Christobiography by Keener Craig S.;

Author:Keener, Craig S.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

13.4. Conclusion

John is a “maverick gospel”;90 he seems less interested in traditional biographic conventions than are his predecessors. Scholars are currently exploring the mysteries of John in fruitful ways that will likely produce greater understanding; for the purposes of this book, however, it seems sufficient to conclude this chapter with some brief comments.

If any extant first-century Gospel stretches the range of imperial-period biography beyond the contours traced in earlier chapters, it would be John. Some might even compare his flexibility with some earlier biographic models, such as that of Xenophon (though Xenophon may have gone further: we have less ground for certainty there).

At the same time, John is no Ps.-Callisthenes or author of the apocryphal gospels. By any standard that we have surveyed, his work remains much closer to biography than to a novel. Few if any novels would exhibit all the sorts of correspondences with other biographies noted above. Even if John falls in a different range of historical biography than, say, Luke, there is good reason to believe that this Gospel is no exception to the first-century Gospels falling in that wider category.

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