Smoodock's Blog

I believe before we get into the actual study of Matthew’s Gospel, we should come to understand what a Gospel is, meaning what is its literary genre, so that we can come to a better understanding of what the author of Matthew wants us to know. Many readers of the Bible today believe the Gospels are biographies of Jesus,[1] while this is true in a sense, it is not true in the modern sense of the word and genre. If we acquire a biography of a famous person, today, we more or less, have come to expect accurate chronology, and, if the author writes something that his subject had said, the reader expects an exact quotation. This isn’t so, when we come to the Gospel narratives!

The Gospel records are written after an ancient Greco-Roman literary genre known as bios (life). This type of genre was used to describe the lives of famous historical figures like emperors, philosophers, orators and poets. A bios was written, while stressing the goals, achievements, failures, and the moral character of its main character, usually with the agenda to generate, in the hearts and minds of his readers, the same attitude of respect, praise or honor that the author had for the person described in his bios. Not many villains were subjects of such a genre, because very often the purpose of the author was to generate a desire in the reader to imitate the person he describes.

The general consensus among Biblical scholars today is that the Gospel narratives were written in this ancient form of biography, not strictly in the modern sense, but in the ancient sense of a bios. In other words, the authors or the four Gospel narratives worshiped Jesus, they admired him and confessed him as Lord, the Servant of God, who sent him to fulfill his will for mankind. So, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John tell their particular story in such a manner that their readers would arrive at these same conclusions that the authors do about Jesus. This may mean that events are rearranged to suit the particular purpose each author had in his Gospel narrative. Therefore, we don’t necessarily have the accurate chronology in the Gospels that we’ve come to expect in a modern biography. Moreover, if they wish to paraphrase something Jesus said, that’s allowed under the genre in which they write. It doesn’t mean errors or lies are placed in the text; it just means the author summarizes Jesus’ sayings without corrupting the content. Therefore, the long accounts of some of Jesus’ discourses (Matthew 24, 25; and John 13 through 18) don’t have to be word for word, if they accurately portray the essence of what Jesus said.

Finally, the author of a Gospel narrative could amend the text, in the sense of leaving out known facts, in order to emphasize his particular objective. Such things were done, for example, in the post resurrection accounts. Matthew wasn’t interested in dwelling on Mary Magdalene being the first to see Jesus alive. He was more interested in showing how the unbelieving authorities reacted to the news that Jesus arose from the dead, even denying what some of them actually saw for themselves, when Jesus appeared to over 500 brethren at once in Galilee at his **only** prearranged post resurrection appearance.

Who saw Jesus after his resurrection and when? When did Peter and the disciple whom Jesus loved come to the tomb? Was it before the women in Matthew 28 or afterward? Such questions can be answered by comparing the texts together, but each Gospel writer amended his text in order to emphasize his main objective. This was something allowed in the bios genre during the Greco-Roman period.

Why are the Jesus’ Narratives called Gospels? It’s because Mark begins his account this way in Mark 1:1. Undoubtedly, the term stuck, because the church fathers of the second and third centuries so named the four. Over the centuries the term gospel came to mean something that was true, usually a religious truth. However, during the first century AD, the term gospel was used for any event that was good news. It might have been a military or a political victory, the birth of a son etc. Therefore, the Gospel of Jesus is the good news of his coming, of the things he said and promised, if we would believe him etc. It is the good news of Jesus’ death in our stead and of his resurrection that grants us new life—spiritual life, eternal life. This is the message of the author of the Gospel of Matthew, and, yes, his goal is to generate in his readers a trust that his claims about Jesus are true, and worthy to embrace for ourselves, so that we, too, become Jesus’ disciples.

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[1] See Wikipedia’s Ancient Biography.