10 - Biblical Hermeneutics: Gospel History - Part 2

Genre Override and Historicity

Craig L.Blomberg

The preunderstanding of most of today’s evangelical scholars who specialize in Gospel study is that the Gospels require special rules of interpretation because they belong to a special literary category. “Genre” is the term they use to speak of such a category. These scholars will usually advocate that theological rather than historical purposes dominated in the writing of the Gospels, and consequently, that a high degree of historical precision in the Gospels is not to be expected. They evaluate the Gospels according to historiographical canons of the day in which they were written and not according to modern standards of historical reliability. Blomberg writes, …