The christological narratives The Gospels as literature

Abstract

The author of this essay tries to compare the Gospels with the Roman and Greek literature of the first century. He shows that from the very beginning the Gospels were never considered as genuine literary works. They never pretended to be so in those days as their language did not have the refined requirements to be treated as such by the contemporary cultivated people. We are, therefore, entitled today not only to go beyond their similarities with other contemporary biographies but to discover in their pages a genuine renovation of the biographical genre and a new way to express the truth concealed in this kind of texts. A new hermeneutic space was, indeed, created with them.