Roland

The gopsels have always struck me as fitting much more comfortably into the genre of storytelling than the genre of written history.

Are there other historical or biographical works from that time period that read as the gospels do? That is to say with people conversing with one another as they would in a novel or short story, and with carefully worked out staples of narrative writing such as rising action, character conflict, climax, falling action, denouement etc.?

We know that the historians Josephus, Tacitus, Suetonius et.al. didn't write this way, but are there others who did?

Toto

This seems to be the general consensus:

Roland

Toto

Thanks for the info.

mountainman

YES.

Check the non canonical gospels and particularly the non canonical acts. I recall the term denouement noted against one or more. If you want a place to start try this Analysis of the Non Canonical Christian Literature Corpus

Truly weird stories using the canonical characters, Jesus and the 12 Apostles as subjects (IMO) of parody. Plenty of docetic references, such as Jesus not leaving any footprints.

There is in addition, whoever the author was of NHC 6.1 "The Acts of Peter and 12 apostles" dated from Nag Hammadi at 348 CE, the text cites a reference from the Bagavad Gita ("the city of nine gates").

There is plenty of action in Syriac short Acts of Philip, where the author of the acts has a powerful christian angel doing the bidding of the apostle philip, by tying a Jew to the top of the mainmast in a ship in a gale, because the Jew blasphemed against Christ.

Nobody really knows who wrote the gospels, and nobody really knows who wrote the non-canonical gospels. But they sort of somehow appeared together in an unknown century which could have been the first except we have absolutely not one shred of evidence from the first century. So, everyone then thinks, it MUST HAVE BEEN the second century, because in this century the history of Eusebius tells us that people started writing about christianity.

Personally I think it all happened in the fourth.
Best wishes,


Pete

aa5874

After having read the information on that link, the general consensus is seriously flawed.

These are the facts:
The words of Jesus cannot be ascertained. An oral tradition for the gospels before the fall of the Temple have not been verified or supported by an real evidence.

This writer did not address the fact that the original Jesus story could have been written by a single author and then modified by other unknown authors.

It is really disappointing to see the general consensus based on flawed assumptions.

By the way, who is the author of that link? I noticed it was anonymous.

Toto

Note: the non-canonical gospels and the non-canonical acts are not history, and no one has ever treated them as history (except for a few analysts who claim to find a few possible historical references among the obviously fanciful stories.)

aa5874: the consensus of which I spoke was just that the gospels are a unique genre.

Ben C Smith

The position that the gospels are sui generis was pretty much the consensus some two or three decades ago. At this point, and for the last decade or more, that consensus has completely crumbled. See the most recent edition of R. Burridge, What Are the Gospels (or via: amazon.co.uk)? Chapter 10 (IIRC), a new addition to the updated version of the book, reviews the state of the question in thoroughgoing fashion (including the views of Hurtado, whom that snippet you linked to quoted).

If anything, there is almost a new consensus in the opposite direction.

Ben.

gstafleu

And the direction is...? (IOW, which genre are they, modernly speaking?)

Gerard Stafleu

Toto

I thought we went through this before. There is a review of Burridge here.

So he rules out "unique" on definitional grounds.

He then goes on to describe bioi as a "flexible genre that developed and changed and that shared some similarities in form and content with neighboring genres such as historiography, rhetoric, encomium, moral philosophy, polemic, and the novel."

So - Burridge first of all decides that the gospels cannot be unique by definition, and then fits them into a 'flexible" category that includes all sorts of styles and content.

As this point you have to ask what the purpose of categorizing the gospels might be? If you want to see them in their Hellenistic context, this makes some sense.

But I can't help but wonder if there isn't a hidden agenda to put the gospels in the same category as works with some history, to leave the impression open that there might be some history in them, without having to actually show a historical basis.

andrewcriddle

A comparison of the Alexander Prose Romance with the Gospels may possibly be of interest.

However the present form of the Alexander Legend has inset letters of an entirely fictitious nature.

There may have been an earlier form of the legend without the letters which would have been a better comparison to the Gospels.

Andrew Criddle