The Gospel of John and Christian Origins

Excursus I: The Gospel Genre

Excursus I: The Gospel Genre What are the Gospels? This is the title of a book by Richard Burridge in which he sets out “to establish the case positively and finally for the biographical genre of the gospels to become the new scholarly consensus and orthodoxy.”1 Consensus? Orthodoxy? Should the torrent of critical applause that greeted this work, liberally quoted in the second edition,2 be allowed to drown out any misgivings one might have about these grandiloquent claims? Let us begin by tackling the question of genre: “Genre is at the heart of all attempts to communicate,” declares Burridge.3 Even if we limit ourselves to literary genres this is patent nonsense, though genre is a category tossed around comfortably and casually by literary critics of all persuasions. Sometimes it may be useful. Tragedy, for instance, is a term applied particularly to three groups of writings, the first composed in fifth-century Athens, the second in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, and the third at or around the court of Louis XIV of France. We have a sufficient number of well-preserved examples of all three of these groups to make comparison straightforward and illuminating. The audience of each of the three groups is well known and well documented, and in spite of some dispute about the origins of the first two groups it is easy to trace probable influences. So here is an example in which the term genre performs a useful function. Compare this happy situation with Greek bioi and Latin vitae, generally classed together as Greco-Roman biographies, written in two different languages over some nine centuries in a wide variety of styles, and with a number of different aims in view. Burridge has selected ten illustrative examples. Five of these predate the Gospels. Isocrates’ Evagoras is a funeral eulogy of Evagoras, king of Cyprus c. 411–374 bce. Xenophon’s Agesilaus gives an account of its subject’s life (king of Sparta 398–360 bce), followed by a systematic review of his virtues. Satyrus’s Euripides, extant only in fragments, recounted various episodes of the life of the Greek tragedian and concluded with his death. Nepos’s Atticus tells the story of the political career of Cicero’s 1. Richard A. Burridge, What Are the Gospels? A Comparison with Graeco-Roman Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 99. 2. Richard A. Burridge, What Are the Gospels? A Comparison with Graeco-Roman Biography, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), 253-55. 3. Burridge, What Are the Gospels? 2nd ed., 48. 23 famous friend and correspondent; while Philo’s Moses—exceptional among his works, which are otherwise mostly pure allegories—is an apologetic account of the career of Moses, written with a Gentile readership in mind. Three of Burridge’s other examples (Tacitus’s Agricola, Plutarch’s Cato Minor, Suetonius’s De vita Caesarum) were composed soon after the Gospels, the final two (Lucian’s Demonax and Philostratus’s Apollonius) considerably later. (The last named, frequently cited in discussion of the Gospels, will receive further discussion.) Suppose that we put the Greco-Roman bioi completely out of our mind: suppose they never existed. Would we then have to conclude that the Gospels could never have existed either, because then there would have been no preexisting genre for them to be slotted into? The form critics brought to light the great variety of forms, or Gattungen, that make up the bulk of the Synoptic Gospels. Add the necessary connective links, plus a passion narrative, and you have a Gospel. Anyone who then wished to speak of a Gospel genre would have to say, as Bultmann did, that the Gospels are sui generis. Burridge objects: “It is hard to imagine how anyone could invent something which is a literary novelty or unique kind of writing,”4 and elsewhere that “the gospels cannot be sui generis, but must be set within the web of literary relationships of their own day”5 —comments that appear to suggest that the first person to write a Gospel must have had some already existing model in mind. Yet nowhere does he actually claim (how could he?) that the Christian evangelists were influenced by any of the bioi prior to their own, or that they knew even a single one of them. Bultmann also saw that the Gospels cannot be classed as biographies in the modern sense of the word, because they show no interest in the character of Jesus. It is largely because the...