What Are the Gospels?

September 14, 2005

Introduction:

Some individuals have argued that the four canonical Gospels were not meant to be taken as history. However, there is strong textual evidence that the authors of the Gospels intended for their writings to be read in a literal sense. Granted, the mere fact that the Gospel authors probably intended for their reports to be understood literally, does not demonstrate whether or not the authors actually wrote true literal accounts. However, the issue at hand is not whether or not the Gospel authors, or Evangelists, as they are commonly called, record accurate historical information about Jesus, but whether or not they intended to portray the contents of their writings as being literal historical data.

New Testament scholars are uncertain what type of genre the four canonical Gospels should be classified as. In the words of the New Testament scholar Joseph B. Tyson, “Technically, there are no non-Christian gospels, although there are some Hellenistic books that have significant similarities to the gospels” ( TNTEC:147). There appears to be a general consensus among New Testament scholars, however, that the Gospels are in a subtype of ancient biography.

General Comments about the Gospels and Ancient Biography:

Dr. Bart Ehrman wrote: “Many recent scholars have come to recognize that the New Testament Gospels are a kind of ancient biography. Most of the distinctive features of the Gospels relate directly to their Christian character. They are the only biographies written by Christians about the man they worship as the Son of God who died for the salvation of the world" ( TNT:64-65).

“As we will see, for example, the New Testament Gospels put an inordinate amount of emphasis on the death of the main character, something highly unusual for ancient biography. The stress on Jesus’ death, however, is determined by the distinctive emphasis of these works and is not out of bounds for the genre. Instead, it shows the Gospels are a kind of sub-genre, that is, one type of ancient religious biography” ( TNT:65).

“It appears that ancient readers, whether they actually read the words off the page or heard someone else do so, would have recognized them as biographies of a religious leader” ( TNT:65).

Richard A. Burridge wrote: “Assumptions that the gospels are biographies or contain some biographical material or features are increasingly common” ( WATG:23).

David E. Aune wrote: “The Gospels are a subtype of Greco-Roman biography” ( TNTLE:64).

Characteristics of Ancient Biographies and the Gospels:

Dr. Ben Witherington III wrote: “There are certain indicators that Mark, Matthew, and John would all have appeared to be biographies.
- First, they all introduce their main protagonists at the beginning of the document, whereas in Luke’s Gospel Jesus does not come to the fore until after Luke 1. A person perusing the beginning of Luke’s scroll would not have recognized it to be a biography of Jesus.
- Second, these documents are the right length. Mark has 11,242 words, Matthew has 18,305 words, and John has 16,150 words. The longest of all Gospels is Luke’s, which has 19,428 words, which puts it right at the upper limits of what a scroll could hold. Even at a glance all these documents are some sort of prose narrative or story; they are not plays, speeches, or the like. In Mark’s Gospel, Jesus is the subject of over 44 percent of all the verbs” ( TNTS:75).

“Biographies were popular literature in the first century A.D. They were not necessarily for a high-brow audience, since they could be read aloud profitably, containing as they did selected short episodes from a life” ( TNTS:76).

“A few of the conventions of ancient biographies need to be kept in mind:
- (1) These were never exhaustive accounts of a person’s life. The mere limitations of scrolls and of the means of researching and writing prohibited anything that might be comparable to a modern thorough biography.
- (2) Ancient biographies were not written in the post-Freudian, post-Jungian era. By this I mean they did not operate with certain developmental personality models…They also believed that how one died most revealed one’s character, which is the very reason why the Gospel writers had to explain in detail the demise of their hero Jesus. He died in the least honorable way possible. How could this be explained if he was a virtuous man? In the Roman tradition there was an answer to this question, as the Lives of Julius Caesar showed. One’s death also revealed what God or the gods thought of a person. The Passion narratives had to come to grips with this basic ancient assumption.
- (3) Ancient biographies tended not to spend much time on the youth of a person. The focus was normally on the adult life of the person in question. This is the case in all three of the more biographical Gospels, although Matthew and John do speak briefly about the antecedents to Jesus’ adult life.”
- (4) Ancient biographies were not really all that concerned with the physical appearance of the person in question unless it was particularly striking. The biographies of Jesus are no different in this regard.
- (5) Ancient biographies were not greatly concerned about either precise chronology (in an age before watches when even seconds are counted) or the issue of proportionality. By the latter I mean that an ancient biographer might well spend an inordinate amount of time on some particular period in a person’s life, not offering a womb-to-tomb balanced portrait.
- (6) Ancient biographies were certainly more like portraits than photographs. They were tendentious in character, presenting and interpreting a life from a particular point. Such writers wanted to tell the truth, but they were not laboring under the modern anxiety about objectivity” ( TNTS:76-77).

Conclusion:

In conclusion, there is good textual and comparative evidence to conclude that the Evangelists intended for their accounts to be understood in a literal historical sense.