posted
I remember from my Religious Studies days that there are four types of gospels that have been identified, but I can only think of two of them--the narrative type, like those that made it into The Bible, and the type that is basically just a conpendium of quotes. Anybody know what the other two are, just off the tops of their head? Dana?
posted
Maybe. That isn't ringing a bell, but that doesn't mean it's not right. I think that Pagles talks about this in some of her books. I'll look it up tonight.
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posted
Different scholars categorize genres differently, but I don’t know of any model with four types of gospels. Sorry.
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posted
Well, it's entirely possible that I'm making this up, but I could have *sworn* that there was one that had four types. Hm. I'll see what I can dig up tonight.
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posted
The type I know are synpotic (Matthew, Mark, Luke) and John (which might have had a category, but since there was only one, I never really used it).
I've also heard of gnostic gospels, but none of these are canonical.
posted
Some of the non-canonicals are just infancy stories or just passion narratives. So they're sometimes refered to as infancy gospels or passion gospels.
Edit: but they're still narrative, so they don't really fit as two new categories.
posted
Dag, that's not quite what I mean (although it's a perfectly legitimate way of organizing them). What I'm talking about is something that I'm pretty sure I read about in one of Pagel's books, and something that I'm even more sure that I heard her talking about in a lecture once. In this way of categorizing, all four of the gospels that were included in the Bible we have today would be considered "narrative" since they tell a story. Other, non-canonical gospels include texts that are just collections of sayings attributed to Jesus, with no narrative structure binding them together. I can't remember what the other two types she talked about were (and now I'm doubting myself about the number of types that she advocated. Maybe it was more than four? It'll have to wait until tonight when I can look in a couple of her books and see what I can find).
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I remember, while sitting in her lecture, thinking that I'd always thought of gospels as narrative, since that was the only type with which I was familiar, and wondering what the rationale was for categorizing these non-narrative texts as gospels in the first place, and wondering what it really meant for a text to be a gospel.
So Dana, how would you define gospel anyway?
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posted
“Gospel” is first the message – the word means “good news” so anything that’s part of the good news could be called gospel. Secondly, it’s a section of the Bible comprised of the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Thirdly, it’s a genre of literature. In the third sense I tend to go with the stricter definition that limits it to narratives about the life of Jesus, but it’s pretty common to expand it to include “sayings” gospels (like Thomas) and maybe whatever Pagel’s other two categories are.
Mystery gospels would be books that purport to teach secret knowledge necessary for salvation. John would certainly be closer to this Gnostic way of looking at things, but it’s still primarily narrative.
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posted
“Synoptic” means “taking the same point of view” so it’s not really a type, just an acknowledgement that three of the four canonical gospels are much alike and one is noticeably different.
♫One of these things is not like the other . . . three of these things are kind of the same . .
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