Greg Matthews said
A gospel is a genre.  In this case this type of genre describes the life of Jesus, what he taught, etc.  The epistles of Paul are another type of genre (letters written from Paul to someone else).  There are number of genres in the Bible and I certainly don’t know all of them, but a couple others the top of my head that I know of are: apocalypses (like Daniel and Revelation) that speak of things to come; and historical books like Genesis, Chronicles and quite a few other OT books.

Hmmm…. What do you think of Gospels as a sort of Greco Roman biography? 

Also, what of Apocalyptics as coded commentary on current events. Thus John’s allusions to Rome and identifying Nero as the beast etc?

Greg Matthews said

The Gospels are a biography of a period of Jesus’ life, no?  Whether they’re factual or not is another matter of course. And, whether it’s coded or not (and it is to those of us looking at it critically!) Revelation is still an apocalypse.  John was describing the end of things for Christians in his time.  Maybe the coming Kingdom of God.

Well tru dat, Greg. Perhaps your unfamiliar with the Habermas/Licona argument about the Gospels being Greco Roman biograghies.

This is part of the whole we can prove the ressurection using the Critical Method

Greg Matthews said
I know what it is, but, for me, it doesn’t really matter as far as my definition of the genre of a Gospel.  The only issue would be what do I mean by “the life of Jesus” because the ancients viewed biographies differently from the way we view them.  That said, per Bart’s own words, someone from Roman times would interpret the Gospels as being biographies of a religious leader (accounts of the life of Jesus).  See what I mean?

Oh Absolutely, I guess I am thinking more in terms of the kinds of material they are trying to use. So my question was kinda dumb.

Habermas/Licona want to say the events (particularly the resurrection) can be established as historical using the critical method.

Their claim, as I understand it,  is that, at one time you couldn’t consider the Gospels to be biography because they contained miracles. The remedy is to compare them with Greco-Roman biographies.  While this move might be successful they trade on a lot of ambiguity, confusing historicity in the limited way we can talk about it and what actually happened.  Oddly, it was this theory that lead me , to Ehrman’s work and I happen to think Bart was right about the limits of proving miracles etc.