Gospels and Other Narrative Experiments in the Roman Mediterranean

This article situates gospel books amid the manifold experiments in imperial Roman narrative prose. These variegated innovations were not structured by existing generic categories, although several prominent contours - fictionality, empire, wonder, and religious experience - texture the literary landscape. Both critics and adherents of the emerging Christian movement attempted to categorize gospel books. Some dismissed gospels as cheap paradoxography, flimsy fiction without underlying significance. Others theorized gospels as marvelous narratives constructed in order to signify divine truth. Both approaches reflect vibrant and ongoing conversations about narrative form, literary fiction, and divine reality.