The First Biography of Jesus

Genre and Meaning in Mark's Gospel

Helen K. Bond

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781467458078
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

What difference does it make to identify Mark's gospel as an ancient biography?

Reading the gospels as ancient biographies makes a profound difference to the way that we interpret them. Biography immortalizes the memory of the subject, creating a literary monument to the person's life and teaching. Yet it is also a bid to legitimize a specific view of that figure and to position an author and his audience as appropriate "gatekeepers" of that memory. Biography was well suited to the articulation of shared values and commitments, the formation of group identity, and the binding together of a past story, present concerns, and future hopes.

Helen Bond argues that Mark's author used the genre of biography to extend the gospel from an earlier narrow focus on the death and resurrection of Jesus so that it included the way of life of its founding figure. Situating Jesus at the heart of a biography was a bold step in outlining a radical form of Christian discipleship patterned on the life – and death – of Jesus.

CHAPTER 1

Mark as a Bios

Genre matters to the reading of every text.

—John Frow¹

When scholars argued in the 1970s and 1980s that the gospels were bioi, they were only advocating a view that had been taken for granted within Christian circles for almost nineteen hundred years. What is more surprising, perhaps, is that anyone should ever have doubted that the gospels were biographies. In this first chapter, we shall look at the debate over the genre of the gospels, noting the way in which various issues have played into the dispute, not least assumptions over the nature and formation of the gospels, the evangelists’ level of education, and often rather rigid conceptions of ancient bioi themselves. We shall pay attention not only to the academic arguments but also to the social contexts in which they were debated, in the conviction that scholars are no more insulated from prevailing cultural trends and attitudes than anyone else.

From the Ancients to Votaw

At first glance, it is rather surprising that no one in the ancient world ever refers to the gospels as bioi. The reason for this, however, may be quite straightforward: almost from the very beginning, these particular “lives” were known as “gospels” (euangelia).

The term “gospel” is not, of course, a literary genre. The term, often in the plural, was used in the Greco-Roman world to refer to the proclamation of significant news or imperial proclamations—to announce a military victory, the accession of a new emperor, or an emperor’s benefactions—and would be the occasion for civil rejoicing. On the famous Priene Calendar, for example, Augustus can refer to his own birthday as “the beginning of good news (euangelia) for the world.”² When Paul talks about “the gospel” he has in mind Christian preaching concerning the death and resurrection of Jesus. Although his language can vary, he appears to appeal to a body of shared tradition such as we find in 1 Cor 15:3b–5: “that Christ died . . . that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve.” Although he can sometimes uses the word in a similar way, Mark’s great innovation was to include the life, ministry, and teaching of Jesus within his understanding of “gospel” (1:1, 14, 15; 8:35; 10:29; 13:10; 14:9).³ Still for him, however, as for Paul, the term referred primarily to oral proclamation.

At some point over the next few decades, however, the term underwent a shift of meaning so that it now referred not only to oral preaching but quite specifically to books about Jesus. Clear evidence for this change does not appear until the mid-second century, when Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, and Clement of Alexandria all begin to use the term “gospel” to refer to written lives of Jesus (both those that were later considered canonical and those that were not).⁴ There are good reasons, however, to assume that this usage goes back significantly earlier. Marcion seems to have referred to his abridged copy of Luke as a “gospel,” and references in 2 Clement, Ignatius, and the Didache, though not quite as clear as we might like, do nevertheless seem to suggest that their authors now associated the term “gospel” with written books as well as oral proclamation.⁵ James Kelhoffer has recently argued—persuasively in my opinion—that the change came about sometime between the writing of Matthew and the composition of the Didache (which appears to describe Matthew’s work as a “gospel”), that is, in the very late first century.⁶ Such a usage can be explained quite naturally from Mark’s opening line: “The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, Son of God.” Whether Mark intended “the beginning” (archē) to include only the prologue or the whole of the book (a point we shall return to in Chapter 3), his opening incipit applied the term “gospel” to a written text, and (whether consciously or not) set in motion a train of thought that would eventually identify the term “gospel” with a particular type of literary work.⁷ As it circulated among Christian churches and was read out at gatherings, Mark’s bios would have quite naturally become known as a “gospel,” a term that could equally easily be applied to Matthew, and then by analogy to Luke and John.⁸

This early shift in meaning has important implications for our study. The reason why no one in the early church describes the earliest lives of Jesus as bioi is presumably because from very early on they became known by a term that had quickly acquired theological significance within Christ-following circles—that is, “gospels.”

One other term is worth noting. In the early second century, Papias claimed that Mark wrote down Peter’s “memoirs” (apomnēmoneumata), and soon after Justin Martyr could refer to the “memoirs of the apostles” (apomnēmoneumata tōn apostolōn) being read out at the Eucharist.⁹ Both authors were keen to link the gospels with the reliable recollections of Jesus’s first followers, and the term “memoirs” was clearly a useful one in that regard. Yet it is interesting that precisely the same word was used to designate Xenophon’s biography of Socrates, known as his Memorabilia (= apomnēmoneumata).¹⁰ Although “memoirs” was a rather loose literary genre, the use of the same term to refer to both Xenophon’s collection of anecdotes relating to Socrates and to what were now known as Christian “gospels” does suggest that Papias and Justin, and presumably others, assumed that they belonged to the same category of broadly biographical literature.

The strongest piece of evidence that Mark was indeed read as a bios, however, comes from the way in which his work was received and expanded by Matthew and Luke. Both later authors added a genealogy to the earlier account, and both included elaborate birth stories that, in keeping with biographical expectations, act as precursors to the adult man. Luke even added a childhood story in which the twelve-year-old Jesus outshone the rulers of his day with his wisdom and scriptural interpretation (2:41–51). Both gospels too, in line with general expectations, include more detailed accounts of events following Jesus’s death, now adding resurrection appearances to the Markan story of the empty tomb.¹¹ Assuming the general validity of the “two-document hypothesis,” the fact that two later authors—quite independently—added elements that enhanced the biographical nature of the earlier text strongly suggests that they (and presumably most other audiences) understood that earlier text as a bios. They might have considered Mark’s work to be deficient in a number of aspects—aspects that they themselves could easily remedy—but it was recognizably an attempt at a bios all the same.

And this general assumption seems to have continued into modern times. The establishment of Markan priority in the mid-nineteenth century encouraged a flood of “Lives of Jesus,” based on what was now known to have been the earliest (and therefore, it was supposed, most reliable) of the gospels. While many of these tell us more about the concerns of their own age than the object of their study, their authors all took it for granted that the gospels were broadly biographical, albeit poor examples of the genre. Ernest Renan, for example, remarks that the gospels “are neither biographies after the manner of Suetonius, nor fictitious legends, after the manner of Philostratus; they are legendary biographies. I place them at once alongside of the legends of the saints, the lives of Plotinus, Proclus, Isidore, and other compositions of the same sort, in which historical truth and the desire to present models of virtue are combined in divers degrees.”¹²

A full articulation of the case for regarding the gospels as bioi, however, was left to C. W. Votaw in two lengthy articles published in the American Journal of Theology in 1915. The Chicago professor compared the gospels to other “popular” biographies of intellectual leaders, specifically Plato and Xenophon on Socrates, Arrian on Epictetus, and Philostratus on Apollonius of Tyana. Votaw pointed out that each of these authors presented a selective and idealized account of the teaching of their hero, and that their interest was not so much antiquarian (that is, to provide a historical account) as to present their subject’s way of life as relevant to their own times (that is, as one to be appreciated and emulated). In this broad aim, Votaw found significant parallels to the gospels, concluding that they too were biographical accounts written not simply to preserve tradition but to “accomplish practical results in the moral-religious sphere.”¹³

Votaw’s insights were hugely significant and deserved much fuller critical study. This, however, would have to wait for several decades. Scholars were on the brink of a new approach to the gospels that would advocate a very different understanding of both their composition and literary genre—form criticism.

The Eclipse of Biography

In Germany, the seeds of change had already been sown. Noting their rather primitive style, Franz Overbeck argued that the gospels had much more in common with oral folklore and sagas than with contemporary literature. He coined the term “Urliteratur,” meaning that the gospels were not designed for a wide literary audience, but rather for simple Christian congregations who were more interested in their content than their aesthetic merits. In Overbeck’s view, it was only with the patristic writers that Christian authors began to participate in the popular literary genres of their day.¹⁴ In a similar manner, Adolf Deissmann distinguished between what he called “Kleinliteratur” (popular literature) and “Hochliteratur” (the high literature of the cultured elite). The gospels, he suggested, were examples of “Kleinliteratur” and were similar in style to the many unassuming papyrus documents emerging at the time from Egypt—basic letters, contracts, and popular literary efforts that provided a window onto the lives of ordinary people with only a rudimentary level of education.¹⁵ Together, the views of Overbeck and Deissmann encouraged a distinction between consciously literary works indebted to a particular generic tradition, produced by and for educated circles (“Hochliteratur”), and works destined for the lower classes whose prime function was to act as depositories for oral material (“Urliteratur” or “Kleinliteratur”). This distinction would prove fundamental to the form critics, who would drive an even broader wedge between the gospels and the more literate compositions of their contemporaries.

The person who would do most to sever the identification of the gospels as ancient bioi was the form critic K. L. Schmidt. In a contribution to Herman Gunkel’s Festschrift in 1923, titled “The Place of the Gospels in the General History of Literature,” he tackled the question of gospel genre head on.¹⁶ Dismissing Votaw’s parallels as merely superficial, he stressed the differences between the gospels and Greco-Roman biography. Authors of the latter, he argued, present themselves as self-conscious litterateurs; their works describe the descent, family, education, and development of their hero; their portraits include a physical description, a note of character and personality, and an attempt to give a sense of the subject’s motives, emotions, and private thoughts.¹⁷ Philostratus’s Life of Apollonius of Tyana, for example, has great literary pretensions: the authorial “I” is present throughout, the author gives a clear indication of the nature of the work and his use of sources, and strives for both completeness and a good literary style.

The gospels, he argued, are very different. Schmidt’s own work on the framework of Mark’s Gospel had convinced him that the evangelist was responsible only for the connecting material, and not for the units of tradition (or pericopae) themselves.¹⁸ These units of tradition were essentially the kerygma of the early church—lively, oral preaching material that had been shaped according to the needs of various congregations and largely preserved in cultic settings. The contribution of the evangelists was simply to gather material together. Thus for Schmidt, as indeed for all the form critics, Mark and his followers were not creative authors, but collectors, compilers, and editors. The uneducated nature of most believers in this early period, along with their intensely apocalyptic outlook, meant that it would be some time before Christians engaged in anything other than simply preserving tradition. The gospels for Schmidt were...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. Mark as a Bios
• 2. Ancient Bioi
• 3. Mark the Biographer
• 4. A Life of Jesus
• 5. Other Characters
• 6. The Death of Jesus
• Final Reflections
• Bibliography
• Index of Authors
• Index of Subjects
• Index of Scripture and Other Ancient Sources