Hypothesis of the Gospels

Narrative Traditions in Hellenistic Reading Culture

Ian N. Mills

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9781506497075
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

The gospels were not the only books in antiquity to retell the same story. Ancient readers had their own language for describing works that retread the same narrative ground. Different versions of a story were imagined as sharing a narrative core, called a hypothesis. Early Christian readers adopted this conceptual model in order to describe gospel literature, legitimize its pluriformity, and limit its diversity. Even before the term hypothesis appeared explicitly, however, readers imagined gospels in roughly the same way. Christians did not radically reimagine the literary character of gospels at the end of the second century, when hypothesis language first appeared. Rather, the components of this model are already present in the earliest evidence for the reception of gospels. The standard model for thinking about pluriform narrative traditions in Hellenistic literary culture shaped the production and interpretation of gospel literature from the very beginning.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. The Literary Hypothesis in Hellenistic Book Culture
• 2. The Gospel Hypothesis in Irenaeus of Lyon
• 3. The Gospel Hypothesis in Early Christian Literature
• 4. Reading the Gospels Before Irenaeus
• 5. The Gospels According to the Gospels
• 6. Competition and Gospel Etiology
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Subject Index
• Index of Modern Authors
• Scripture Index
• Index of Ancient Sources