The Understanding of “Gospel” as Genre in Contemporary Scholarship

Contemporary scholarship primarily addresses the issue of genre and a literary understanding of the four canonical Gospels. Genre is a contemporary category employed to classify and categorize what a group of writings has in common with one another. The classification of genre is an organization of literary conventions characteristic to or representative of a particular group of writings. This classification of genre shapes the expectations of a reader with regard to the form, function, and content of a work of literature. The classification and understanding of genre is an essential step in interpretation; it is primarily through the notion of genre that “[W]e are enabled to understand even old or unfamiliar works, like the gospels” (Burridge, What Is a Gospel?, 36). Literary genre is thus a classification used to designate the form and function of a written work.

One further debate that reflects on the understanding of a gospel genre is the potential inclusion of noncanonical “gospel” writings into the genre. Many ancient writings, known from the church fathers or from extant texts such as those uncovered at Nag Hammadi, bear the title of “gospel” (e.g., the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Mary, the Gospel of Philip, the Gospel of Truth). Burridge, among others, notes that, although these works bear the title “gospel,” they demonstrate a different genre from the canonical Gospels since they do not contain the same form and/or content. For instance, the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Philip record only sayings of Jesus with no narrative or comprehensive account of Jesus’ life, while others such as the Protevangelium of James contain a simple narrative without offering a comprehensive account of the life of Jesus (Burridge, What Is a Gospel?, 242–43). The scholarly delineation of a gospel genre thus appears to be very different from the ancient understanding of whether a literary work merited the title “gospel”; this awareness mandates caution in the usage of the term.