Many people see the Christian Gospels of the New Testament as mere fairy tales. This idea is often coupled with our modern understanding of biography, with its comprehensive outlook, perfect chronology, and lack of a genealogy.
However, these ideas need to be abandoned when approaching the Gospels.
Brant Pitre’s book The Case for Jesus and Richard Burridge’s work What Are the Gospels? A Comparison with Greco-Roman Biography make the case that the four Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are truly in the literary form of ancient biographies.
Two examples are the Greek historian Plutarch’s biographies between A.D. 90 and 100 and the Roman historian Suetonius’s biographies in 120, both of which parallel the Gospels. This article will compare the way an ancient life of a historical figure such as Alexander the Great or Caesar Nero was recounted with how the Gospels recount the life of Jesus.
Public Ministry
A modern biography typically covers a vast amount of material, down to the minutiae of the subject’s physical appearance and the details of his high school experiences. The ins and outs of someone’s early life, mid-life, and late life are discussed.
With that in mind, many would not think of the Gospels as biographies. For example, out of the twenty-eight chapters of Matthew’s Gospel, twenty-three cover Jesus’ public ministry. Of the thirty-three years that Jesus lived on this earth, three are in focus, including such episodes as healings and exorcisms.
Why? Because the principal focus of an ancient biography was on the public ministry of the individual in question. It would cover the birth, early life, and death as well, but as Pitre notes, the “bulk of the book” is “devoted to the subject’s public career” (p. 71). To give one example, “Plutarch’s life of the Greek statesman Timoleon dives straight into the story of his public deeds.” This is why the Gospels focus substantially on the deeds that everybody knew about Jesus, and not on his hidden life of thirty years in Nazareth.
Short and Sweet
Modern biographies are hundreds of pages long, so how could the Gospels, which can take only a couple of hours to read, be considered biographies? Well, ancient Greco-Roman biographies averaged around ten to twenty thousand words—about what would fit on the length of an ancient scroll.
The ancients did not have an unlimited amount of paper to form into a book the way modern people do today. They had scrolls. These scrolls were made from leaves or skins (papyri leaves and sheepskin), and because they were very expensive to make, they did not have much space to work with. That’s why they covered only the most notable deeds of an individual. The four Gospels fit into this genre simply based on their length.
Not Chronological
Some skeptics say the Gospels contradict one another and cannot be biographies. This is due to the lenses we wear today, which sort documents into the category of “biography” based on chronology.
But ancient biographies did not care as much as we do today about telling a story from the beginning to the end. For instance, Suetonius says in his biography of Caesar Augustus, “Having given as it were a summary of his life, I shall now take up its various phases one by one, not in chronological order, but by categories” (Life of the Deified Augustus, 9).
Similarly, the Gospels are not always concerned about chronological order. John’s Gospel has Jesus flipping over tables early in his life (John 2:14), and Luke’s Gospel has Jesus doing this late in his life (Luke 19:45). These differences do not necessitate that the Gospel writers erred, for they may have focused topically. (Or Jesus might have flipped tables twice.) Modern biographies are focused on exactitude, but ancient biographies like the Gospels were not always like that.
The Gist
The issue of Gospel contradictions raises its head again with regard to the sayings of Jesus.
Whereas the previous objection was over the placement of the episodes of Christ, this objection looks at the internal substance of those episodes. For example, Matthew’s Gospel (20:29-34) says Jesus healed two blind people, and Mark’s Gospel (10:46-52) says Jesus healed one blind person.
Although modern histories are concerned about word-for-word accuracy and precision—“Is it two blind guys or one?!”—ancient histories like the Gospel writers were not necessarily that way. Sometimes the works of antiquity attempt to convey only the general sense of what people said, for quotation marks were not used. Consider the ancient historian Thucydides:
With reference to the speeches in this history, some were delivered before the war began, others while it was going on; some I heard myself, others I got from various quarters; it was in all cases difficult to carry them word for word in one’s memory; so my habit has been to make the speakers say what was in my opinion demanded of them by the various occasions, of course adhering as closely as possible to the general sense of what they really said” (History of the Peloponnesian War 1.22.1).
Thucydides used multiple reliable sources (like Luke’s Gospel—see Luke 1:1-3) and wrote only the “general sense” of what was said. The Gospels do the same thing, oftentimes recounting the same events but worded differently. This is because only the substance needs to be recorded for early works.
Genealogy
Modern biographies often couldn’t care less about genealogy. A bio of Barack Obama is not going to list out fourteen generations of the Obama family. Yet the Gospels do this, which seems to imply that they are not biographies.
The Gospels of Matthew (1:1) and Luke (3:23) outline Jesus’ lengthy lineage, from King David and from Adam, respectively. They suggest that Jesus has royal blood stemming from the kings of Israel.
This is actually a common feature in Greco-Roman biographies, as can be seen in Josephus. He says in his ancient biography, “My family is no ignoble one, tracing its descent far back to priestly ancestors. . . . Moreover, on my mother’s side I am of royal blood. . . . My great-grandfather’s grandfather was Simon” (Life of Josephus, 1). Josephus is not from a bunch of poor peasants. His fathers and mothers were priests, kings, and queens. The lineage of the historical figure is frequently a feature of early biographies.
More connections between ancient Greco-Roman biographies and the Gospels could be made, such as how they provide historical information and their appeals to eyewitnesses, but suffice it to say that the Gospels fit into this genre. They are not pagan myths about Zeus or “once upon a time” fairy tales. They are not like modern biographies, where every detail is recorded verbatim and in chronological order. They are ancient biographies.
To attempt to make the Gospels fit into the genre of modern biographies or of mythologies is to make a huge mistake. Yet, sadly, many people have attempted just this.