Abstract

Are the gospels biographies? Heroic legends? To what literary genre do they belong? Should they all be lumped into a single genre? In seeking answers to questions such as these, biblical criticism often makes use of the techniques of comparative literature. Exegetes look for formal and thematic similarities between two static entities, two works that are, by all accounts, “finished.” The moment one abandons the idea of a text as a static object in favour of a more dynamic view of the text as an event which the reader experiences, this approach runs up against some major obstacles. The author maintains that the generic classification of the gospels requires a far more subtle approach than the simple comparison of texts on the basis of formal or thematic characteristics and tries to show that genre cannot be specified without reference to the effects produced in the reader.