Throughout the 20th century, scholars debated the literary genre of the gospels. Prior to that, they had always been assumed to be biographies. St. Justin Martyr refers to them as "memoirs of the apostles." Memoirs would be a sub-type of biography. However, in the 19th century, scholars started to notice differences between the gospels and modern biographies. For instance, none of the gospels have much to say about the majority of Jesus' life, but focus almost entirely on the last three years of his life. This caused many to use the term "sui generis," or original genre, in reference to the gospels, meaning that they don't really fit into any other genre, but are instead their own unique genre.
Based on this understanding, many scholars further reasoned that because the gospels are not biographies, we should not expect biographical information from them about Jesus as we would from a biography. Rather, the gospels were written for specific communities to meet the needs of those communities. So if Matthew, for instance, traces Jesus' genealogy back to Abraham, that was to answer a question or argument that had arisen about Jesus in the community for which he was writing. This is how differences between the gospels were often accounted for in the last century.
This thinking was challenged in the late 20th century by a number of scholars, but the person who pretty much settled the argument about the gospels' genre was a classicist named Richard Burridge who compared the gospels to other ancient biographies and found that that's what they were - ancient biographies. That's how they would be read/heard by someone who had never heard of Jesus before. They don't share a lot of traits with modern biographies not because they are not biographical, but because they are not modern. But many ancient biographies, for instance, do not recount more than a few years of a person's life - the few years that matter most to what the author wants to communicate.
So now that the biographical genre is established, what about that second point of reasoning mentioned above? That we should not expect biographical information about Jesus, but rather authors reading their community's experience back into the life of Jesus. Richard Burridge - the classicist mentioned above - said that his findings directly challenge this, and I agree: If they are biographies, we absolutely should expect to find biographical information, and our focus should be about the subject of the biography - Jesus - and not about some hypothetical later community reading its experiences back into the life of Jesus.
The response to this realization, however, has been interesting from some scholars who concede now that the gospels are in fact ancient biographies, but that this does not matter because ancient biographers just made things up about their subjects to please their audiences. One of my professors, Craig Keener, challenged this in an article by looking at material on the Roman Emperor Otho. We have information written about him from three ancient sources - two biographers and one historian - within about the same lapse of time as between Jesus' death and the composition of the canonical gospels. If these skeptical scholars are correct that ancient biographers just made things up, there should be very little correspondence between the two biographies and one historical work dealing with this Roman emperor. What he found was the exact opposite - most of the material between the three sources was in agreement about Otho. It's possible that the information is incorrect, but it is absolutely not true that either of these two biographers just made things up about their subject, because if they did, there would be no correspondence between their works.
In my article, I tried to come at the subject from a different angle. The first century Jewish historian Josephus, who wrote around the same time as the gospel writers, wrote an autobiography, as well as a history of the Jewish revolt (in which the Temple was destroyed) which contained overlapping material with his autobiography, as he participated in the revolt, then switched sides and fought with the Romans. The problem is that much of the autobiographical material in the two works conflict with one another. So whereas my professor argued in his article that ancient biographers did not necessarily just make things up about their subjects using Suetonius as a test case, I argued from the opposite end of the spectrum using Josephus, at times a sloppy historian, whose own autobiographical works contradict one another, to try to begin to determine the outer range of variation that would have been expected by ancient readers from biographical works.
Stay tuned for a link to the article when it is published in the coming months...
In the meantime, if you are interested in any of the above, I highly recommend the following books:
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