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Originally Posted by No Robots Collins is quite critical of Burridge's neglect of Jewish literature: Burridge's case for defining the Gospels as bioi appears strong in large part because he did not seriously consider any alternative. The very brief review of scholarship under the heading "The Jewish Background" on pages 19-21 does not constitute a serious consideration of the relevant genres of Jewish literature. It is certainly essential to interpret the Gospels in light of Greek and Roman literature. But it is equally essential to interpret them in light of Jewish literature. --Adela Yarbro Collins / Review of What Are the Gospels? A Comparison with Graeco-Roman Biography by Richard A. Burridge. In The Journal of Religion, Vol. 75, No. 2 (Apr., 1995), pp. 241. In fact, Collins cautions against assigning the Gospels to the genre of Greco-Roman biography, stating: It is certainly true that the Gospels eventually came to be read as lives of Jesus, but such readings should be seen as an understandable, but significant departure from the authors' primary intentions. --p.245.

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Burridge has made an important contribution in verifying the intuitive definition of the Gospels as "lives of Jesus.

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The sixth type is the historical biography. Lives of this type have the same aims as historiography: to give an account of an important series of events and to explain the events in terms of their causes. Plutarch’s life of Caesar is an example of this type. He pays little attention to Caesar’s private life and character, in order to focus on posing and answering the questions how and why Caesar came to be a tyrant.121 Another example is Tacitus’s account of the life of his father-in-law, Agricola, written around 98 ce. In this work Tacitus was critical of the ostentatious deaths of the Stoic opponents of the principate and endeavored to show that a good man was able to contribute to the welfare of the state, even during the rule of a despot.122 Suetonius’s Lives of the Caesars also belongs in this category. His method of collecting, ordering, and presenting material is that of the learned grammarian and antiquarian. In his Lives of the Caesars, however, he moved beyond the scholarly type into the historical type, because his aim was to communicate in an orderly way all the information about a person that is worth knowing and of significance for the field in which that person had distinguished himself. Since the emperors’ field of activity was Roman history, he founded a new type of historiography: the narration of the history of a period by focusing on the lives of a series of supreme political rulers in that period.123 The historical type of biography is the one that is most similar to the Gospels. Mark, for example, apparently intended to narrate the history of the fulfillment of the divine promises; in other words, to describe in mimetic fashion the sequence of events in which the gospel of God was proclaimed and had an effect on human beings as actors in a historical process. He chose to narrate this sequence of events by telling the story of Jesus’ life, because he was the primary agent of God in the unfolding of this history. Further, the focus on a single life, from the beginning of the public life of the protagonist to his death and vindication, provides a pleasing artistic and dramatic unity.124 The Gospel of Mark, then, has an important affinity with what I am calling the didactic type of ancient biography. It is also analogous to the historical type of ancient biography, in that the life of Jesus is told, not for its own sake, not to illustrate his character or cultural achievement, but because his life was at the center of a crucial period of history from the point of view of Christian proclamation. The historical type of biography is very close to the historical monograph, which focuses on a single person. Whether one defines Mark as a historical biography or a historical monograph depends on one’s perception of where the emphasis in Mark lies: on the activity and fate of Jesus or on God’s plan for the fulfillment of history in which he played a decisive role.125 121 Ibid., 136–37. See also Christopher Pelling “Breaking the Bounds: Writing about Julius Caesar,” in McGing and Mossman, eds., Ancient Biography, 255–80, esp. 266–69. 122See the discussion by Dihle, Entstehung, 27–32, 80. For a recent treatment of the political ambiguities and genre of this text, see Tim Whitmarsh, “This In-Between Book: Language, Politics and Genre in the Agricola,” in McGing and Mossman, eds., Ancient Biography, 305–33. 123Ibid., 64–80. See also idem, Studien, 116. See below the discussion of histories that focus on an individual leader. 124Leo pointed out how often the motif of the vengeance of the gods occurs at the end of Plutarch’s lives and the dramatic effect of this motif and its placement (Biographie, 159, 165, 183). 125Wegener concluded that Mark is best viewed as belonging to the genre “Hellenistic biography” from a historical point of view, but as dramatic history in the tragic mode as a more helpful category for modern readers (Cruciformed, 30–31). Collins, A. Y., & Attridge, H. W. (2007). Mark : A Commentary on the Gospel of Mark. Hermeneia--a critical and historical commentary on the Bible (32). Minneapolis: Fortress Press.

To be frank, the Jewish Jesus is completely irrevelant to Christianity today. He does not make sense, because all that he stood for that was Jewish, he no longer stands for in Christianity.--Forbidden Gospels