Genre determines the rules of the game.[1] I am not sure how many times I have made that statement to university/seminary students. The genre of any Bible passage is important to determine as one approaches exegesis. Interpretive rules differ depending upon genre. For example, you do not deal with a Psalm (Hebrew poetry) and a Pauline letter (epistle) the same way. Get genre wrong or disregard it, and you will get off on many eisegetical tangents. This is why the authors of some of the most used hermeneutical textbooks spend a great deal of time on genre.[2]
It is easy to determine that a Psalm is poetry, and a letter is epistolary, but what about the Gospels? That has been a harder question to answer. Until the 1970s there was practically a consensus that the Gospels were a unique literary genre in the Greco-Roman world. Apparent analogies with other early Christian writings were irrelevant.[3]
The position of early 20th century form critics such as Bultmann and Schmidt was that the Gospels were not really about Jesus. Instead, they were collections of Jesus traditions from the early Christian communities. That minimized the role of the Evangelists as authors. The Gospels were written not to give us a life of Jesus as much as to proclaim the significance of Jesus.
In the 1970s scholars began to take another look at how to the Gospels related to Greco-Roman literature. Burridge particularly has shown that they compare well to Greco-Roman biographies. Like such works, the Gospels are continuous prose narratives of the length of a single scroll, comprising stories, anecdotes, sayings and speeches within a relatively short space to depict their understanding of the character of Jesus of Nazareth. Therefore, their focus on Jesus’ public ministry from his baptism to death, and on his words and deeds, his teaching and his ministry, is not very different from the content of other ancient biographies.[4]
Most scholars today hold that the Gospels best reflect Greco-Roman biographies. The writers were men of their times, so it should not be surprising that the Evangelists reflected features of popular literature. While admitting this, we can also see there is something different about the Gospels. On this point the redaction critics were right – the Gospel writers have theological emphases. After all, their subject is “Jesus Christ, the Son of God” (Mark 1:1). That makes the Gospels something different than an ordinary biography. John is clear on this point. His purpose in writing – “. . . so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in His name” (20:31).
They do share qualities of Greco-Roman biographies or to a lesser extent other popular genre of the time, but Blomberg’s label of “theological biography” is most appropriate for these writings as all four show us who Jesus is – God in the flesh – and what He came to do, Died and raised again for our eternal redemption.
Genre matters as it determines the rules of interpretation. Ask the right questions of a text, and you will likely get the right answers. Genre helps us ask the right questions. The Gospels are theological biographies. Thus, the interpreter approaches a Gospel passage Christologically. Genre demands you ask this question of any Gospel passage, “What does it tell us about Jesus?” It either tells us about who He is, what He came to do, or both. Our response must then be as that of Saul of Tarsus on the Damascus Road: “What shall I do, Lord?”[5]
[1] Borrowed, of course, from Dr. Robert Stein.
[2] Examples include Duvall and Hays, Grasping God’s Word and Fee and Stuart, How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth – both in their 4th editions.
[3] L.W. Hurtado, DJG, s.v. “Gospels (Genre).”
[4] See R. A. Burridge, What Are the Gospels? A Comparison with Graeco-Roman Biography (Cambridge University Press, 1992; rev. ed., Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004).
[5] Acts 22:10.
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