No Robots

They have no real literary parallel, but they are definitely closest to Jewish midrash.

Why not with the Talmud?

The shift from unconnected anecdotes about Jesus, which resemble rabbinic material, to composing them together in the genre of an ancient biography is not just moving from a Jewish environment to Graeco-Roman literature. It is actually making an enormous Christological claim ... [while] no rabbi is that unique ... writing a biography of Jesus implies the claim that not only is the Torah embodied, but that God himself is uniquely incarnate in this one life, death and resurrection.--Richard A. Burridge, What are the Gospels? A Comparison with Graeco-Roman Biography. Second Edition. Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans, 2004. p.304:

Note that Burridge asserts that the Gospels as we have them are derived from Jewish material.

Gamera

Read Richard Burridge, What are the Gospels? and he goes into detail and the structural and other elements that constitute a graeco-roman biography. His analysis is somewhat sophisticated and invovles computer analysis. I don't have my copy here so I can't summarize it. But regardless of your position, you should read the book.

Gamera

I'm not disputing that. The issue is not the content of the gospels, but the genre, which Burridge convincingly (to my mind) places squarely within the graeco-roman biographical tradition.

This is important to the extent that we are trying to reconstruct how the authors and readers of the gospels would have approached the text. Burridge's study makes the mythicist position very untenable.

spin

To quote Gamera, "Bingo!"

The old shifto-changeo defense is still in place. It doesn't matter that that his stuff has no evidence to support the text, it has a narrative. He has no way to distinguish his narrative from that of Robin Hood, but he has a nrrative and it's better attested as a narrative than yours. Convincing.

Oh, please! Destruction of the Persian empire, Greek king named Alexander (yes, the coins name Alexander as king, just as other coins name different kings) minting coins in Babylon, Tyre and Egypt.


spin

Steven Carr

In other words, the earliest Gospel is anonymous, has Jesus talking to Satan, and gives no evidence of any sources or chronology or how the author got his stories.

Just like Tacitus!

And 2 other Gospels then used the first Gospel as a source, carefully avoiding any mention of where they had done so, and changing whatever suited their own private theological agendas.

Just like Suetonius!

Well, if Burridge had a computer, it must be accurate.

I saw a TV documentary about him once, and on his computer screen, there were pie-charts and everything.

You can't get more convincing than that!

Now about the anonymous author of Matthew reading the Old Testament and deciding that 30 pieces of silver was the amount Judas got...

Steven Carr

Argument from a Christian vicar says so?

The Reverend Dr. Burridge says the Gospels are just like a graeco-roman biography.

There's a shock.


Burridge on the Gospels :-

'I, along with many others, have known the words of the Gospels to leap out of the page and hit me between the eyes. Why are Matthew, Mark, Luke and John in the Bible and other gospels aren’t? Simple – they have power, the others don’t.'

No Robots

However much they may be said to resemble Greco-Roman biography, this is not what they are. They are, as Constantin Brunner puts it, "the occasional writings of a previously nonexistent ammé haáretz literature" (Our Christ, p. 275).


Burridge continues the age-old practice of emphasizing Greco-Roman influence on the NT, and minimizing its Jewishness. This is the playground of both traditionalist religion and mythicism. Only by insisting on the essential Jewishness of the NT are the claims of religion and mythicism refuted.

Toto

This appears to state that the Rev. Dr. Burridge is proposing a theory at variance with many other scholars.

Reviewed hereSo that even if the gospels take some elements of Greco-Roman bioi, it would be rash to take the next leap and say that they would have been read as factual at the time.

The description in the review of Burridge's computer analysis sounds rather unimpressive. He counted up the number of times Jesus was mentioned in the gospels, and it compares to the number of times the subject is mentioned in other biographies? That sort of mathematical obfuscation ("content analysis") was popular at one time in the social sciences, but I thought most people had seen through it by now.

Two more reviews are linked here.

ETA: I see nothing here that makes mythicism "untenable." Someone historicised Jesus several generations after he lived - why not use the form of a biography?

No Robots

Ya see, Gamera: Burridge has holes that a truck could drive through. For God's sake, man! You've put me in a position where I have to agree with Toto.

French Prometheus

You mean, a reasonable reason why coins with AΛEΞANΔPOY BAΣIΛEΩΣ written on them would be minted in Babylon in the 320's BCE?

Given what I know of Greek and Persian cultures (including their respective coinage), I can't think of a reason other than the conquest of the Persian Empire by a Greek-speaking king named Alexander. And archeology allows us to date those coins to about a decade after the death of Philip II.

ETA: Just so you know, I personally own coins of Philip II, Alexander, Philip III, half the Seleucid kings and most of the Ptolemies. We're not talking about a small scrap of papyrus preserved in a museum. We're talking about ancient artifacts that were made in such large numbers that many still exist today and can be bought at an affordable price by thousands of private collectors in the world.

I wish Cleopatra's coins were as affordable as Alexander's...