The Gospels are Bíoi – So What?

Three Lessons for Reading the Gospels as Ancient Biographies

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, 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