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Christobiography: Memory, History, and the Reliability of the Gospels
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About Christobiography: Memory, History, And The
Product Description Demonstrates the reliability of the canonical gospels by exploring the genre of ancient biography The canonical gospels are ancient biographies, narratives of Jesus’s life. The authors of these gospels were intentional in how they handled historical information and sources. Building on recent work in the study of ancient biographies, Craig Keener argues that the writers of the canonical gospels followed the literary practices of other biographers in their day. In Christobiography he explores the character of ancient biography and urges students and scholars to appreciate the gospel writers’ method and degree of accuracy in recounting the ministry of Jesus. Keener’s Christobiography has far-reaching implications for the study of the canonical gospels and historical-Jesus research.Table of Contents: Introduction Part 1. Biographies about Jesus 2. Not a Novel Proposal 3. Examples and Development of Ancient Biography 4. What Sort of Biographies Are the Gospels? 5. What Did First-Century Audiences Expect of Biographies? Part 2 Biographies and History 6. Biographies and Historical Information 7. What Historical Interests Meant in Antiquity 8. Luke-Acts as Biohistory 9. Sources Close to the Events Part 3. Testing the Range of Deviation 10. Case Studies: Biographies of Recent Characters Use Prior Information 11. Flex Room: Literary Techniques in Ancient Biographies Part 4. Two Objections to Gospels as Historical Biographies 12. What about Miracles? 13. What about John? Part 5. Memories about Jesus: Memories before Memoirs 14. Memory Studies 15. Jesus Was a Teacher 16. Oral Tradition, Oral History 17. The Implications of This Study Review — Richard Bauckham “I have long thought that what we need is to be able to place the Gospels much more precisely within the wide spectrum of ancient biographies. Keener has mastered the literature, primary and secondary—as one would expect.” Markus Bockmuehl — University of Oxford “This is a welcome guide to some of the best recent scholarship on the biographical purpose and composition of the Gospels, taking due account of the impact of memory in their composition. Prof. Keener sensibly concludes that living memory played a meaningful and consolidating role in the formation of these rhetorically constructed but essentially historical narratives about Jesus. A thorough and reliable introduction to this vital yet complex subject!” Alanna Nobbs — Macquarie University “This work displays extensive knowledge of the major classical texts from around the New Testament period. Keener uses these judiciously and critically, as an ancient historian would do for any primary source, showing awareness of genre and bias and using modern studies of memory and its impact on historiography. Thus he provides an integrated and convincing historical picture.” James H. Charlesworth — Princeton Theological Seminary “Less than two decades ago, New Testament experts concurred that no one can or will ever publish a biography of Jesus. Why? It is because former scholars concluded that the authors of the Gospels are all biased, even creating traditions not from history but from the proclamations about Jesus. Now, thanks to archaeological and historical studies, we know that the descriptions of some Galilean villages and Jerusalem in the Gospels prove that the Evangelists accurately described some installations; they knew what we did not formerly know. To claim that a biography must be objective reduces the inviting and informative biographies to a mere list of unrelated episodes that may masquerade as facts. We also now have hundreds of compositions from Jesus’s time that were either unknown to previous scholars or misinterpreted by them. The Gospels belong among the ancient biographies. Craig Keene
