Gospel as genre

The four documents we call gospels are not biographies, not histories, and not theological essays. They are a literary form of their own, named after their own first sentence in Mark — euangelion, good news. The word matters, and the genre matters; reading Mark as something it is not blunts every move it makes.

What the word meant in Mark's world

Euangelion in the first-century Roman empire was a political word. Heralds called it out in the marketplace whenever a new emperor came to power. Coins were struck with the word stamped on them. Provincial cities erected inscriptions in stone celebrating the good news of Caesar's reign and birthday. The most famous of these is the Priene Calendar Inscription of 9 BCE, which describes the birthday of Caesar Augustus as "the beginning of the good news for the world that came by reason of him." That is the genre Mark is borrowing when he writes his opening sentence: the beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. He is not labelling a kind of book. He is making an imperial-style announcement and handing Caesar's vocabulary to a Galilean carpenter.

Why this matters for how we read

Three things follow from taking the genre seriously.

First, the gospels are written to make a public political-religious claim, not to give a biographical account. Mark does not tell us what Jesus looked like, where he went to school, what kind of carpenter he was, or whether he married. He tells us about a kingdom drawing near and a man giving his life for it. The questions we bring as twenty-first-century readers (what was Jesus really like? what would I have seen if I had been there?) are not the questions the genre is built to answer. The genre is built to announce.

Second, the gospels follow narrative-literary conventions, not historical-chronological ones. Mark structures his story for effect: framing pericopes (one story bracketed by two halves of another), repeated keywords (immediately, on the way), geographical reversals, structural mirror-images. The order of events in Mark is the order Mark wants the reader to encounter them, not necessarily the order they happened. Asking "did Jesus really cleanse the temple at the beginning of his ministry as John has it, or the end as Mark has it?" misunderstands what the gospels are doing.

Third, the gospels include things that are not strictly historical. The voice from heaven at the baptism. The transfiguration. The conversation in Gethsemane that no-one was awake to hear. These are theological-literary moves the genre permits and the inspired writer makes. To insist on bare historicity for every line in Mark is to read against the grain of the form he chose.

A practical implication for the course

When a question comes up in the course about whether something in Mark "actually happened" — did Bartimaeus really walk to Jerusalem with Jesus? did the demons really speak? did the fig tree really wither? — the right move is often not to answer the historical question but to ask what the gospel-as-genre is doing in that moment. Mark is making an argument. The narrative is the argument. The genre permits and asks us to read it that way.

A note on the other three gospels

Matthew and Luke borrow Mark's genre and extend it (birth narratives, longer teachings, resurrection appearances). John takes the form and reshapes it for a meditative-theological register, but still inside the genre Mark invents. Mark is the original. When the course reads Mark, it is reading the document that gave the genre its name.

Further reading

Richard Burridge, What Are the Gospels? A Comparison with Graeco-Roman Biography (Eerdmans, second edition 2004) — the major academic study; argues the gospels are a Graeco-Roman bios, not a brand-new genre. Useful counterpoint to the position above.

Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man (Orbis, 1988) — reads Mark as a political-pastoral text written for an embattled Jewish-Christian community in the wake of the Jewish-Roman war. The gospel-as-political-announcement reading is part of his frame.

N. T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God (SPCK, 1996), chapter 1 — for a more theologically traditional but still genre-aware reading.