The Four Fabulists: The Literary Genres of the Gospels and the Acts of Apostles

By: Suresh A. Shenoy

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

In Christian circles, traditionally the New Testament has been the ultimate and the best evidence for the divinity of Jesus of Nazareth. Such an assumption rests on the belief that New Testament is the vehicle of divine revelation. Hence, it is the Word of God and its genre necessarily unique as ‘sacred scripture’. My book, "The Four Fabulists: the Literary Genres of the Gospels and the Acts of Apostles", offers a different take. With a detailed textual analysis, it successfully argues that far from being a unique genre, the four Gospels and the Acts incontrovertibly belong to the genre of classical narrative histories in the textual content as well as in its presentation. More specifically, my book demonstrates that each of the five books follow particular classical histories as models. These range from Herodotus from fourth century B.C.E. to Flavius Josephus in first century C.E. The conceptual designs of each book open the secret doors to the authors' true intentions. They point accusing fingers at those who, in their professed claims of maintaining orthodoxy, have been substituting the meaning of the texts with their own interpretations. Consistent with the styles of these histories, textual content in the New Testament texts are barely ‘historical’, but mostly ‘fictional (what is humanly possible) and ‘fictitious’ (what is humanly impossible). The textual presentation of the New Testament texts offers ample evidence on which of the models of classical history they each replicate. With a tightly argued demonstration, the New Testament texts are less than ‘sacred scripture’. They indeed are the creations of literary imagination of their highly literate and skilled authors. Such an unavoidable conclusion about the New Testament texts makes claims of divine revelation for them untenable. The incarnation, the virgin birth, the miracle narratives, the resurrection and the ascension of Christ cannot but be ‘fictitious’. In using the classical historical forms in the content and in the presentation, the five New Testament books become inappropriate vehicles for divine revelation.