"The publication of Richard Burridge's What Are the Gospels? in 1992 inaugurated a transformation in Gospel studies by overturning the previous consensus about Gospel uniqueness. Burridge argued convincingly for an understanding of the Gospels as biographies, a ubiquitous genre in the Graeco-Roman world. To establish this claim, Burridge compared each of the four canonical Gospels to the many extant Graeco-Roman biographies. Drawing on insights from literary theory, he demonstrated that the previously widespread view of the Gospels as unique compositions was false. Burridge went on to discuss what a properly "biographical" perspective might mean for Gospel interpretation, which was amply demonstrated in the revised second edition reflecting on how his view had become the new consensus. This third, twenty-fifth anniversary edition not only celebrates the continuing influence of What Are the Gospels?, but also features a major new contribution in which Burridge analyzes recent debates and scholarship about the Gospels. Burridge both answers his critics and reflects upon the new directions now being taken by those who accept the biographical approach. This new edition also features as an appendix a significant article in which he tackles the related problem of the genre of Acts. A proven book with lasting staying power, What Are the Gospels? is not only still as relevant and instructive as it was when first published, but will also doubtlessly inspire new research and scholarship in the years ahead."-- Provided by publisher.

Although the Gospel of Mark is in some respects similar to Greco-Roman novelistic genres, the author maintains that it compares more favorably with Jewish novelistic literature of the Hellenistic period, and that Mark writes within this narrative tradition. Paperback edition is available from the Society of Biblical Literature (www.sbl-site.org)

Justin Marc Smith argues that the gospels were intended to be addressed to a wide and varied audience. He does this by considering them to be works of ancient biography, comparative to the Greco-Roman biography. The earliest Christian interpreters of the Gospels did not understand their works to be sectarian documents. Rather, the wider context of Jesus literature in the second and third centuries points toward the broader Christian practice of writing and disseminating literary presentations of Jesus and Jesus traditions as widely as possible. Smith addresses the difficulty in reconstructing the various gospel communities that might lie behind the gospel texts and suggests that the 'all nations' motif present in all four of the canonical gospels suggests an ideal secondary audience beyond those who could be identified as Christian.

The Fourth Gospel and the Manufacture of Minds in Ancient Historiography, Biography, Romance, and Drama is the first book-length study of genre and character cognition in the Gospel of John. Informed by traditions of ancient literary criticism and the emerging discipline of cognitive narratology, Tyler Smith argues that narrative genres have generalizable patterns for representing cognitive material and that this has profound implications for how readers make sense of cognitive content woven into the narratives they encounter. After investigating conventions for representing cognition in ancient historiography, biography, romance, and drama, Smith offers an original account of how these conventions illuminate the Johannine narrative’s enigmatic cognitive dimension, a rich tapestry of love and hate, belief and disbelief, recognition and misrecognition, understanding and misunderstanding, knowledge, ignorance, desire, and motivation.

Collection of texts published previously.

One of the most fundamental questions when reading and trying to understand New Testament texts is the question of genre. It is impossible to understand a text, its meaning and intention, in its proper historical setting if one does not understand its genre: As an example, interpreting a satirical text without understanding the genre would no doubt lead to grave misunderstandings. The same logic applies to texts from the New Testament, and the matter is complicated even further by the immense historical gap between the time of the genesis of the New Testament canon and now. The problem of the New Testament texts' genre(s) is therefore a vital area of scholarly discussion within international New Testament scholarship. The current volume utilizes the newest insights from current research on the New Testament to cast new light on the question of the genre of Mark's Gospel. Here, prominent international New Testament scholars discuss how we should understand the genre(s) of Mark's Gospel, thus making an important contribution to international scholarship on the Gospel of Mark as well as the Gospel genre in general.

The discussion concerning Markan characterisation (and Markan genre) can be helpfully informed by Bakhtinian categories. This book uses the twin foci of chronotope and carnival to examine specific characters in terms of different levels of dialogue. Various passages in Mark are examined, and thresholds are noted between interindividual character-zones, and between the hearing-reader and text-voices. Several generic contacts are shown to have shaped the text’s ‘genre-memory’ – in particular, the Graeco-Roman popular literature of the ancient world. The resultant picture is of an earthy, populist Gospel whose “voices” resonate with the “vulgar” classes, and whose spirituality is refreshingly relevant to everyday concerns.