It has become popular to describe the gospels as biographies, but Rosenstock-Huessy pre-challenged this trend (no doubt reacting to the lives-of-Jesus movement of the 18th and 19th centuries). Ancient biographies, he claims were actually “thanatographies,” while “the story of Jesus makes sense only when his death begins and antecedes our lives.” If the story of the gospel ends with the death of the biographess, Jesus remains “uninteresting”: “If the tomb of Jesus is not the womb of the Christian era, we had better forget his whole story as a fairy tale.”
