Can the historical Jesus teach ethics? In response to Richard Burridge, Imitating Jesus

Abstract

Richard Burridge is best known for his book, What are the Gospels?, which argues convincingly that the gospels belong within the broad generic category of the Graeco-Roman biography. The consensus that ‘the gospels are not biographies’ rests on a set of modern assumptions about what a biography should contain; measured against the yardstick of ancient biographies, however, the gospels clearly represent the same kind of literature. Of course, that does not mean that they are in every respect like other Graeco-Roman bioi or vitae. The gospels remain distinctive. One indication of this distinctiveness is that the title attached to them is not bios tou Iesou or the like, but euaggelion kata . . . followed by an evangelist's name. The gospels intend to be more than just a further contribution to the biographical literature of the ancient world. Burridge allowed that ‘gospel’ might represent a distinctive and new ‘subgenre’ within the broader biographical genre; there is no difficulty about such a move if we understand genre as a dynamic concept rather than a static one. Perhaps we might want to qualify the claim that ‘the gospels are biographies’ by stating instead that ‘the gospels represent a new development within the biographical genre’.