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What are the Gospels? A Comparison with Graeco-Roman Biography (25th Anniversary Edition) is unavailable, but you can change that!

The publication of Richard Burridge’s What Are the Gospels? in 1992 inaugurated a transformation in Gospel studies by overturning the previous consensus about Gospel uniqueness. Burridge argued convincingly for an understanding of the Gospels as biographies, a ubiquitous genre in the Graeco-Roman world. To establish this claim, Burridge compared each of the four canonical Gospels to the many...

Genre is a system of communication of meaning. Before we can understand the meaning of a text, we must master its genre. Genre will then be our guide to help us re-construct the original meaning, to check our interpretation to see if it is valid and to assist in evaluating the worth of the text and communication. Dubrow concludes: ‘Generic categories and principles rarely provide simple answers to problems about literature—but they regularly offer us one of the surest and most
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