복음서의 장르는 무엇인가?

Abstract

To know the basic characteristic of a text, we need to know the genre of the text. The genre of the four Gospels has been disputed since the 18th century. Most scholars in the nineteenth century regarded the four formdeveloped who Gospels biographies. However, scholars as criticism in the twentieth century insisted that the Gospels be ‘something peculiar in themselves, sui generis’. In 1992, Burridge challenged this view. Burridge analyzed the forms andcontentsof ancient biographies and compared them with the four Gospels. He argued that the characteristics of the biographies were also observed in the four Gospels. The study of Burridge has been supported by many scholars. However, despite the study of Burridge the debate on the genre of the Gospels is not ended. Because, as Burridge claimed, ancient biographies had diverse and floating forms and contents. For example, there were Peripatetic biographies that dealt with the lives of generals and and written with public performance in mind, politicians were Alexandrian’s biographies that dealt with the lives of scholars, poets and artists, Encomium type that praised the public achievements of the main characters, Popular-novelistic type that presented the lives of the main characters to the public like a novel. This paper examines whether the Gospels belonged to the ancient biographies and, if they did, which sub-genre they belonged to. The four gospels does not belong to any of the sub-genres presented above. The four Gospels were similar to the Aretalogy. This is a biography of Divine Man, who has become a man of divine nature. There were no biography of the divine man before the Gospel, but since the second century, the biographies of various philosophers have been written in this form. Thus the Gospel is one of the Aretalogy.