Are the Gospels Graeco-Roman 'Lives'?
The Gospels and Ancient Biography
This is the second post in which I sketch the contributions of my PhD research on Jesus’ physical appearance. This week’s sketch takes me to the question of the literary genre of the gospels, and whether or not we should see them as Graeco-Roman ‘lives’.
In the last three decades, a quiet revolution has taken place in gospel studies. Some of its first tremors were felt at my alma mater, the University of Nottingham, in the 1980s, when a doctoral student turned up with the intention to prove that the gospels were not biographies. Equipped for the first time with computer software for textual analysis, and a degree in classics, Richard Burridge seemed to be in a good position to prove his thesis. He gathered a collection of ten ancient ‘lives’ (Greek bíoi; Latin: vitae) and ran their features through his software, comparing them with the gospels.
Yet what Burridge found took him by surprise. Far from differing from ancient ‘lives’, the gospels fit the genre well – and the data from his analysis seemed to prove it. Just like the gospels, ancient lives revealed the character (éthos) of an individual through a selection of their words and deeds. They had a strong ethical component, encouraging their audiences to imitate the subject’s virtues (and avoid their vices). They paid significant attention to their subject’s death, believing that one’s death was the greatest testimony to a life well lived. And all of this would often fit on a single scroll.
By the time I turned up for a degree in biblical studies over two decades later, Burridge’s work had already become mainstream. In my very first undergraduate essay, the question I was assigned was the title of this post: Are the Gospels Graeco-Roman biographies? In response, I argued that they were. What principally convinced me was their keen focus on an individual, unparalleled in Jewish literary forms.
Yet the longer I sat with the label, ‘Graeco-Roman biography’, the more uncomfortable, and even useless, it seemed to be. As Burridge himself had pointed out in his original study, the term bios (‘life’) does not cast much light on the Gospels’ purpose, for it is a wide-ranging term that can encompass a great variety of texts. Some lives were highly fictional – others more historiographic. To say that the Gospels are biographies of a sort seems likely, but the hermeneutical payoff is weak.
The Search for a Sub-Type
In response to this quandary, many scholars have attempted to qualify exactly what kind of biography the Gospels are. In the last couple of decades, there has been a whole fleet of scholars who have promised to deliver a specific sub-type of biography in which the gospels might fit. They are ‘subversive’ rather than ‘civic’ (so Robyn Faith Walsh); they are ‘historical’ rather than ‘novelistic’ (so Craig Keener); or they are biographies written in a peculiar ‘mode’, such as tragedy (as proposed by Jeffrey Jay).
These proposals shed light on aspects of the gospels, yet I am sceptical of this ‘fine-tuning’ exercise for two reasons. The first is that it is a modern attempt to put order to a genre that is, by its very nature, amorphous. One can say that the gospels are civic rather than subversive biographies – but did any ancient author have these schemata in mind when they set out to write their ‘lives’?
