Loading…

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 third, the last couple of decades have seen a trend toward identifying scriptural echoes and allusions within the gospels (usually referred to rather anachronistically as the study of the “Old Testament in the New”). There was nothing unusual about a biographer peppering his account with literary allusions: Greco-Roman authors commonly displayed their knowledge of Homer and the other “greats” of the classical tradition, and Philo wrote biographies of a number of Jewish heroes, each of which drew
Page 4