The Genre of the Gospels

A Jewish Life for All Who Believe

Our Present Age

Volume 2, No. 3

The Genre of the Gospels

A Jewish Life for All Who Believe

In a stunning move, New Testament scholarship has reached a consensus on the genre of the canonical gospels: the gospels are a subset of the Greco-Roman βίος, or “Life,” such as in Plutarch or Suetonius.^[1] The question of genre matters because it allows us to offer an explanation for why Jesus does or says certain things, and particularly what modern Christians are to do about it. If, for example, Richard Burridge is correct in his seminal work What are the Gospels?, then modern readers are to approach the life of Jesus just as they would the “Life of Nero”: as a particular example of inimitable virtues, or a pattern of life which ought to be avoided.^[2] This paper will argue for the essential Jewish-ness of the gospels, suggesting that the four canonical gospels which have been are united by a common message about the good news of Jesus Christ (κήρυγμα) and find their authority, not as a biography about Jesus, but as revelation from God in the tradition of the Law and Prophets. The canonical gospels are examples of distinctly Jewish literature in the tradition of their Scriptures.

First, we have to ask why modern scholarship has defined the genre of the gospels as βίοι? What common features do they have, and what exactly is a βίος? Plutarch himself answers this:^[3]

Since, then, our souls are by nature possessed of great fondness for learning and fondness for seeing…in the exercise of his mind every man, if he pleases, has the natural power to turn himself away in every case, and to change, without the least difficulty, to that object upon which he himself determines. It is meet, therefore, that he pursue what is best, to the end that he may not merely regard it, but also be edified regarding it…so our intellectual vision must be applied to such objects as, by their very charm, invite it outward to its own proper good. Such objects are to be found in virtuous deeds; these implant in those who search them out a great and zealous eagerness which leads to imitation.

Plutarch believes that virtue can be cultivated by imitating virtuous men, and therefore he intends to hold up “as a matter of inspection” men whose lives, either through virtue (and whose lives should thus be imitated) or through vice (and whose lives should thus be avoided), demonstrated the kinds of virtues Plutarch wishes to encourage in his readers.^[4] In other words, the βίος is not a biography in the modern sense but a moral argument, a didactic tool for those who wished to learn how to live by providing an example of a lifestyle worth imitating, or pattern of life worth avoiding.

If Burridge is correct and the gospels are an example of the Greco-Roman βίος, then the authors intend to hold up Jesus as an example of a virtuous life. While this may be true, Christians also affirm what the author of John says: “Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book; but these are written so that you might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name” (20:30–31; cf. Lk 1:4). The concern for the writers of the gospels, taking John’s statement as paradigmatic for the others, is to communicate a particular message about a particular person; indeed, the gospels were written in order to provoke, not a moral response, but a theological one from their audiences.

Adopting Graham Stanton’s observation that the four gospels are not “βίοι tout court; they are four witnesses to the one Gospel” means that there are four particular accounts of the one message about Jesus Christ.^[5] In the apostolic preaching of the one Gospel, the concern is not so much with the theological inclinations of the authors or audiences but about the message contained therein.^[6] While he affirms that the gospels are a subset of the genre, Stanton also believes that the gospels are unique in their single, united purpose, which is the κήρυγμα, the apostolic preaching that is the good news of salvation for all people. Thus, the gospels are not written for the Johannine community, nor for Christians in a particular place; instead, each author presents a narrative about the life of Jesus which is intended to preach the Gospel to all Christians, wherever (and whenever) they may be, for they communicate that same message with unique ends in mind.^[7] The gospels were written with a particular theological purpose, thus explaining their differences, but all for the singular purpose of announcing the good news of salvation and demanding a response of faith.

Thus, while there is “substantial and significant” overlap between the ancient βίος and the written gospels, there is something unique about the accounts written in the New Testament. While, like other biographies, the gospels served as propaganda to justify the person about whom they were written, each author of the gospels was concerned with the historical accuracy of the claims they made about Jesus.^[8] The evidence for this is, just as Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15:3–8, the appeals to eyewitness testimony concerning the events of Jesus’ life (cf Acts 2:32; 1 Jn 1:1–4). At their most basic level, the four gospels present an account of a man who the authors believed fulfilled the promises of God presented in the Jewish Scriptures.^[9] The question to which we must now turn is this: if the gospels are united in their single message of salvation, holding out not only an example of a virtuous life but the one who can “save his people from their sins” (Matt 1:21; Ps 130:8), then what are they? In other words, if Stanton is correct that the gospels are not “βίοι tout court,” then can we make a positive statement about what they actually are beyond the common message between them? The answer to this question lies, not in the Greco-Roman world of the New Testament to which Burridge turns, but in the Jewish world, in the rich tradition of Israel’s Scriptures. Following in the tradition of Joseph and Daniel, the gospel writers hold up the life of Jesus, not as a Greek βίος, but a Jewish one.

With the possible exception of Luke, it is unlikely that any of the traditional gospel authors received formal literary training, nor were they concerned with conformity to a pre-existing genre, especially one belonging to the Greco-Roman world (Luke alone specifically parallels works by Herodotus and Aristeas).^[10] Their familiarity with formal literary conventions would likely have been limited; and if we assume that their primary exposure to Greco-Roman literature was through various forms of entertainment, then Lives would not have found a particularly warm reception in Judea. The reason for this is that “Jesus’ world was a deeply Jewish social world.” The central pillars of Jesus’ social context, and indeed, if we read them closely enough, the concern of the gospels, are the proper understanding of the Torah and the Temple:  “Amongst all those varieties of Judaisms, there was unanimity about the importance of the two institutions, Torah and Temple. Indeed, the differences among various Jewish groups might best be seen as differences about how to understand Torah and Temple.”^[11] Jesus, and by extension his biographers, have been molded more by their Jewish heritage than their Greek one: thus the Gospel is for the Jew first, and then for the Greek (Matt 15:21–28; Mk 7:24–30; Jn 4:22; Rom 1:16; 2:10).

Burridge suggests that we have to read the gospels as models of Greco-Roman βίοι, rather than Jewish documents, because no rabbinic stories exist which model, even closely, the activity of the gospels. In other words, because Jesus is the only Jewish rabbi whose narrative is told in the manner in which the gospels tell it, the genre cannot be Jewish but instead must be a type of Greco-Roman Life.^[12] This, however, misses the point entirely. Instead of looking at contemporary documents during what modern scholars like to call “Second-Temple Judaism” (and, for rabbinic history, shortly thereafter), the gospel authors are looking backwards to older forms of storytelling, methods which present a character uniquely ordained by God for a special, redemptive purpose among his people. In other words, because the gospel writers view Jesus as the fulfillment and culmination of Israel’s history, they use Israel’s history to explain him and his activity.^[13] He is Abraham, Moses, and David; he is Joseph, Daniel, and Isaiah’s Suffering Servant; he is the fulfillment of the protoevangelium, the one who fulfills everything in the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings (Lk 24:46).^[14] Therefore, since the gospel writers view Jesus as the fulfillment of everything in the Old Testament, particularly the unique promises of God to save his people Israel, the form in which they communicate that message will naturally take the form of previous Scriptures.

The gospels, particularly John, share some features with Jewish writings in rewriting their inherited tradition to creatively elaborate on present events from the eyes of the past. The Testament of Levi and 4 Ezra are both exceptional examples of theological readings of current events interpreted through the lens of a particular event in Israel’s history.^[15] For example, 4 Ezra is set in Babylon during the exile, asking when God will vindicate his people, but this is a question for all times, as the real context of the writing is set during the time of Roman occupation; the answer of 4 Ezra is, then, looking both backward and forward; knowing what God has done in the past (redeemed his people from foreign oppression/exile), Israel can have confidence that God will do it again in the future (vindicate Israel as God’s true people during foreign oppression—exile in their own land). Take, for example, Joseph, and compare his life as it is recorded in Genesis with the gospel accounts of Jesus (and the same exercise could be done with all the significant Old Testament figures). Joseph is uniquely called by God to save his people, just as Jesus later is; both suffer, but in the end inherit a kingdom. Though this is only a cursory glance, it is plain that the contour of Jesus’ life most closely aligns, not with the emperors, philosophers, or poets, but with God’s chosen people, especially with those God called out to lead his people into salvation.

We know that Jesus stands out from the context in which he finds himself—the whole pattern of the New Testament is a reversal of pre-existing social categories. But we know also that he stands within a particular context, a people which understood itself as the heirs of the covenants of the Old Testament. It is impossible to really know how much the gospel authors intentionally paralleled their life of Jesus with the patterns of life presented in the Jewish Scriptures. What is plain, however, is that they were intentionally interpreting the events and prophecies of the Old Testament around the man Jesus of Nazareth, and as such modern interpreters can only understand the genre of the gospels by situating the authors within their Jewish context. Trying to force the gospels into a pre-existing Greco-Roman genre, even with the parallels that Burridge notes (and there are plenty!) does a great disservice to the texts and to their Jewish character because it forgets altogether the centrality of Israel’s elect status and her Scriptures in first-century Palestine. It is for this same reason, of course, that we have to affirm that the gospels are not an altogether new genre, for if the authors conceived of their project as something new then Jesus could make no sense within Israel’s history. The gospel writers have, as has been amply demonstrated elsewhere, a deep reliance upon Israel’s Scriptures—Matthew and Luke in particular, and Mark and John in their own, more subtle ways—and so they view Jesus, and the whole project of gospel-writing, as a continuation of what has already happened in Israel’s history, but defined in a new way around the incarnate God. While the events of Jesus’ life are unique (no one rose from the dead like Jesus before!), each of the authors of the canonical gospels are concerned with presenting the κήρυγμα, the good news of salvation for all people, as the climax of God’s activity with Israel; and it is because of this life that they can look back into the Old Testament and understand in a new way what God has done, “hoping against hope” that, just like in 4 Ezra, what God has done in the past he will do again; and in modeling, however unintentionally, their life of Jesus upon the lives of the Old Testament saints, the gospel writers have demonstrated that Jesus, while doing a new thing, has fulfilled in himself all that the Law requires.

Notes

^[1] Andrew T. Lincoln, “Reading John: The Fourth Gospel under Modern and Postmodern Interrogation,” in Reading the Gospels Today, ed. Stanley E. Porter (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), 133.

^[2] Richard A. Burridge, What are the Gospels? (2^nd ed., Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), 246–251, 304–307.

^[3] Plutarch, “Life of Pericles” I, in Lives, trans. Bernadotte Perrin (LCL 65; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1915), 2–5.

^[4] See longer arguments in D. A. Russell, Plutarch (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1973), 100–110. Modern historians also write with a particular purpose in mind (no “objective history”), but Plutarch had the ability to acknowledge it (pp. 162–163). See also James D. G. Dunn, “The Tradition,” in The Historical Jesus in Recent Research, eds. James D. G. Dunn and Scot McKnight (Sources for Biblical and Theological Study, Volume 10; Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2005), 173–174, and N. T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God (Christian Origins and the Question of God, vol. 1; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 31–46. Burridge helpfully outlines the features of a βίος and outlines the common features with the gospels in “Gospel: Genre,” in Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels, 2^nd ed., eds. Joel B. Green, Jeannine K. Brown, and Nicholas Perrin (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2013), 338, 340.

^[5] Graham N. Stanton, Jesus and Gospel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 89. Irenaeus of Lyons (130–202) establishes that “there is one Gospel in fourfold form, held together by one Spirit.” Thus the gospel is not primarily the written account but the message proclaimed and preserved in the “deposit of faith” (AH 1.10.3; 3.2.8). See also Simon Gathercole, The Gospel and the Gospels (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2022), 7, 12–14: “the canonical Gospels contain ‘news,’ whereas ‘Thomas and the others are advice’” (citing Wright, Judas and the Gospel of Jesus, 29).

^[6] This is in response to the redaction critics of the mid-twentieth century. See Martin Hengel, The Four Gospels and the One Gospel of Jesus Christ, trans. John Bowden (Harrisburg: Trinity Press International, 2000), 106–110.

^[7] Stanton, Jesus and Gospel, 192, n. 3. See also his forward in Burridge, What are the Gospels?, viii.  This is argued most persuasively in Richard Bauckham, ed., The Gospels for All Christians (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998). See also Hengel, The Four Gospels, trans. Bowden, 141–153. Redaction critics like Krister Stendahl and Raymond E. Brown became interested in the groups who composed the texts rather than the person presented in the texts. So, for example, what does the content of the John’s gospel tell us about the “Johannine community,” which consisted of the early disciples of John who composed the gospel in their teacher’s name? How was this different from the Matthean community, &c.?; so, Burridge, “Gospel: Genre,” in Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels, eds. Green et al, 336.

^[8] Dunn, “The Tradition,” in The Historical Jesus in Recent Research, eds. Dunn & McKnight, 174. How much of the gospels are biographical and how much are propaganda remains an open question; see Morna Hooker, Beginnings (Harrisburg: Trinity Press International, 1997), 2, and N. T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God (Christian Origins and the Question of God, vol. 2; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996), 112–113.

^[9] E. P. Sanders, The Historical Figure of Jesus (London: Penguin Books, 1995), 96. See also Gathercole, Gospel, 7.

^[10] See Hooker, Beginnings, 44. Peter Williams outlines the evidence of the use of the Greek language in first- century Palestine in his article “Did Jesus Speak Greek?” (tyndalehouse.com/explore/articles/did-jesus-speak-greek).

^[11] Marcus J. Borg, “The Palestinian Background for a Life of Jesus,” in The Search for Jesus, ed. Herschel Shanks (Washington, D.C.: Biblical Archaeological Society, 1994), 41–44. The gospels’ dependence on the OT (especially Matthew and Luke) indicates that the authors view Jesus as standing within his Jewish context, even as he stands out from it (Is 42:21; Matt 3:15; 5:17; 7:12; Mk 1:2; 12:24; Lk 16:17; 24:44; Jn 8:48–59; Ac 2:29–36; 10:42; Rom 3:31; et al.). See Hooker, Beginnings, 31, Wright, New Testament, 147–338, Wright, Jesus, 150–155, and Gathercole, Gospel, 476–478.

^[12] Burridge, What are the Gospels?, 331–339.

^[13] See Wright, Jesus, 131; Lk 24:45–46, and David W. Pao and Eckhard J. Schnabel, “Luke,” in Commentary on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament, eds. G. K. Beale and D. A. Carson (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007), 251.

^[14] See 4Q397 14–21; 4Q398 14–17 I, 3–4 on the tripartite division of the OT (also Lk 16:16, 29–31). On “fulfillment of Israel’s Scriptures,” we only have to look elsewhere in Luke-Acts to see how the author views the activities of Jesus in continuity with the OT; e.g., Ps 118:22 (Lk 20:17); Is 53:12 (Lk 22:37); Ps 31:5 (Lk 23:46); Ps 22:7, 18; 69:21 (Lk 23:34–36); Ps 118:22 (Ac 4:11); Ps 2:1–2 (Ac 4:25–26); Is 53:7–8 (Ac 8:32–33); cited in Pao & Schnabel, “Luke,” in Commentary, eds. Beale & Carson, 401.

^[15] See Lincoln, “Reading John,” in Reading the Gospels Today, ed. Porter, 133.