Over the last three decades, a quiet revolution has taken place in Gospels scholarship. Its first tremors were felt at my alma mater, the University of Nottingham, in the 1980s, when a doctoral student by the name of Richard Burridge turned up with the intention to prove that the Gospels were not biographies. Equipped for the first time with computer software for textual analysis (remember: this was the 80s…) and a degree in classics from Oxford, 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 to ancient ‘lives’, the Gospels fit the genre well – and the data from his analysis seemed to prove it.1 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 this would often fit on a single scroll.
Of course, there are important differences between the Gospels and ancient biographies. For a start, the Gospels are infused with a Jewish and apocalyptic flavour which is missing from their Graeco-Roman counterparts. The stories of Jesus slot into a wider ‘salvation history’ in a way that Graeco-Roman lives do not. The Gospels also seem less concerned to tell us some of the secondary details of Jesus’ life, such as his education or appearance – more on which below. As many scholars have stressed, however, “adaptation in biography was the norm.”2 There was not one single way to write an ancient bios, and the Gospel writers simply represent one (very Jewish) way of engaging the genre.
Burridge’s thesis bankrupted the previously accepted model that the Gospels were sui generis, a totally unique genre. Yet the revolution has been a quiet one. Although the majority of scholars and many lay people have come to recognise the Gospels as biographies, understanding their genre has yet to revolutionise our interpretation of these texts.3 In short, we have yet to consider the hermeneutical payoff of calling a Gospel a ‘biography.’ Part of the reason why relates to the diversity of biographical writing alluded to above. If there were many ways to write a life, and many reasons for doing so, then it seems that understanding the Gospels’ genre would not throw much light on their meaning or purpose. The Gospels are bíoi – so what?
In the last decade, however, Gospels scholars have begun to consider this ‘so what?’ question. A recent monograph, The First Biography of Jesus, by my doctoral supervisor, Helen Bond, is a landmark in research on the hermeneutical implications of reading the Gospels as lives, providing a complete reading of Mark alongside other bíoi.4
In the rest of this blog, I want to pull three insights from Bond and others’ work, which help us understand how reading the Gospels as bíoi illuminates their interpretation.
1. It really is all about Jesus
The first way to read the Gospels as bíoi is to recognise them as texts about Jesus.
If this strikes you as blindingly obvious, you would be right. But, as George Orwell once said, the restatement of the obvious is the duty of intelligent people at certain points of history. The mid-twentieth century in Gospel scholarship was arguably one of those moments, as scholars had come to consider the Gospels as about almost anything but Jesus.
Gospel scholars of the period often imagined that the Gospels told us as much about the Gospel writers and their Churches as about Jesus himself. Behind each Gospel was a hypothetical ‘community,’ whose own history could be re-constructed from the Gospels themselves. This castle-in-the-sky project reached its most lofty heights with respect to the fourth Gospel, when even a careful and brilliant scholar like Raymond Brown attempted to plot the history of its community behind the text.5
To be clear, I don’t wish to deny that the evangelists were influenced by their contemporary contexts, nor do I wish to imply that the Gospel traditions haven’t been shaped by the concerns of the Church. However, I want to highlight how odd it is to read an ancient life as a coded story of the life of a community, rather than about its subject. To tell a veiled story about the authors themselves was not the purpose of ancient biographies, and this should give us all pause when reading these biographies (of Christ) as veiled autobiographies (of the Church). When we begin asking what each Gospel says about a specific Christian community, rather than Jesus himself, we are on rocky ground.
Scholars have also been tempted to read the Gospels as much about the secondary characters as about Jesus himself. Equipped with the tools of literary theory, scholars have subjected the characters in the Gospels – the crowds, scribes, pharisees, sadducees, disciples and other minor characters – to great critical scrutiny and have thrown much light on their characterisation. In Markan studies, particular attention is often paid to the disciples, and their repeated misapprehension of Jesus.
With the focus on these secondary characters, we find in these characters a lesson about ourselves: we are like the disciples, who continually misunderstand our Lord and fail to grasp his difficult message. When we read the Gospels as ancient biographies, however, our attention is flipped from ourselves onto Christ – the main purpose and subject of the life. Rather than saying, we are like the disciples, the emphasis is on the character of Jesus, and his depiction as someone who is easy to misunderstand and difficult to follow.6
Yet it is not only scholars, equipped with the resources of source and narrative-criticism, who are tempted to make the Gospel biographies of Jesus about something other than Jesus. In modern church contexts, it is a common exercise to psychologise the Gospel narratives; to get into the heads of the characters. We consider how we would feel if we were in that situation and reflect on how we would respond to Jesus in the disciples’ position. Whilst this ‘reader response’ method of interpretation is intuitive to us as introspective Westerners (and is not without value), these are not the kinds of questions ancient readers would ask of an ancient life.
One of the key differences between ancient and modern biographies is the lack of attention the former pay to psychology. Have you noticed that it is very difficult to tell Jesus’ personality from the Gospels? This is no mistake. Like other ancient biographers, the evangelists were not so much interested in Jesus’ psychology as his character (éthos). When we try to get into the ‘heads’ of the Gospel characters, we are asking about what they would feel. Yet ancient readers were always drawn back the question back to who Jesus is, and what he is like. Their attention was on the character of Christ.
2. A Different Kind of Life
Another benefit of reading the Gospels as bíoi is knowing how they subvert the genre.
Scholars often describe genre as a ‘contract’ between a writer and their audience – a set of conventions and expectations which guide our interpretation. When a story begins, ‘Once upon a time,’ we know immediately that we are in the realm of fairy tale. Occasionally, however, a writer will flout some (unspoken) term in the contract and subvert our expectations. This creates new surprising meanings as our expectations are dashed.
One of the great delights of reading the Gospels alongside other ancient ‘lives’ is being able to see where they subvert ancient expectations of what makes a good hero. To illustrate this with an aspect of my own research: biographies have a very clear idea about what an ancient hero should look like. Divine figures and kings receive - quite literally - glowing descriptions in biographies written around the time of the Gospels. We can see from them what early readers would expect Jesus to look like: he should be great and handsome like Moses, beautiful like David, or have bright eyes and a strong bearing like other pagan ‘Sons of God.’7
The Gospels, however, fall eerily silent on the point of Jesus’ appearance. Apparently, the evangelists didn’t seem to think that their hero needed to be divinely beautiful or have the stature of a King, and this speaks greatly to what they value.
Rather than depicting a stereotypical king or divine man, the Gospels show us another kind of life. This is perhaps nowhere clearer than in his gruesome, sacrificial death. Whilst other biographies take care to show how their heroes died a noble death, the Gospels are not ashamed of the humiliating death Jesus undertook for our sake.
3. Imitating Christ
Finally, reading the Gospels as lives invites us to read them with an eye to imitating Christ.
I mentioned above that ancient bíoi had a strongly ethical component. They were written, in part, because a great man had lived a life which was worthy of remembrance and imitation. In the epilogue of the life of his father-in-law, Agricola, Tacitus notes his preference for a written memorial over statues, because it is through his life that others can see Agricola’s character, and imitate the beauty of his soul.
Although the Gospels are, in many ways, about the things Jesus has done for us, they must also be read as offering us an exemplar in his person. Whilst only Jesus could die his kind of death, he teaches his disciples to take up their cross and follow him, living out the values of the Kingdom. In devoting so much of their space to Jesus’ teaching, several scholars have pointed out that the Gospels most closely resemble the lives of philosophers.
But what does this mean – to ‘imitate’ Christ? When seen through the lens of biography, it cannot mean that we simply do all the things that Jesus did. The important ethical point was not imitation of the subject’s exact actions, but imitation of the virtues the subject embodied.8
When a Roman reader picked up Tacitus’ Agricola, they would not expect to play a similarly pivotal role in the conquest of Britain. Tacitus did not write so that his readers could all be like Agricola in the particulars of his life, but so that they could imitate the beauty of his soul in their own contexts. The same applies to the Gospels: we may not be able to die a sacrificial death, or multiply loaves and fishes, but we can seek to embody the abundant generosity and caritas expressed in these actions. With an eye to the Gospels as lives, Christian readers will ask how to live the character of Christ in their own contemporary settings.
Keeping the Main Thing, The Main Thing
To read a ‘Life of Jesus’ – a Gospel – is to fix our eyes on the subject of the life, Jesus himself, to pay attention especially to his character, and to consider imitating him in our own varied contexts. It is to make the Gospels less about us or the Church at large, and more about the subject of the life. And for the historically-minded readers among us, it presents a further question: how does this life subvert early readers’ expectations of what an ancient hero should be like?
When we begin to ask these questions, we will have begun to read the Gospels as ancient lives.
See Richard A. Burridge, What are the Gospels? A Comparison with Graeco-Roman Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992; 2nd ed. 2004).
Michael F. Bird, The Gospel of the Lord: How the Early Church Wrote the Story of Jesus (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2014), 238.
See Steve Walton, “What are the Gospels? Richard Burridge’s Impact on Scholarly Understanding of the Gospels,” Currents in Biblical Research, 14 n.1 (2015): 81-93.
Helen K. Bond, The First Biography of Jesus: Genre in Meaning in Mark’s Gospel (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2020).
See his classic work, Raymond Brown, The Community of the Beloved Disciple (New York: Paulist Press, 1979).
See Richard A. Burridge, “Reading the Gospels as Biography” in The Limits of Ancient Biography, eds. Brian McGing, Judith Mossman (Swansea: The Classical Press of Wales, 2007), 34.
On Jesus’ physical appearance, see Joan E. Taylor, What did Jesus Look Like? (London: T&T Clark, 2018), 1-14.
See Bond, First Biography, 159-60.