![]() They are propagandistic because each tries to persuade the reader of the ultimate religious significance of Jesus in categories adapted by Christians from early Judaism (for example, rabbi, 017teacher, prophet, messiah, son of God and son of David). The Gospels are apologetic because each author tries to neutralize or turn to his own advantage the enormous difficulties created by the death of Jesus, whom Christians regarded as the Messiah of Jewish eschatological expectation, a figure whose death was not anticipated. I do not use these words pejoratively, but simply as technical terms. Each writes with a program that is both apologetic and propagandistic. None of the evangelists, however, pretends to be objective. Luke even takes the narrative a step further by ending with an account of Jesus’ ascent into heaven, which was a widespread Greco-Roman mythological motif signifying postmortem deification. Similarly, Matthew and Luke add various resurrection appearance stories to the end of their compositions. ![]() Matthew and Luke expanded Mark’s account by beginning before Jesus’ birth they include a description of the supernatural circumstances of his birth, infancy stories and genealogies. The biographical character of Mark is less pronounced than either Matthew or Luke. For this reason, one scholar has recently categorized the Gospels as “tragi-comedies.” 3 Comedy here refers not to ha-ha humor, but simply to the fact that the ending is a happy one. This reversal plays a focal role in the concluding section of each Gospel. The apparent tragedy of Jesus’ death is reversed by the triumph of his resurrection. In a rapid series of events crowded into a few hours following the Last Supper, Jesus is betrayed by one of his own disciples, arrested, tortured, tried by a kangaroo court and executed.ĭefeat is transformed into victory, however. The evangelists place particular emphasis on the final week of Jesus’ life, when he traveled to Jerusalem with his disciples to celebrate Passover and, as clearly anticipated in the plot of each Gospel, to die. In all, there are approximately 60 parables, three dozen pronouncement stories (brief narratives culminating with a striking saying by Jesus) and 30 miracle stories. In support of this programmatic presentation, each of the evangelists includes a variety of relatively short units of discourse and narrative, many of which originally circulated orally. Why then did early 20th-century scholars generally abandon this view?Įach of the four canonical Gospels-Matthew, Mark, Luke and John-focuses on the public career of Jesus, emphasizing his activities as a teacher, preacher and miracle-worker. Most readers generally assume that the Gospels are a kind of biography. Since the message of a literary work is dependent on the “package” in which it is presented, it is important to appreciate its literary setting. In much the same way, ancient literary forms, such as biography, aroused certain expectations in the audience. The phrase “once upon a time,” used to introduce some types of English folktales, provides a clear signal to the audience that what follows will be a story that is short, imaginary, interesting and particularly appealing to children. Literary forms are a way of packaging written communications so that contextual meaning is provided for individual sentences and paragraphs. The message of the Gospels cannot be properly understood apart from its literary setting. In short, while the content of the Gospels is couched in 016distinctively Jewish and Christian categories, both form and function are typically Hellenistic. Indeed, the New Testament Gospels are a subtype of Greco-Roman biography. While it is true that the Gospels are not biography if measured by modern historical standards, I believe it can be shown that they are biography as that literary genre was understood in the Greco-Roman world. The quest for the historical Jesus was put on hold. In this assessment, history-biography-took a back seat to theology. In the 20th century, a new consensus began to emerge: The Gospels were not biographical or historical documents instead, they were expanded versions of the early Christian kerygma, that is, the proclamation of the saving significance of Jesus. But, beginning at about that time, the view that the Gospels could be considered biographies was increasingly abandoned as inadequate and inaccurate. True, that was the general view from about the second century A.D. I intend to argue that the New Testament Gospels are biographies! Until quite recently that would have been a surprising position for a modern scholar to take.
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