are biographies! Until quite recently that would have been a surprising position for a modern scholar to take. True, that was the general view from about the second century A.D.1 to the late 19th century. But, beginning at about that time, the view that the Gospels could be considered biographies was increasingly abandoned as inadequate and inaccurate. In the 20th century, a new consensus began to emerge: The Gospels were not biographical or historical documents; instead, they were expanded versions of the early Christian kerygma, that is, the proclamation of […]