9. The Gospels as Ancient Biographies
Nov 07, 2026For a long time, Gospel scholars tended to treat the Gospels as a literary form almost entirely new and their own—a new "Christian" genre: Gospel. But during the last several decades, extensive comparison with ancient Greek and Roman literature has changed that understanding somewhat.
Ancient Biographies
Today, it is more common to recognize that the Gospels have substantial literary similarities to ancient biography—what was commonly called a βίος (bios), a “life.”[3]
But this needs an immediate qualification, because an ancient biography was not a modern biography.
Features:
Unlike modern biographies, ancient biographies speak of extraordinary or divine births, prophecies, miracles, disciples, extended teachings, and detailed death scenes. Some biographies that were written during or after the writings of the Gospels also include brief apparitions after death and ascensions. These sometimes preserve traditions that existed prior to Christianity.[4]
In such general respects, the Gospels are not unique, and these parallels form part of the broader case for saying they belong to the general category: ancient biographies. Even so, some elements of their stories—such as Jesus’ bodily resurrection—set them apart from those biographies.
Methods & Procedures:
Ancient biographers did not usually pursue the same kind of comprehensive, documentary reconstruction often found in and expected of modern biography. They chose representative sayings, actions, controversies, and relationships—sometimes arranging them thematically rather than chronologically—to reveal the subject’s character and public significance. Their principal concern was not so much to trace psychological development or reproduce verbatim speech as to show what kind of person the subject was and why that life deserved praise, blame, or imitation.
Again, these Gospels follow the same general patterns.
Prophecy & Fulfilment:
Unlike modern biographies, ancient biographies could employ prophecy and fulfillment for various purposes:
- Suetonius says omens predict both Augustus’ greatness as well as Caesar’s assassination.
- Plutarch relates signs that surrounded Alexander’s career or that became a warning fulfilled by Caesar’s death.
However, in these Greco-Roman biographies, prophecy shows up as an individual oracle, dream, or omen that foreshadows an achievement or death and subsequently proves true.
Gospel authors do this as well, but more characteristically they interpret Jesus through an intricate and complex conversation with Israel’s sacred writings—not merely as the person anticipated by isolated predictions, but as the one whose life brings Israel’s sacred story to fulfillment.[5]
The Gospels clearly fit into the general category of ancient biography. Their distinctiveness is not so much in their inclusion of such things as miracles and the like, as in their specific contents, people, claims, and interpretations.
End of Life:
Ancient biographies sometimes gave a great deal of interpretive attention to how their subjects died, although the practice was far from universal.[6]
All four Gospels do this as well, devoting, roughly speaking, a quarter or more of each Gospel to the events leading to Jesus’ death and resurrection. So the emphasis on Jesus’ death is not unprecedented in ancient biography. What is more exceptional is that all four Gospels give such sustained prominence to the same final period, and they interpret that death as promissed and culminating in, of all things, Jesus' bodily resurrection.
In sum, noting the similarities between the four Gospels and ancient biographies does not mean that they are simply collections of historical information about Jesus. And we do this not simply to give you an interesting tidbit about them.
That's what usually happens. I've personally heard this many times. A teacher, a preacher—someone—will walk through some technical material about the Gospels, and then just walk away and forget about it. As though it makes no difference. But it makes a difference. How we actually view the Gospels will have great effect on how we finally read and apply them.
Avoiding a Mistake
A common mistake is to read the Gospels as though their only purpose were to report ‘the facts and history of Jesus,’ so that if something is stated in a Gospel, then it must have happened historically in exactly that way. As we have seen thoughout this series, a close comparison between Gospel accounts often shows differences in details, description, or even theological purpose. Too often, it's more convenient to forget about those things and just fall into old habits.
An opposite mistake is think of the Gospels only in terms of their theological purposes—as if history does not matter. However, just because each Gospel has theological agendas does not mean that they are somehow anti-historical. Those are not mutually exclusive categories.
A better tack is to recognize the Gospels as of the category ancient biographies. This allows us to see them not as rigid documentary reconstructions, or as chronicles of history, or as historical artifacts, but rather as interpretations of the traditions, events, sayings, and the ministry-life of Jesus.
Each of the Gospel writers tells the story of Jesus in order to interpret Jesus. That distinction is enormously important for helping us get more from the Bible.
https://www.biblicalconversation.com/more
Questions to Consider
- If the Gospels are best understood as forms of ancient biography, what expectations from modern biography do we need to stop imposing on them?
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ - How does recognizing the Gospels as ancient biographies help us hold together both historical rootedness and theological interpretation?
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ - If each Gospel writer tells the story of Jesus in order to interpret Jesus, what does that suggest about the significance of differences among the four?
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ - After following the argument of these 9 study sessions, what would it actually mean for you to let Mark speak as Mark, Matthew as Matthew, Luke as Luke, and John as John before bringing them into conversation with one another?
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Next Week:
10. "Beyond the 5th Gospel"
What changes when we stop conflating the Gospels and begin hearing Mark, Matthew, Luke-Acts, and John in their own distinctive voices?
Series Note
This is Study Session #9 of the free, online, ten-session Bible study series: Beyond the 5th Gospel. It is best to begin with Study Session 1 and follow the entire study in the proper order, on a week-by-week schedule.
Because this is copyrighted material intended for personal or group study, you are granted the right to freely use this material in Bible classes, small groups, private study, or similar settings—as long as you keep the material unchanged and intact, including this series note.
If you have come to this study session out of sequence, please go here for the beginning of the series:
https://www.biblicalconversation.com/blog/5th-gospel-prelude
Go here for all available PDF downloads:
https://www.biblicalconversation.com/studiesbc#section-1788376027032
Thank you.
Gary D. Collier
Footnotes
[1] Post 1 explicitly distinguishes comparing from conflating; post 4 illustrates the distinction through Tatian’s Diatessaron; post 7 uses comparison constructively to identify how Mark and Matthew interpret the same event differently; and posts 8 and 9 warn that immediately combining parallel accounts can erase meaningful editorial choices. The point is not that harmonization is inherently illegitimate, but that it should never govern how the Gospels are read or obscure what each Gospel says in its own distinctive voice.
[2] No, I'm not claiming to be Jesus—that is not at all the point. In effect, this challenge sees a problem that is at least similar to early Syriac churches, where the Gospels had literally started to be replaced by the Diatesseron. By the 5th century, efforts had to be made to restore the four Gospels. [See Post 4, under the heading: “Tatian (Late 2nd Century).”] My point here is the concern over the dominant and pervasive philosophy that treats the four Gospels as only one.
[3] The prevailing scholarly view identifies the Gospels as distinctive and flexible forms of ancient biography, shaped by Jewish Scripture and Christian proclamation, while recognizing that this classification alone does not determine their authorship, historical precision, or relationship between history and theology. See Excursus 2 for a detailed summary of recent discussion about this topic.
[4] For accounts that describe apparitions, disappearances, or ascensions in ancient biographies, see Excursus 3.
[5] See Suetonius, Life of Augustus 94–97, especially 94.1–3, for predictions and omens interpreted retrospectively as foretelling Augustus’s birth, greatness, and death; and Life of Julius Caesar 81, for the signs and Spurinna’s warning preceding Caesar’s assassination. See also Plutarch, Life of Alexander 2–3, 14, 73–75, for dreams, oracles, and portents associated with Alexander’s birth, career, and death; and Life of Caesar 63, for the warning about the Ides of March. On the narrative function of supernatural signs in Alexander, see P. Bosman, “Signs and Narrative Design in Plutarch’s Alexander,” Akroterion 56 (2011):91–106, https://doi.org/10.7445/56-0-6.
[6] For this section see Richard A. Burridge, What Are the Gospels? A Comparison with Graeco- Roman Biography, rev. 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), 131–33, 159–64, 192–93. The pre-Gospel evidence is limited. Xenophon, Cyropaedia 8.7.1–28 (ca. 365 BCE), constructs an extended deathbed scene containing Cyrus’s final prayer, review of his life, succession arrangements, reflections on immortality, burial instructions, and death, although the Cyropaedia is a partly fictional work whose precise genre remains disputed. Cornelius Nepos, Life of Atticus 21–22 (ca. 30 BCE), narrates Atticus’s final illness, decision to refuse food, conversation with his friends, and death. Philo, Life of Moses 2.288–292 (ca. 30 CE), provides a shorter but strongly theological account of Moses’s final prophecy, transformation, death, supernatural burial, and Israel’s mourning. Tacitus, Life of Agricola 43–46 (98 CE); Plutarch, Life of Cato the Younger 62–70 (ca. 115 CE); Suetonius, Life of Augustus 97–100 (ca. 120 CE); and Philostratus, Life of Apollonius of Tyana 7.9–42; 8.1–8, 29–31 (ca. 225 CE), covering Apollonius’s imprisonment, trial, disappearance, and reported death or ascension.
