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The First Biography of Jesus: Genre and Meaning in Mark’s Gospel is unavailable, but you can change that!

What difference does it make to identify Mark’s gospel as an ancient biography? Reading the gospels as ancient biographies makes a profound difference to the way that we interpret them. Biography immortalizes the memory of the subject, creating a literary monument to the person’s life and teaching. Yet it is also a bid to legitimize a specific view of that figure and to position an author and...

and the composition of the Didache (which appears to describe Matthew’s work as a “gospel”), that is, in the very late first century.6 Such a usage can be explained quite naturally from Mark’s opening line: “The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, Son of God.” Whether Mark intended “the beginning” (archē) to include only the prologue or the whole of the book (a point we shall return to in Chapter 3), his opening incipit applied the term “gospel” to a written text, and (whether consciously or
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