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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...

quality of characterization, social setting and occasion, and authorial intention and purpose.53 Not all of these features were present in every example, but there was enough similarity throughout the group as a whole to be able to demonstrate a “family resemblance.” The strength of Burridge’s approach was to show that in order to be classified as bioi the gospels do not have to cohere in every respect with a chosen biography (or even a group of biographies); all they need is to be broadly within
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