What Are the Gospels?: A Comparison with Graeco-Roman Biography

In this work Dr Burridge contends that scholarly study of the genre of the Gospels has gone full circle over the last century of critical scholarship. The question of how the Gospels should be categorised is still a vexed one and - surprisingly - there is still no consensus. This book analyses and evaluates the debate over the course of the last century. It shows that while the nineteenth-century assumption that the Gospels could be likened to biographies has been denied by the mainstream scholarship of this century, in recent years a biographical genre has begun to be assumed once more. Dr Burridge provides a good foundation for the re-introduction of this biographical view of the Gospels by comparing the work of the Evangelists to the development of biography in the Graeco-Roman world, and by drawing on insights from literary theory. The author shows that the view that the Gospels are unique, which is still widespread among biblical scholars, is false: a first-century reader would have seen the Gospels as biographies, or 'Lives' of Jesus, and they must therefore be interpreted in this light.