I don’t know this book.StephenGoranson wrote: ↑Tue Jul 27, 2021 5:08 am For example of one of many earlier:
The First Biography of Jesus: Genre and Meaning in Mark’s Gospel, Helen Bond (2020)
Abstract
Reading the gospels as ancient biographies makes a profound difference in the way we interpret them. Biography immortalizes the memory of the subject, creating a literary monument to the person’s life and teaching. Yet it is also a bid to legitimize a specific view of that figure and to position the author and the audience as appropriate “gatekeepers” of that memory. Furthermore, biography is well suited to the articulation of shared values and commitments, the formation of group identity, and the binding together of a past story, present concerns, and future hopes.
Helen Bond argues that Mark’s author uses the genre of biography—while both utilizing and subverting its literary conventions—to extend the proclamation from an earlier narrow focus on the death and resurrection of Jesus to include his way of life. The First Biography of Jesus shows how this was a bold step in outlining a radical form of Christian discipleship, one patterned on the life and death of Jesus.
But I have a lot of problems with the idea of gMark as “biography.” It is a religious text presenting itself as scriptural revelation, constructed largely around snippets of OT scripture. It hardly contains any teaching by Jesus at all, although I suppose the Great Commandment in chapter 12 would count as a bare minimum. It certainly isn’t about Jesus’ “way of life,” but all about the drama of his death and resurrection and messiahship. There were no pre-existing models for a portait of the messiah and his suffering.
If we have to take the genre approach to the Gospels—and I don’t see any good reason why we would—why is the idea of gMark as an apocalypse (the whoe thing, not just 13) so rarely considered?