Contents
1.1.Jesus in Ancient Historians
1.2.What Can Be Known about Jesus?
1.3.Why Historical-Jesus Research Needs the Gospels
1.4.Default Expectations and the Gospels
1.5.We Know More about Jesus Than We Think: Ancient Biography
1.6.We Know Less about Jesus Than We Want: What History Remembers
PART 1. BIOGRAPHIES ABOUT JESUS
2.2.Implications for Historical Information
2.3.What Were Ancient Biographies?
2.5.Hysterical History or Knowledgeable Novels?
2.5b.Novelistic Biographies or Historical Novels?
2.5c.The Cyropaedia, Life of Apollonius, and Alexander Romance
2.5e.Entertaining Novel Hypotheses
2.8.Fictionalized Elements in Historical Biographies
3.Examples and Development of Ancient Biography
3.1.Protobiography and Early Greek Biography
3.1c.Xenophon’s “Memoirs” about Socrates
3.1d.Aristotelians and Aristoxenus
3.2.Nearly Nepotism: Cornelius Nepos
3.3b.Josephus’s Historiography
3.3f.Suetonius’s Lives of the Caesars
3.3h.Philostratus’s Lives of the Sophists
3.3i.Diogenes Laertius’s Lives of the Eminent Philosophers
3.4.Later Biographies and Hagiography
3.6.Other Early Jewish Sources for the Biographic Form?
4.What Sort of Biographies Are the Gospels?
4.1a.Leo’s Lineage for Biographies: Chronological versus Topical
4.1b.Talbert’s Types, Burridge on Biographies: Functions and Purposes
4.1c.Typologies with Historical Concerns
4.3.The Reliability of Diogenes Laertius’s Biographies
5.What Did First-Century Audiences Expect of Biographies?
5.1.Adaptations in Biographies
5.2a.Rhetoric and Personal Commitments
5.2c.Bragging or Ragging on Biographees: Balancing Biases
5.3.More Morals, Not Less Lessons
5.4.Interpretations and Information
5.5.Characteristic Care for Character
5.6.Chronic Chronology? Ancient Biographies Were Not All Chronological
PART 2. BIOGRAPHIES AND HISTORY
6.Biographies and Historical Information
6.2.Biography as a Form of Historical Writing
6.2a.Biography and Historiography
6.3.The Gospels as Historiography?
6.3a.History More than Biography?
6.3b.Biography More than History?
6.3c.An Overlap More Significant than the Difference
6.4.“Biographic Features” Missing in the Gospels?
6.4b.Background, Birth, and Upbringing
6.5.Can a Biography Take the Form of an Extended Passion Narrative?
7.What Historical Interests Meant in Antiquity
7.1.Concerns for Rhetorical Presentation
7.2.Speaking of Rhetoric . . .
7.3.Balancing Readers’ Enjoyment and Truth
7.6a.Political and National Agendas
7.6b.Historians’ Moral Agendas
7.6c.The Value of Moral Examples
7.7.Editorial Perspectives and “True” History
7.8.Concerns for Historical Information
7.8a.Historians’ Concern for Accuracy?
7.8c.Peer Review: Developing Consensus Standards
7.9b.Critical Use of Historical Sources
7.9c.Historians and Critical Thinking
8.1.A Special Case: Is Luke’s Gospel Historical Monograph or Historical Biography?
8.1c.Luke’s Claim of “Thorough Familiarity” (Luke 1:3)
8.2.Luke’s History and Rhetoric
9.1.Legends Rising Early, Retiring Late
9.2.Distrusting the Distant Past?
9.4.Reasoning about Recent History
9.5.Narrowing the Gap for Earlier Figures
9.6.Valuing Some Historical Distance for Contemporary History
9.7.The Gospels and Recent Information
PART 3. TESTING THE RANGE OF DEVIATION
10.Case Studies: Biographies of Recent Characters Use Prior Information
10.2.How to Evaluate Particular Biographies
10.4.The Most Useful Analogies?
10.5c.Listing Parallels and Some Differences
10.5e.Differences because of Genre
10.5h.Conclusions regarding Otho Material
10.6.Comparing Other Greek and Roman Biographies
10.7.Comparing Diaspora Jewish Works
10.7a.Josephus versus the Septuagint
10.7b.Josephus versus Josephus
11.Flex Room: Literary Techniques in Ancient Biographies
11.1.Flexibility in Ancient Biography
11.2.Flexibility in the Gospels
11.3.Acceptable Differences: Philo, Josephus, Plutarch
11.4.Surveying Some Literary Techniques
11.7.The Degree of Adaptation in the Gospels
PART 4. TWO OBJECTIONS TO GOSPELS AS HISTORICAL BIOGRAPHIES
12.1.Paranormal Experiences in Ancient Sources
12.2.The Early Christian Worldview
12.3.Evidence for Jesus as a Healer
12.4.A Nonbiographic Alternative?
12.5.Miracle Reports Can Come from Eyewitnesses
PART 5. MEMORIES ABOUT JESUS: MEMORIES BEFORE MEMOIRS
14.2.Everyday Assumptions about Long-Term Memory
14.3.Reconstructive Recollection
14.3a.Nixing Dean’s Faculties? A Neisser Reading
14.3e.Time Zone Out: Chronological Conflations
14.3f.What Such Limitations Mean
14.4a.Verbatim Recall Is Very Rare
14.4b.Except for Exceptions . . .
14.5.Functional though Fallible
14.5a.Memory Usually Refers to Something
14.5b.Kinds of Memories Preserved
14.6.Transience and the Longevity of Memories
15.1a.Evangelists Would Heed Eyewitnesses
15.1c.How Accurate Is Eyewitness Memory?
15.2.The Collective Memory of Eyewitnesses
15.2a.Experiments and Experiences
15.2c.Strengths and Weaknesses of Collective Memory
15.2d.Collective Memory and the Overall Portrait of Jesus
15.3.The Sage and His Disciples
15.3b.Extraordinary Memory in Antiquity
15.3c.Memory in Ancient Education
15.3f.Taking Note of Note-Taking
15.3g.So What about Jesus and His Disciples?
15.4.What about the Witnesses’ Illiteracy?
15.4a.Was Everyone in the Movement’s First Generation Illiterate?
15.4b.Did They Need to Be Literate to Pass On Information?
15.4c.Memory among Nonelites: General Considerations
15.4d.Memory among Nonelites: Ancient Reports
15.5.What Should Genuine Memories Look Like?
16.Oral Tradition, Oral History
16.1.Critically Reforming Form Criticism?
16.2.Oral Tradition: Connecting Past and Present
16.3.But a Past Actually Happened
16.4.Examples of Distorted Oral Tradition
16.5.Examples of Tenacious Oral Tradition
16.7.Traditional Middle Eastern Memory
16.7b.The Role of Prominent Tradents
16.7c.Ancient Mediterranean Memory
16.8a.Some Eighty Years of Living Memory
16.8b.Mark Comes from the Period of Living Memory
16.10.Reticence to Invent Jesus Tradition
16.11.Examples of Early Judean/Galilean Traits
16.13.Sayings Reflecting Jesus’s Environment
17.The Implications of This Study