Ian N. Mills, The Hypothesis of the Gospels: Narrative Traditions in Hellenistic Reading Culture. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2025.
In the eleventh book of The Odyssey, Odysseus journeys to the underworld and encounters Agamemnon, the fallen king of Mycenae (11.386-460). The shade of Agamemnon describes how he was murdered by Aegisthus, a rival for the throne, taken as lover by Clytemnestra in Agamemnon’s absence. Sophocles’ Electra, however, describes an axe-wielding Clytemnestra committing the deed herself (11.446). Some readers found such contradictions troubling (see esp. Kincade 2021). One commentator preserved as a scholion to the Electra, however, defended Sophocles’s rewriting of the Homeric tradition.
“It was enough to agree on the whole with what happened. For each person has the authority to make each part happen as they wish, unless they harm the whole hypothesis.”
— Sch. Soph. El. 446
This reader recognized that two versions of the same story will inevitably differ. Every author has the “authority” to describe the details of what happened in whatever way they see fit. But that authority is not limitless. This reader used the term hypothesis (ὑπόθεσις) to pick out certain aspects of the shared story—an imagined substrate of content—that set the bounds for acceptable variation in the retelling. The murder of Agamemnon, it seems, belonged to this reader’s conception of the hypothesis, while the specific actions of Aegisthus or Clytemnestra was a matter of authorial discretion.
Dio Chrysostom uses the same language in his comparison of the three versions of Philoctetes written by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides (Oration 52). All three plays tell the story of how the Greeks recovered the bow of Heracles from the eponymous Philoctetes whom they had stranded on the island of Lemnos. Dio notes, however, that each version featured different characters, events, and dialogue. Nevertheless, Dio insists that none of the playwrights can be faulted for any of their creative choices. What they all share—what makes them three versions of the same story—Dio calls a hypothesis (52.2, 12; cf. Sch. Eur. Troad 1129).
The idea of a hypothesis is ubiquitous in discussions of stories sharing a common subject. Plato and Xenophon each wrote a Socratic Apology on the same hypothesis (Athenaeus, Deipnosophists 11.112). Herodotus, says Dionysus of Halicarnasus, wrote on the same hypothesis as two earlier historians (Letter to Gnaeus Pompeius 3.1). And the biographers of Alexander, says Plutarch, all wrote on the same hypothesis (Alexander 17.6). This notional stratum of content—abstracted out of a literary tradition but imagined as preexisting its composition—was a key piece of conceptual furniture for readers in the early Roman empire.
This way of thinking about narrative traditions is so prevalent in Hellenistic reading culture that it can be recognized even where the term hypothesis is not used explicitly. Where one author might say that Plato and Xenophon wrote “on the same hypothesis,” another author says that both authors wrote “a Symposium” and “a Socratic Apology” (Diogenes Laertius, Lives 3.34). So too, one and the same author explicitly describes different poets writing on the same hypothesis of the Trojan war (Aelian, Varia 14.21), while elsewhere speaking of authors writing their own “Iliad” (11.2; cf. Photius, Library 190). In such cases, the title of a particularly influential work in a narrative tradition is used as a shorthand for its hypothesis.
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. Despite its popularity among early readers, however, this popular way of imagining narrative traditions stood in tension with the particular claims that Christian readers wished to make about scripture. Consequently, the idea of a hypothesis underlying the gospels quickly fell out of favor among Christian interpreters.
Irenaeus of Lyon offers the earliest surviving extended discussion of the multiplicity of the gospels. The idea of a hypothesis first appears in Irenaeus in his critique of the allegorical reading practices employed by the followers of Valentinus. These readers share the same gospels as other Christians but, according to Irenaeus, interpret incidental details (e.g. the number thirty in the parable of the vineyard) as relating to another story about the emanation of divine beings and the origin of the universe. Irenaeus characterizes Valentinian interpretive practice as substituting the hypothesis that underlay the pagan theogonic tradition for the hypothesis of the gospels (1.9; 2.14.1-2). This line of argument too is precedented in the Homeric scholia (e.g. Sch. Il. 13.198a).
In his argument against the Valentinians, Irenaeus not only makes explicit use of the term hypothesis to refer to the basic story about Jesus (1.10.3; 2.25.1) but also juxtaposes Valentinian hypotheses to “the gospel” (3.16.5). The latter use of “gospel” in Irenaeus—as Annette Yoshiko Reed already observed (2002)—is distinct from well-known uses of the same term to refer to either the message about Jesus (i.e. the kerygmatic use) or a specific gospel book (i.e. the bibliographic use). Instead, like other second and third century readers, Irenaeus uses the title “gospel” to refer to the hypothesis of the relevant narrative tradition.
It is this hypothetic use of ‘gospel’ that explains important aspects of Irenaeus’s defense of gospel pluriformity in the third book of Against Heresies. Irenaeus insists that “the gospel” has existed in multiple media, oral and written (3.1.1). It is preserved, he proceeds, “equally and individually” in each of the now-canonical gospels (3.1.1). Dio Chrysostom made very nearly the same claim about the three Philoctetes.
But this line of reasoning sits uneasily alongside Irenaeus’s more famous argument that Christians must use all four gospels (3.11.8-9). If each gospel “individually” contains the gospel, then readers only need one such book. The tension between the two passages makes sense if, throughout most of Against Heresies, Irenaeus is thinking about gospels in the same way that contemporary readers conceptualized other narrative traditions—as distinct works on a common hypothesis. But, to serve his proto-canonical apologetic, he diverges from this mental model to propose a “four-fold gospel.”
More than any other author, Epiphanius of Salamis used hypothesis language to defend the gospels he considered canonical. Confronted by contradictions between the gospels, Epiphanius repeatedly appeals to an imagined hypothesis uniting the canonical gospels while, at the same time, explaining why different evangelists told the story differently (Pan. 66.41.4; 51.4.11, 6.2). The gospels used by heretics, on the other hand, harm the hypothesis (Pan. 4.8.4; see also 24.8.6) or use another hypothesis entirely (Pan. 42.12.1). Like the Homeric and dramatic scholiasts, Epiphanius used hypothesis language to invoke an essential story that both legitimized variation between accepted versions and excluded others.
The same kind of reasoning, dependent on the same mental model of pluriform narratives, can be identified in yet earlier authors who do not use explicit hypothesis language. Justin, Serapion, the author of the Muratorian canon, and even the third evangelist, I argue, exhibit a similar way of thinking about narrative traditions. Justin, for instance, describes the gospels as Memoirs—a well-established subgenre of historical writing associated with the lives and teaching of philosophers. He pointedly compares gospel literature to the Socratic works of Plato and Xenophon which, as we have already seen, were widely regarded as sharing a common hypothesis. When Justin refers to the entire, written gospel tradition with the singular noun “gospel,” therefore, it seems likely that he is using the term in a hypothetic sense. This conceptual model for organizing and evaluating a narrative tradition, I argue, makes sense of the ad hoc gospel collections seen in use throughout the second century.
Writing a book on an established hypothesis was universally recognized as a competitive act. Readers invariably inferred rivalries between the authors of any two (or more) books on the same hypothesis (e.g. Athenaeus, Deipn. 11.504d-e). And Hellenistic authors in the early Roman empire occasionally used hypothesis language to express their intention to displace earlier works on the same subject (e.g. Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities 1.2.1, see also 1.5.1). The critique of earlier gospels in the preface to the Gospel according to Luke suggests that the canonical evangelists had the same agonistic intentions. The earliest etiologies for the canonical gospels, I argue, resist the implication that a later author like John was critical of his predecessors. Just as Dio Chrysostom was unwilling to find fault in any of the differences between the three Athenian Philoctetes, so too this early reader of the gospel finds an explanation for every difference between the gospels in the divine authorial agenda while, at the same time, insisting on unity with respect to the basic details of Jesus’s life (i.e. the narrative hypothesis).
This book draws attention to one important but neglected concept from Hellenistic literary criticism that readers—including Christians—used to organize, describe, and evaluate narrative traditions. The idea of a narrative hypothesis was widespread in the centuries around the turn of the millennium. And early Christian readers make explicit use of hypothesis language in the earliest treatments of the multiplicity of the gospels. It is, therefore, more than plausible that the concept of a narrative hypothesis conditioned the production, transmission, and earliest reception of the gospels.
Ian N Mills is the Visiting Assistant Professor of Classics and Religious Studies at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York. He teaches courses on premodern religion in the Ancient Mediterranean with a particular focus on early Christianity and ancient Judaism. Mills is the co-host of the New Testament Review podcast.