In this thread I’ve been talking about how I conceived of my New Testament textbook, some 20 years ago now, as a rigorously historical introduction.   I’ve  been stressing that one of the ways it is historical is that it takes seriously the Greco-Roman milieu out of which it arose, and that one of the key implications is that one needs to read the NT books in light of the ancient genres which they employ.   My argument in the book (and in general!) is that if you misunderstand how the ancient genre works, you will misunderstand the book.   The Gospels, I argue, are written as Greco-Roman biographies.   Here is an excerpt where I describe what that means and why it matters, again from the first edition of my textbook. *********************************************************  We have numerous examples of Greco-Roman biographies, many of them written by some of the most famous authors of Roman antiquity, for instance, Plutarch, Suetonius, and Tacitus.  One of the ways to understand how this genre "worked" is to contrast it with the way modern biographies [...]

In my previous post I began to discuss how I chose, back in the mid 1990s, to conceptualize my New Testament textbook, not as a theological/interpretive introduction to the NT, or as a literary introduction, but as a rigorously historical introduction.  Among other things, that meant treating the books of the New Testament as *some* of the early Christian wriitngs, which needed to be discussed in relation to other early Christian writings produced at about the same time.   In this post I’ll talk about one other feature of a more historical approach to the New Testament. Almost all the other introductory textbooks available at the time, as I indicated yesterday, began with a kind of obligatory appendix on the “background” to the New Testament – information on the historical, political, social, and religious matrix out of which the New Testament sprang (first the Greco-Roman context and then Jewish).   Once all *that* was over with,  these textbooks typically moved to talk about the writings of the New Tesatment without incorporating any insights from the world in [...]