Recently, many scholars have agreed that the New Testament Gospels are a form of ancient biography. Why do they think this? What do Gospels have in common with other ancient biographies? How are they different? Do you agree with this categorization of the Gospels?

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The Answer is Although some earlier New Testament scholars believed that the Gospel writers created a new genre to talk about Jesus, Ehrman points out that a completely new genre would be impossible to understand. Readers must bring some expectations to a text in order to interpret it. For the most part, the New Testament Gospels follow the conventions of ancient biography: they focus on one central character around whom all action revolves, they emphasize miraculous events accompanying Jesus' birth and death as well as his own miraculous deeds, they contain divinely inspired teachings, and they present Jesus' personality as constant. Unlike most ancient biographies, though, the Gospels emphasize Jesus' death, an element that typically was not a subject of extended narrative. In addition, Jesus was not a political, military, or philosophical leader; he was not even a very important religious leader during his lifetime. On the contrary, he was a poor itinerant teacher who had only a few followers and was relatively unknown among pagans until almost a century after his death.

Recently, Many Scholars Have Agreed That the New Testament Gospels