The Polarizing Gospel Genre and Register

Abstract

This study aims to convince the reader of three things. First, the gospels ought to be classified as gospels. Second, a gospel is a folkloric collection about Jesus designed to polarize and galvanize readers with regard to the values at stake in the gospels (e.g., the moral, spiritual, historical, social, and theological values). And third, this classification is better than labels like biography or historiography, because this understanding of what a gospel is and does helps the reader draw better analogies between his or her own context and the kind(s) of context the gospels were designed to function in. Drawing analogies between your situation and the situation of the gospels’ first readers is at the heart of rightly interpreting these texts, and it is for this reason that scholars have sought for centuries to achieve an understanding of the original context of the gospels that is both precise and generalizable. This study traces scholarly approaches to classifying the gospels over the past century. Early claims about the genre of the gospels were refined and nuanced by form and redaction criticism, with its emphasis on how forms or genres were defined by the typical social situations in which they functioned. Interests subsequently diverged between a general, sociological focus and a particular, literary focus. The literary focus brought questions of genre to the fore once again, though this time without the crucial insights of the earlier critics. Recent genre criticism of the gospels has involved some problematic developments, and the current consensus view that the gospels are biographies suffers from a number of weaknesses. Register analysis has developed as a promising path forward that re-integrates some of what genre criticism lost sight of by refocusing on both generic and sociological aspects of texts. I propose that the canonical gospels should be called gospels, not biographies, not least of all because they are more like folk literature than high literature. Using comparative register analysis, I demonstrate that the gospels were likely designed to function like a vilifying story or challenge, among other analogues.