Mike Kok has been blogging through the question of the genre of the Gospels and the history of scholarship on the subject, and of late he has reached Richard Burridge’s work on whether the Gospels are Bioi, i.e. ancient biographies of the sort written in that historical and cultural context. His latest post features a chart comparing the features in a number of works (the right column of which unfortunately doesn’t show up properly in Chrome).
Andrew Lincoln’s forthcoming book Born of a Virgin?: Reconceiving Jesus in the Bible, Tradition, and Theology
also tackles the genre of the Gospels, and after noting that ancient biographies often include infancy stories which must be judged ahistorical, and that these elements in some of the Gospels actually serve both to clue us in to their genre, and to encourage us to view the infancy stories in a similar way.
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