I just finished reading The Living Word of God by Ben Witherington, a professor of New Testament Interpretation at Asbury Theological Seminary. In this book the author has interesting things to say about portions of the New Testament. He believes it’s important to understand the various genres that makeup the twenty-seven books found there. Since I teach the Bible as literature at Palomar College, I wanted to share some of his points here; he believes we can understand the Bible much better if we understand the type (genre) of literature we are reading.

For this blog I’m going to focus solely on the four gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, John) as ancient biographies and histories. Many of my students assume that these gospels must be like modern biographies, covering the person’s entire life, producing a chronological account, and containing precise quotations. They have questions when they discover this is not the case. They assume there must be errors in the text.

But Witherington claims these four gospels “all conform quite nicely to the conventions of ancient biographies, which were quite different in scope and character than most modern biographies.” To start with, modern authors have unlimited space to tell their stories, but ancient biographies were restricted to material that could fit on scrolls. These authors had to be selective about what they covered. That’s why, for example, we don’t learn the entire story of Jesus’ life.

In addition, ancient biographies did not spend much time about early childhood development. People in the ancient world did not believe personality developed over time. Instead, they felt you were stuck with whatever personality you were born with. Again, we can see this when we look at the life of Jesus — we know very little about him before his ministry started around the age of 30.

Another characteristic of ancient biographies was a focus on the death of the individual since this event was thought to reveal the character of the person. A shameful death was considered to be a revelation that the person did not have a good character. It’s no wonder, then, that the gospel writers spent so much time on the death of Jesus — they felt they needed to argue that this death was necessary to fulfill God’s plan.

A fourth difference between modern and ancient biographies deals with the amount of editorializing the author did. Much editorializing abounds in modern biographies; the author is often eager to share his/her comments. However, the ancients tended to portray a person indirectly, allowing the words and deeds of the person in question to speak for themselves. That is certainly true of the gospels in the New Testament. We often hear the words of Jesus and are forced to decide for ourselves what he meant.

There is much more that Witherington has to say, but I’ll save that for future blogs. I’m hoping that this information will allow us to appreciate the gospels for what they are rather than what they were never intended to be.