The Gospels as Biographies of Jesus
Most Gospels scholars today view the Gospels as belonging to the genre of ancient biography. Both supporters and detractors now recognize this general consensus. As one classicist notes, understanding the Gospels as biographies was “always the obvious reading.”
This designation makes good sense: biographies and one kind of historical monograph were the only kinds of works focused on a real, individual historical figure other than a historical novel—and historical novels were rarely if ever written about recent figures. Biographies normally introduced their main character directly within the first few words of the work (cf. Matt. 1:1; Mark 1:1; John 1:1; more conventionally historiographic in Luke 1:1). Biography is the closest available analogy for how the first audiences would initially approach the narrative, first-century Gospels. Because biographies, like letters, were among antiquity’s most common genres, it is not surprising that they represent much of the earliest surviving Christian literature.
That biography offers the closest analogy or genre for the Gospels does not mean that the Evangelists added nothing distinctive to the traditional, wider genre. There is little doubt, in fact, that they did. Like other Jewish biographers with a Diaspora audience, they inhabit a world in continuity with ancient Israel’s biblical heritage. Their key protagonist is a mostly rural Middle Eastern figure, and they address a biblically literate subculture. Most distinctive of all, they proclaim no ordinary sage or king but one whom they deem the central figure of history.
Moreover, as subsequent chapters will show, biographies were not all the same; ancient writers often used literary conventions from one genre in another, producing what would appear, in any “purist” classification, an overlap in genres. The most common overlap between biography and another genre in the early empire was with the wider genre to which biography in this period normally belonged, namely historiography (see ch. 6). Even apart from overlap in genres, there are a range of biographic techniques, sometimes even in works by a single author (e.g., Plutarch). Given the distinctive elements of the Gospels and the range of differences in ancient biography, it is important to note at the outset that we cannot use ancient biography to predict or explain everything that we find in the Gospels.
Given the fluidity of genre, analogies with works that are similar in many respects need not prove that they are similar in all respects. Nevertheless, the significant points of analogy do suggest the strong probability that ancient hearers would have approached the Gospels with the expectations with which they approached other contemporary biographies. The Gospels’ use of prior material does correlate significantly with that found in the dominant form of biography that flourished in precisely their period, especially in those biographies that, like the Gospels, addressed public figures within living memory (see chps. 9–10). The dominant form of biography from the early empire thus should help us to better understand some of what the Evangelists and their first audiences would have taken for granted.
These are excerpts from Craig Keener‘s Christobiography: Memory, History, and the Reliability of the Gospels (pp. 1-2; 27-29). You can purchase your copy here.