Debutanten Jesus

Abstract

This article analyzes an important but overlooked topos in the study of ancient Greco-Roman biographies and New Testament gospels: the main character’s debut. In the bioi/vitae, the debut or first public appearance often functioned as a display window of the main character’s persona, as a programmatic episode, and as an ideological and literary miniature of the whole biography in which it occurred. The article employs these insights to identify and analyze the debut summaries and debut scenes in the New Testament gospels (Mark 1:14–15, 21–28; Matt 4:17–25; 5–7; Luke 2:40–52; 4:16–30; John 2:1–11, 12–23). As biographers of a kind, the evangelists accommodated the debut of Jesus to their own ideological, literary, and theological agendas with the consequence that each of the four gospels contains a distinct debut of Jesus.