Bible Review

A new English translation and analysis of this anonymous biography is now available: Aune, “Greco-Roman Biography,” in Greco-Roman Literature and the New Testament, ed. Aune (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1988), pp. 107–126.

Two helpful recent introductions to some of these apocryphal gospels are by Marvin W. Meyer, The Secret Teachings of Jesus: Four Gnostic Gospels (New York: Random House, 1984), and John Dominic Crossan, Four Other Gospels: Shadows on the Contours of the Canon (Minneapolis: Seabury, 1985).

A number of scholars still emphasize the unique character of the Gospels: Robert A. Guelich, “The Gospel Genre,” in Das Evangelium und die Evangelien, ed. P. Stuhlmacher (Tubingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1983), pp. 183–219; Helmut Koester, Introduction to the New Testament (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1982), p. 169: “Thus, with his Gospel, Mark created a genre of literature.”

Bultmann, The History of the Synoptic Tradition, p. 373.

Karl Ludwig Schmidt, “Die Stellung der Evangelien in der allgemeinen Literaturgeschichte,” in Neues Testament, Judentum, Kirche: Kleine Schriften, ed. Gerhard Sauter (Munich: Kaiser Verlag, 1981), pp. 37–147. This article was originally published in EUCHARISTERION: Studien zur Religion und Literatur des Alten und Neuen Testaments. Hermann Gunkel zum 60. Geburtstag. (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1923), vol. 2, pp. 50–134.

See Franz Overbeck, “Uber die Anfange der patristischen Literatur,” Historische Zeitschrift 48 (1882), pp. 417–472, who did not use these precise terms, however.

Van A. Harvey, The Historian and the Believer (New York: Macmillan, 1966), p. 249. This dictum has been called “Lessing’s ugly ditch,” because its effect has been to separate faith from reason, and it was accepted by the philosophers Lessing and Kierkegaard, by the late-19th-century Christian theologians Wilhelm Hermann and Martin Kahler and by such diverse dialectical theologians as Karl Barth and Rudolf Bultmann.

Rudolf Bultmann, The History of the Synoptic Tradition, tr. John Marsh (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), p. 373.

Dan O. Via, Jr., Kerygma and Comedy in the New Testament: A Structuralist Approach to Hermeneutic (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1975), pp. 99–101.