An author's summary of Ian N. Mills, The Hypothesis of the Gospels: Narrative Traditions in Hellenistic Reading Culture. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2025.
We do not have to wonder whether early readers of the gospels used the same mental model to understand the pluriform narrative tradition about Jesus. Irenaeus, Clement, Origen, Epiphanius, and Eusebius make explicit use of hypothesis language to describe, limit, and legitimize the multiplicity of gospels. The same authors and other early readers, I argue, use the title “gospel” to refer to the narrative hypothesis that they imagined constituting the narrative tradition about Jesus.
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