CADRE Comments

In a previous post , I discussed the difference a genre can make by focusing on Philo's On the Life of Moses ( OLM ). Although usually adopting a creative allegorical approach to Jewish scripture, in OLM Philo adopts a relatively straightforward biographical approach to the life of Moses. He makes relatively faithful use of the Old Testament and traditions of his people. While reading OLM , I was struck by the similarities in many of its features with Luke-Acts . I will begin with the general similarities and then focus in more detail on the similarities of the works' prefaces. General Features On the Life of Moses and Luke-Acts are of comparable length, filling two scrolls. OLM is around 32,000 words long and Luke-Acts is around 37,700 words long. On the Life of Moses and Luke-Acts are both Greco-Jewish works. Their audiences were predominantly Hellenized readers, though possessing an interest in the Jewish faith. Related to the Jewish aspects of both writings is ...

Advances in New Testament studies have resulted in the widely accepted conclusion that the Gospels are a form of ancient biography, meant to convey the significance of the life of Jesus. Leading the way into the study of the genre of the Gospels were scholars like C.H. Talbert ( What Is a Gospel? ) and Richard Burridge ( What Are the Gospels? ). Genre is important because it “is widely acknowledged as one of the key conventions guiding both the composition and the interpretation of writings. Genre forms a kind of ‘contract’ or agreement, often unspoken or unwritten, or even unconscious, between the author and a reader, by which the author sets out to write according to a whole set of expectations and conventions, and we agree to read or to interpret the work using the same conventions, giving us an initial idea of what we might expect to find.” Richard Burridge, Four Gospels, One Jesus , page 5. That is the theory, anyway. Is there any reason to think that genre identification can...