2.9. Conclusion

2.9. Conclusion

Chapter 2

Not a Novel Proposal

Most Gospels scholars today view the Gospels as belonging to the genre of ancient biography.¹ Both supporters and detractors now recognize this general consensus.² As one classicist notes, understanding the Gospels as biographies was “always the obvious reading.”³

This designation makes good sense: biographies and one kind of historical monograph were the only kinds of works focused on a real, individual historical figure other than a historical novel—and historical novels were rarely if ever written about recent figures.⁴ Biographies normally introduced their main character directly within the first few words of the work (cf. Matt. 1:1; Mark 1:1; John 1:1; more conventionally historiographic in Luke 1:1). Biography is the closest available analogy for how the first audiences would initially approach the narrative, first-century Gospels. Because biographies, like letters, were among antiquity’s most common genres, it is not surprising that they represent much of the earliest surviving Christian literature.⁵

That biography offers the closest analogy or genre for the Gospels does not mean that the Evangelists added nothing distinctive to the traditional, wider genre. There is little doubt, in fact, that they did.⁶ Like other Jewish biographers with a Diaspora audience, they inhabit a world in continuity with ancient Israel’s biblical heritage.⁷ Their key protagonist is a mostly rural Middle Eastern figure, and they address a biblically literate subculture. Most distinctive of all, they proclaim no ordinary sage or king but one whom they deem the central figure of history.

Moreover, as subsequent chapters will show, biographies were not all the same; ancient writers often used literary conventions from one genre in another, producing what would appear, in any “purist” classification, an overlap in genres. The most common overlap between biography and another genre in the early empire was with the wider genre to which biography in this period normally belonged, namely historiography (see ch. 6). Even apart from overlap in genres, there are a range of biographic techniques, sometimes even in works by a single author (e.g., Plutarch). Given the distinctive elements of the Gospels and the range of differences in ancient biography, it is important to note at the outset that we cannot use ancient biography to predict or explain everything that we find in the Gospels. Given the fluidity of genre, analogies with works that are similar in many respects need not prove that they are similar in all respects.

Nevertheless, the significant points of analogy do suggest the strong probability that ancient hearers would have approached the Gospels with the expectations with which they approached other contemporary biographies. The Gospels’ use of prior material does correlate significantly with that found in the dominant form of biography that flourished in precisely their period, especially in those biographies that, like the Gospels, addressed public figures within living memory (see chs. 9–10). The dominant form of biography from the early empire thus should help us to better understand some of what the Evangelists and their first audiences would have taken for granted.

2.1. Coming Full Circle

By the mid-second century, Christians understood the Gospels as “memoirs of the apostles,”⁸ a feature apparently more significant to many Christians of that period than individual attributions of the works’ authorship.⁹ Thus Justin speaks of “the memoirs communicated by his apostles and organized by those who were involved with them.”¹⁰ Although this title “memoirs” (ἀπομνημονεύματα, apomnēmoneumata) was used more widely,¹¹ including for biographic works,¹² some suggest that it recalls Xenophon’s Memoirs about Socrates,¹³ a work that contains some information that we would not consider historical but that most readers in the Evangelists’ era presumably did. The title indicates the Christian belief, probably widespread among Christians within living memory of the last first-century Gospel, that the Gospels had biographic interest.¹⁴

Unfortunately, if used technically, “memoirs” may well underestimate the literary cohesiveness of the finished Gospels. (The technical designation would probably be more relevant to a document such as Q.) Second-century Christians often mined the Gospels for information about Jesus without paying as much attention to their more holistic form.¹⁵ Apologetic harmonization dominated many ancient approaches to the Gospels.¹⁶ If ancient Christian commentators often sought to harmonize the Gospels more than respecting the characteristic agendas of each Evangelist, the early twentieth-century emphasis on sources behind the Gospels often obscured their individuality no less.¹⁷

Still, through most of history, and as late as 1915, readers generally engaged the Gospels as if they were biographies of Jesus. Early twentieth-century scholars such as Johannes Weiss and Claude Votaw viewed the Gospels specifically in light of ancient biography.¹⁸ But as Adela Yarbro Collins points out, Johann Gottfried Herder’s proto-Romantic classification of the Gospels as unsophisticated folk literature strongly influenced most form critics, who treated the Gospels as a unique, “new Christian genre.”¹⁹

Rudolf Bultmann further treated the Gospels as nonliterary products of uncontrolled oral transmission, rendering superfluous much interest in literary analogies.²⁰ One thing they were not, he was confident, was Hellenistic biographies, though he allowed comparison to collections of anecdotes such as the lives of Ahiqar, Aesop, or Apollonius.²¹ Lack of biographical interest is why the Gospels “have nothing to say about Jesus’ human personality, his appearance and character, his origin, education and development, quite apart from” their lack of literary sophistication.²²

This dismissal seems premature, since not all biographies contained all these features. Jesus might not have been “educated” at an advanced level, but two of the Gospels do speak at some length about his origin. Early Christians’ interest in recalling the ministry of Jesus, including his words and actions, is in fact one of the basic “accepted findings” of an international symposium on relations among the Gospels.²³ Moreover, even if tradents passed on the Gospels’ oral sources in such a folk milieu (see discussion in chs. 15–16), forced categories such as literary and nonliterary prove unhelpful for genre criticism of the Gospels: they ignore the continuum between “folk literature” and the more stylish rhetoric and texts that strongly influenced them,²⁴ as well as differences among the Gospels themselves. (Luke writes on a much more sophisticated Greek level than Mark.)²⁵ “Biographies” in the general sense actually appear throughout the continuum.²⁶

Because the Gospels differ significantly from modern biographies, scholars for much of the twentieth century denied that the Gospels were biographies at all.²⁷ Yet the features that form critics deemed necessary for true biographies are lacking not only in Mark but in Lucian’s Demonax, which is specifically titled a bios and is a full work like the Gospels.²⁸

The understandable form-critical focus on smaller narrative units inadvertently distracted attention from questions of the genre of the larger works. Critics were correct to notice that the Gospels are not modern biographies; they erred only in concluding that this meant that they were not ancient ones. In more recent decades scholars have been returning to the consensus that the Gospels represent biographies in the ancient sense of the term.

In 1977 Charles Talbert was one of the first scholars to challenge the mid-twentieth-century approach and to point to parallels with ancient biographies.²⁹ Although his approach has been somewhat justly evaluated as too rigid,³⁰ it broke essential ground for the works that followed.³¹ Philip Shuler’s 1982 work³² displayed some more significant weaknesses,³³ but it was still a step toward proper comparison of the Gospels with other ancient biographies.

After an extensive survey of biographic works, Klaus Berger concluded in 1984 that the Gospels were biographies, related to the genre of encomium.³⁴ Berger’s student Dirk Frickenschmidt later developed his approach further, documenting extensive literary resemblances between ancient biographies and the Gospels³⁵ and ultimately making a case similar to Richard Burridge’s conclusions about Gospel genre.³⁶

Some of Frickenschmidt’s points of contact include the following, although not all these features are limited to biography or appear in all biographies:³⁷

Richard Burridge, working from a background in classics, was originally skeptical of the biography hypothesis for the genre of the Gospels, but his detailed research changed his mind.³⁸ It was his resulting forceful Cambridge monograph³⁹ that largely effected the paradigm shift in Gospels studies.⁴⁰ He shows how both the Synoptics and John fit this genre.⁴¹

Graham Stanton of Cambridge thus came to regard as “surprisingly inaccurate” the skepticism of earlier decades about the Gospels being biographies.⁴² Indeed, Burridge’s argument has proven so compelling that one reviewer claims that it ought to end any further dissent about the matter.⁴³ Some of those who remain skeptical of the bios hypothesis focus on features of biographic material more generally rather than the bios genre specifically, significantly weakening the force of their critique.⁴⁴ Arguments concerning the biographical character of the Gospels have thus come full circle: the Gospels, long viewed as biographies of some sort until the early twentieth century, now are widely viewed as biographies again.

2.2. Implications for Historical Information

Although classicists approach ancient historical biographies critically, most of them do not handle them as dismissively as some of the more skeptical NT scholars have handled the information in the Gospels. Certainly they do not handle biographies about recent historical figures the way that Jesus-mythicists handle the Gospels. Although Tacitus denounces Tiberius whereas Velleius Paterculus adores him, no one doubts that both provide valuable information for us about Tiberius. Nor, because Tacitus eulogizes his father-in-law, Agricola, or Suetonius emphasizes moral lessons in his biographies, do we dismiss most of the evidence that they provide.⁴⁵

The boundaries of genres are malleable, and scholars can classify ancient biographies in various ways. The broadest definitions of biography encompass all works about historical persons. Because my specified interest in this book is the historical dimension of biographies, my interest is primarily in information-based biographies. This was by far the dominant form of person-centered work in this period (see ch. 3). In the period in which the Gospels were written, mainstream biography was understood as a narrative about a real individual based on available information, and in cases of recent figures, the information available could be substantial.

Historical novels then, as today, exploited the form, frequently tongue-in-cheek, yet most such novels were much more for entertainment than for information about a past important person or that person’s actual teachings.⁴⁶ Entertaining novels would make a poor vehicle for a movement such as the first-century Jesus movement, which was above all intensely interested in its founder, especially given his followers’ repeatedly emphasized commitment to him as Lord and thus commitment to follow his teachings. (His role as teacher is among the least disputed features of the Jesus tradition today.) Moral instruction is far more characteristic of biographies of teachers than of novels (see ch. 5), though there are some rare exceptions. Within living memory, followers of Jesus still had access to information about him and would not need to resort to the sorts of expedients that later novelists and gnostics used to satisfy curiosity about Jesus (see chs. 14–16).

As noted in the introduction, surprisingly few scholars so far have worked to develop the implications of the Gospels’ genre for the question of how we approach the Gospels for historical information about Jesus.⁴⁷ In fact, one of my own doctoral professors suggested in our opening class on Mark that ancient biographies were fictitious and therefore Mark should be approached accordingly. (When I cautiously challenged his assumption, since I had already begun studying some ancient biographies, the professor humbly acknowledged that he lacked firsthand knowledge about the subject and had simply read that view somewhere.)

The Gospels are literary works in their own right and may be approached as such; I have spent more years publishing commentaries than publishing on historical-Jesus research. I readily acknowledge that it is not necessary for everyone to be interested in historical questions. For those who do have such interest, however, the Gospels provide our best source for learning about the ministry of the historical Jesus. Biographies normally are meant to tell us something about their subject and not only about their author.

2.3. What Were Ancient Biographies?

The term “genre” refers to a work’s literary type. Genre provides a broader (though sometimes somewhat amorphous) category that allows comparison with other works that share a number of key characteristics. Particular genres are not universal; rather, they highlight the culturally conditioned, conventional expectations according to which a work’s implied author could expect the work to be read.⁴⁸

Genres are useful for classifying similar works; they are not templates to which writers must adhere. That is, they are descriptive rather than prescriptive, an observation that immediately limits the degree to which we can project our expectations onto a given work, including any of the Gospels.

Nevertheless, ancient prose is not simply “mapless terrain”;⁴⁹ the complication is just that the map’s regions lack rigid boundaries, and scholars are thus sometimes understandably reticent to draw fixed maps. Just as we may infer likely reasons for ancient actions based on ancient customs or ideologies, we may infer as more probable some conscious or unconcious literary conventions when we observe in some similar works traits that tend to be characteristic of each.

Genre is by no means an exclusively modern conception. Not only did ancient readers recognize various genre categories;⁵⁰ they were, as classicist Christopher Pelling notes, “peculiarly sensitive to genre.”⁵¹ Indeed, ancient critics were sometimes too precise about such categories, detailing specific genres of letters and speeches more strictly than the empirical examples allow.⁵² Still, others recognized that genres could develop, often through mixing,⁵³ and authors in practice often mixed them.⁵⁴ Genre categories are thus fluid and may overlap⁵⁵ (for biography and history, see esp. ch. 6).

Nevertheless, genres are not usually simply arbitrary.⁵⁶ Ancient writers could adapt them as needed, but genre conventions provided the social expectations that they could take for granted, tweak, or flaunt. So we may speak of works falling roughly into categories, or perhaps more organically, using genre prototypes heuristically, of some works resembling many other works in particular respects. Although there are a range of different sorts of prose works, more of them cluster in particular areas than others.

So what is the definition of ancient biography? The answer might be simple—if scholars could agree on it. In 1915 Clyde Votaw defined as biography “any writing which aims to make one acquainted with a historical person by giving some account of his deeds and words, sketchily chosen and arranged.”⁵⁷ More recent and more frequently cited, Arnaldo Momigliano defined it as “an account of the life of a man from birth to death.”⁵⁸ Others point to exceptions to Momigliano’s definition⁵⁹ or complain that Momigliano’s interest is biographic material or roots more generally rather than the specific, formal genre of biography as it developed by the early empire.⁶⁰ Talbert defines ancient biography as “prose narration about a person’s life, presenting supposedly historical facts which are selected to reveal the character or essence of the individual, often with the purpose of affecting the behavior of the reader.”⁶¹ Geiger prefers a narrower definition, suggesting that “works belonging to associated literary genres, such as Isocrates’ Euagoras and Xenophon’s Agesilaus, as well as his Cyropaedeia,” do not function as biographies per se.⁶²

Frickenschmidt looks for persistent characteristics of biographies, such as the centrality of “authoritative people and decisive values,” precharacterization of the biographee in the work’s beginning, and full narrative treatment with more attention to detail where relevant.⁶³ Like others, he distinguishes biography from historiography and encomium in some respects.⁶⁴ Biography was like the “mirror of history.”⁶⁵

One might consider biography more generally a narrative about a particular real person’s life or phase in that person’s life. As we shall see briefly in chapter 6 and at length in chapter 10, authors of full biographies in the early empire did have significant historical intention and, when addressing recent figures, normally had considerable information available. We should expect this pattern to hold true for the Gospels as well, since the Gospels and their sources circulated within living memory of Jesus’s public ministry. Ancient biographers and historians viewed historical intention as fully compatible with edifying agendas.

2.4. A Unique Genre?

Before considering the implications of the biographic genre for the Gospels, however, we must examine other proposals for their genre. As noted earlier, the Gospels demonstrate special features that render them distinct in some ways from most other ancient biographies.⁶⁶ This observation limits the predictions that we can safely make on the basis of the wider genre classification, but it does not preclude estimations entirely, given the other features shared with ancient biography. Any subtype or variation of ancient biography (such as works about Jesus) might have features distinctive to that subtype.

Some scholars, however, focusing on the distinctive features, argue that the Gospels are simply “unique,” or sui generis.⁶⁷ Once Gospels began to be written, they did constitute their own subgenre. The specific title “Gospel” is attested by the mid-second century⁶⁸ and probably earlier;⁶⁹ it echoes the LXX (see esp. Isa 52:7)⁷⁰ and might originate from Mark 1:1.⁷¹ But with what larger category would their first audiences have classed them?

Since no one before Jesus’s ministry had written stories about Jesus, or probably about anyone very much like him, the Gospels are unique in a sense. As one classicist puts it, “Mark could not have written a conventional life of such an unconventional figure as Jesus.”⁷² This difference, however, stems from the distinctiveness of the Gospels’ chief character; as Maria Ytterbrink suggests, more likely than “a different kind of biography,” a Gospel is “a biography about a different [kind of] character.”⁷³

Thus while the observation that the Gospels are unique is true in some sense, it is not very helpful for facilitating heuristic analogies. The main point of genre classification is finding a broader, culturally intelligible category that generates audience expectations concerning how to understand a given work.⁷⁴ For ancient audiences, a source-grounded work about a particular actual person—whether a ruler, a general, or a sage—remained a biography. As Ulrich Luz comments, an ancient reader encountering a scroll of Mark without prior knowledge would engage it as a bios.⁷⁵ Or as Eve-Marie Becker points out, the Gospels may be sui generis among other historical works, but they remain historical works.⁷⁶ Bart Ehrman rightly notes that the Gospels’ shared, distinctive subgenre does not diminish the larger biographic genre in which a reader would naturally place them.⁷⁷

2.5. Hysterical History or Knowledgeable Novels?

Among recognized ancient prose narrative genres, the only real alternatives to biography as a category for the Gospels would be historical monographs or novels.⁷⁸ I defer discussion of historical monographs for chapter 6, since this proposal ultimately overlaps with biography and leads to similar conclusions about the Gospels’ merit as historical sources.

Here, however, I address the question of the Gospels as novels. Of course, ancient novels are useful for literary comparisons with the Gospels, as many studies helpfully illustrate,⁷⁹ but we find these similarities because both biographies and novels reflect the larger genre of narrative. Similar narrative traits thus appear also in histories.⁸⁰ Identifying shared literary techniques, then, does not necessarily indicate a work’s genre or the degree of historical information available in it.⁸¹ (Nor, for the record, am I implying any hostility toward novels; if I had time, I would gladly write some. I am simply distinguishing genres.) The Gospels, especially Mark, are on a more popular level than elite historiography and in this respect are more like novels,⁸² yet also again like many biographies.⁸³

In distinguishing ancient biographies from novels, I am not contending that ancient biographies were written according to modern historical standards. Such a claim would be unreasonable, in effect evaluating ancient works by a standard that did not exist in their day. Even the best of ancient biographies by modern standards are more slanted and adaptive than historians today would formally permit (see chs. 7, 10, and 11). Nor do I claim that typical ancient biographies followed all the principles of the best (by our standards) ancient historians, though I will argue for a relationship between mainstream ancient biography and historiography.

But mainstream biographies were vastly more historical than their primary alternative. If we compare them with ancient novels, another genre from the Gospels’ own milieu, they share narrative form but differ in their use of sources. On occasion a novel could recycle an earlier story line (compare, e.g., Apuleius’s Metamorphoses with the story line also found in Lucian’s Lucius). But the novelistic genre did not need to recount factual events, whereas the inclusion of factual events was part of what readers of biographies expected (or at least expected biographers to attempt), whatever the authors’ adaptations. Both genres were meant to entertain or engage readers, but prior information was a mandatory element only in biography.

Occasionally a scholar does suggest that the Gospels are most like novels, although they usually must concede points at which they cannot fit.⁸⁴ But while scholars vary in their estimates of the degree of prior information in the Gospels, virtually all find more information there than is found in novels.⁸⁵ On the usual reconstruction of Gospel sources, Matthew and Luke clearly depend heavily on prior information (at least Mark and Q), and source-dependent Matthew and Luke, who undoubtedly knew the circumstances of Mark’s writing better than we do, would use these sources for information only if they believed that these sources likewise depended on prior information.

2.5a. A Romantic Jesus?

Most ancient novels were not exclusively about a single individual; most frequently they were romances about two lovers,⁸⁶ which the Gospels’ depictions of Jesus conspicuously are not. Moreover, novels usually focused on fictitious characters, which Jesus was not.⁸⁷ Even the later Christian apocryphal acts, which feature significantly earlier Christian figures, work to accommodate this romantic pattern (except within a framework of chastity),⁸⁸ but we see nothing of this interest in the earlier, canonical Gospels and Acts.

Romance novels appear at least as early as 100 BCE with the Ninus romance,⁸⁹ but many see Chariton’s Callirhoe as the seminal romance that influenced its successors.⁹⁰ Although we know of no historical novels about recent historical figures, a minority of ancient novels did exist about figures of the distant past.⁹¹ (Pure mythography normally addressed the even more remote past.)⁹² Even these novels did not feel very constrained by actual historical information, and they did little research into the setting—particularly a setting as obscure and irrelevant to cosmopolitan audiences as rural Galilee.⁹³

2.5b. Novelistic Biographies or Historical Novels?

A range of different works, including the rare novels just noted, are sometimes classified today as biography.⁹⁴ Yet mainstream biographers from the Gospels’ era claimed to, and presumably generally attempted to, report historically accurate information; they were not trying to fabricate fairy tales.⁹⁵

In contrast to the dominant form of biographies in the early empire, some novels in antiquity did subvert the biographic genre for fiction. Unlike completely self-referential fiction, they do make note of at least some extratextual characters who existed, such as Aesop, Alexander, or Apollonius.⁹⁶ Whether we call them novelistic biographies or historical novels may be partly a semantic matter of preferred nomenclature, but they certainly differ significantly from mainstream biographies and histories.⁹⁷

If we include some ancient historical novels in the genre of ancient biographies, then insofar as we wish to examine biographies as sources for historical reconstruction, we must divide biography into at least two subgenres: those that are novelistic in intent, and those primarily historical in intent. While one might find elements of history in the former and elements of fiction in the latter, most full-length works about individuals in our period fall comfortably into one category or the other, rather than in a supposedly heavily populated border between them. Works such as Ps.-Callisthenes’s Alexander Romance, on the genre’s margins, differ starkly from a Suetonius or Luke, who show extensive dependence on sources (see my chs. 7–8).

One competent NT scholar, writing before recent discussions of biography, suggested “four examples . . . which very clearly illustrate the prevalence of fiction in narrative accounts of historical subjects”⁹⁸—but all four of his chief examples were novels: the Ninus romance, Xenophon’s Cyropaedia, Philostratus’s Life of Apollonius, and Ps.-Callisthenes’s Alexander Romance. None were written within living memory of their subjects. The scholar cites these examples to illustrate “just how unclear the line was between fact and fiction in narratives about historical persons.”⁹⁹ I believe, however, that these very examples demonstrate the opposite conclusion. The line is so unclear, I would contend, only because it is drawn in the wrong place. Suetonius’s lives exhibit historiographic intention in a way that Ps.-Callisthenes plainly does not.

Ancient historiography exercised some creative freedoms, but as Christopher Pelling notes, these were not the novelist’s freedom “to make it all up.”¹⁰⁰ For centuries before the period of the empire, historians had defined their activity as “getting the record straight” over against the claims of myth.¹⁰¹ Likewise, while some biographers and historians were less accurate than others, this concession does not entail “that no distinctions were made between historians who used good sources and others who made their material up.”¹⁰² When biography involved deliberate falsification of events (as opposed to creative retelling of sources), it departed from the expected conventions of its genre (see ch. 6).

Of the three extant historical novels most often classified as biographies,¹⁰³ one is from long before the period of the canonical Gospels, and two are from long afterward, from the heyday of novels.¹⁰⁴ None derive from the period of the canonical Gospels, the early imperial period, when ancient biography was achieving its historiographic apex. In fact, because we know of no works that followed the model of Xenophon’s Cyropaedia in this period, and because the Cyropaedia was anomalous in its day¹⁰⁵ (perhaps a protohistorical novel), one might even be tempted to argue that biographically shaped novels did not yet exist in the period of the Gospels. Since arguments from silence are precarious, and there may well be some specimens that have generated less attention, it might be safest to say that, in contrast to biographies, which were common in the early empire, biographic novels were at best unusual. It appears that such novels did not yet exist as a genre: novels and other fictitious works existed, and they could exploit historical features, but there does not yet seem to be a widespread fashion of producing novels about historical characters.

The three most prominent novelistic biographies, or historical novels, are Xenophon’s Cyropaedia, Ps.-Callisthenes’s Alexander Romance, and Philostratus’s Life of Apollonius. Interestingly, the size of these works also distinguishes them from virtually all ancient extant ancient biographies,¹⁰⁶ though the size also differs from typical ancient novels. Probably the later ones, especially the Alexander Romance, are better classified as ancient historical novels (with the Cyropaedia as something like a forerunner of the genre).¹⁰⁷

In contrast to the Gospels, all of the above-named historical novels were composed long after living memory of their subjects (i.e., long after anyone who knew the eyewitnesses had died). Moreover, scenes in these novels tend to be fleshed out with far more copious details than is possible in the anecdotes and often barer focus on events of many biographies (including the Synoptics). Mere use of historical characters is a far cry from historical research or the use of sources (such as the use, on the majority view, by Matthew and Luke of Mark and Q in their Gospels).

2.5c. The Cyropaedia, Life of Apollonius, and Alexander Romance

Some modern scholars treat Xenophon’s Cyropaedia as a biography because it teaches virtues,¹⁰⁸ but Xenophon wrote before such genre distinctions were more clearly delineated. Unlike Xenophon’s Agesilaus or Memorabilia, the Cyropaedia never became a typical model for biography in the later sense. Xenophon did have firsthand knowledge of Persia, but Xenophon’s Hellenica shows that he knew how to write history, and that this is not it.

Cyrus died in 530 BCE, a century before Xenophon’s birth (for the interval, one might compare the mid-second-century Gospel of Thomas, written probably well over a century after Jesus’s crucifixion). This alone would not preclude his work from being biography or depending on substantial information (since later works, such as Arrian’s treatment of Alexander, often depended on significantly earlier sources; see ch. 9).

Nevertheless, even ancient readers recognized that this work was meant to teach politics, not to recount Cyrus’s actual life¹⁰⁹ (although a work could easily do both). The consensus seems clear that the work is a novel:

A measure of fiction featured in much of the historiography of Xenophon’s day, so Xenophon probably felt a freer hand than did the generally more constrained biographers and historians of the early empire.¹¹³

Of the two other works considered here, both later than the Cyropaedia, Flavius Philostratus (ca. 170–ca. 250 CE) is the more competent writer. His Life of Apollonius, commissioned by the empress, is the more biographic and clearly draws on some historiographic and biographic conventions. Nevertheless, it differs starkly from his genuine biographies of Greek sophists,¹¹⁴ and its geography becomes demonstrably fictitious once it leaves the Roman world.¹¹⁵ Although Philostratus’s Apollonius includes some characteristics of biography, it defies many biographic conventions, including in length and structure.¹¹⁶

It borrows the trappings of biography to increase its effectiveness, something like the way that Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code subverts historical markers. It was novels that borrowed elements from history and other earlier genres, rather than the reverse.¹¹⁷ (Even so, however, Philostratus’s original title is not specifically biographic; in Greek it is not Life of Apollonius of Tyana but simply “Things about Apollonius of Tyana.”)¹¹⁸

Unlike typical novelists, Philostratus does incorporate some genuine research. He used some “local oral traditions” from cities that Apollonius had reportedly visited,¹²² although these traditions would now be considerably more than a century old (hence beyond living memory).¹²³ More important, he was aware of the four-volume, second-century work of Moeragenes, another work that provided fodder regarding Apollonius’s youth, as well as letters attributed to Apollonius, some already in the early second century.¹²⁴

Still, Philostratus’s alleged main source for Apollonius’s life is the latter’s former disciple Damis,¹²⁵ although Philostratus recognized that some of it was a “wonder-tale.”¹²⁶ I tend to think that Philostratus would not have dared claim that the empress brought this source to his attention¹²⁷ unless he believed that she thought it to be authentically from Damis, however much Philostratus may have adapted it for literary purposes.¹²⁸ A clearly greater number of scholars, however, contend that even Damis is a fiction of either Philostratus¹²⁹ or (as I think somewhat more likely) an earlier pseudepigrapher.¹³⁰ If it is a fiction of Philostratus himself, even his appeal to this source would be subverting a biographic and historiographic authenticating device.

Philostratus discourages attention to Moeragenes¹³¹ and otherwise mentions him only to corroborate Philostratus’s main source.¹³² Some think that Moeragenes depicted Apollonius as a philosopher,¹³³ others that he depicted him negatively as a magician,¹³⁴ and still others that he depicted him positively as a magus.¹³⁵ The negative view might be more likely; Moeragenes is cited by Origen¹³⁶ to show that even philosophers can be affected by magic. Moeragenes also mentions an Epicurean philosopher who abandoned Philostratus, disillusioned after discovering him a charlatan. Philostratus may have discouraged attention to Moeragenes especially if this discoverer was Damis.¹³⁷

In any case, Philostratus’s own portrait suits a second- or third-century setting (i.e., his own) much better than a first-century setting (i.e., Apollonius’s), in contrast with the many earlier Judean/Galilean features in the Gospels.¹³⁸ A number of his accounts of Apollonius even resemble reports from Christian gospels,¹³⁹ though most frequently of the apocryphal variety.¹⁴⁰ (Classifying the first-century Gospels by reference to Philostratus’s Life of Apollonius of Tyana¹⁴¹ is therefore highly anachronistic.) Given the relative dates, Christian stories would have been at least among the significant potential influences on his storytelling approach (offering literary fodder for miracle stories). The parts of the story most apt to be confirmed by Apollonius’s letters¹⁴² exhibit the least parallels with the Gospels.¹⁴³

Whereas Philostratus was aware of at least some prior information about Apollonius, Ps.-Callisthenes was more interested in his own creative depiction of Alexander. Though some basic information about Alexander was widely known, this author is not writing anything close to mainstream biography.¹⁴⁴ Ps.-Callisthenes’s Alexander Romance differs starkly from the biographic treatment of lives in the early empire, as expressed from Nepos to Suetonius and Plutarch. Ps.-Callisthenes freely mixes historical and fictitious sources, while adding his own fictions.¹⁴⁵

One leading expert opines that “the historical nucleus is small and unusable”;¹⁴⁶ another rightly distinguishes this “popular fiction” from Alexander histories;¹⁴⁷ another speaks of it as “largely fictitious” and usually recognized as a romance;¹⁴⁸ and still others aver that it “in many respects seems as much a work of fiction as the anonymous History of Apollonius King of Tyre, usually regarded as a novel.”¹⁴⁹ Ps.-Callisthenes wrote somewhere between 460 and 760 years after Alexander’s death—i.e., likely over half a millennium later, centuries after living memory of Alexander and his associates had perished.¹⁵⁰

2.5d. The Fabled Aesop

Another work frequently cited as a fictional biography is Life of Aesop. Unlike typical novels, it does rework considerable preexisting material, so some audiences may well have viewed this popular-level work as a biography. More likely, however, they viewed it as an entertaining folk tale.

Nevertheless, most scholars today consider it a novel, like the historical novels noted above.¹⁵¹ Apart from Aesop possibly being a historical person and the work having a legendary nucleus, “almost everything else about this Life is fictive, and thought to be fiction.”¹⁵² The author creatively invests the story with motifs derived from other ancient stories,¹⁵³ expecting readers to understand that this story is fictitious rather than historically true.¹⁵⁴

Even the prior legendary content represents a much longer period of oral tradition—probably over half a millennium—than is possibly relevant for the Gospels or the most typical biographies from the early empire.¹⁵⁵ Some literary traits, such as episodic structure and use of popular Koine, resemble the Gospels (esp. Mark),¹⁵⁶ but literary style and level differ from questions of genre. Episodic style fits many ancient biographies,¹⁵⁷ and structurally the Gospels’ plots are closer to biographies.¹⁵⁸ The Gospels’ premeditated literary arrangement also distinguishes them from purely folkloristic collections¹⁵⁹ such as Life of Aesop. Also, the sexual elements and motifs from Old Comedy¹⁶⁰ in Life of Aesop naturally do not feature in the Gospels.

2.5e. Entertaining Novel Hypotheses

Surviving manuscripts suggest that, throughout antiquity, history was far more valued and thus more pervasive than novels. For example, more copies of Herodotus and especially of Thucydides remain than copies of all ancient novels combined.¹⁶¹ Discussions of prose genre began with history, turned to biography, and finally treated novels last of all, as least useful.¹⁶² Ancient readers could almost always recognize the difference between information-based and novelistic works.¹⁶³

Novels typically reflected the milieu of their readership more than that of their characters,¹⁶⁴ in contrast to the verisimilitude of histories and biographies that, despite embellishment, inference, and adaptation for their audiences, focused on historical content. Some novels contained some realism,¹⁶⁵ but many were inconsistent or uninterested in local color.¹⁶⁶ By contrast, local color pervades the Gospels so thoroughly (see some brief examples in ch. 16) that we sometimes wonder how well Diaspora audiences understood some of the details. (Who in the Diaspora, for example, had heard of Chorazin or Magdala?)

Could the Gospels be historical novels? Given the flexibility of genres, an author could create anything he wanted, but it nevertheless remains vastly improbable that the Gospels would look like biographies, use sources like mainstream biographies, and yet be novels. If they were novels, they would be the only ones we know about that treat a recent person. They would belong to a comparatively rare subgenre (historical novels) as opposed to a very common one (mainstream biography), though again, no extant examples in this subgenre involve recent persons. They would also be exceptional in being more for instruction (in the master’s life and teaching) than for entertainment, making them much closer in purpose to a common sort of biographies than to typical novels.

In contrast to novels, Luke even includes a historical preface (see ch. 8);¹⁶⁷ and Luke uses Mark as if he expected that fairly recent work to be factual. Also in contrast to novels, the first-century Gospels do not present themselves as texts composed primarily for entertainment; rather, they present themselves as true accounts of Jesus’s ministry, for their hearers’ instruction (Luke 1:3–4).¹⁶⁸

The engaging style of the Gospels cannot count against them being biographies. Historians and biographers wrote primarily to inform about historical truth but nevertheless wrote in an entertaining or engaging manner.¹⁶⁹ For example, the author of 2 Maccabees claims that he writes historical narrative and that many sources were available, but he also emphasizes that readers would enjoy and easily remember his work.¹⁷⁰ Suetonius was happy to reveal character while also providing details of imperial sex lives that would titillate his audience.¹⁷¹ Although only some biographers wrote primarily for entertainment, most biographers and most historians¹⁷² expected their works to be enjoyed. A biography “could be entertaining as well as educational.”¹⁷³ Through much of history, in fact, many authors have written essentially factual accounts in the entertaining style of fiction current in their day.¹⁷⁴

Most ancient writers sought to entertain; the key genre question was whether they also sought to inform. Novelists wrote primarily to entertain rather to inform.¹⁷⁵ A few functioned as religious propaganda or suggested moral lessons as well as providing entertainment,¹⁷⁶ but historical instruction was not an interest. Readers would find moral lessons far more often in biographies, which offered role models for moral instruction (see ch. 6),¹⁷⁷ and in historiography (see ch. 7).

2.6. The Lives of the Poets

From the first century BCE through the second century CE, we have easily scores of extant, full biographies (even if we count only those of Nepos, Plutarch, and Suetonius). Again, probably none of the above-mentioned historical novels, probably excepting for one stage in the development of Life of Aesop if we so classify it, fit this period.

We do, however, have some sketchy and not very reliable lives of poets.¹⁷⁸ Whereas some novels exploited biographic conventions without genuine biographic intention, lives of the poets could exhibit more biographic intention (thus we can call them “lives”) but rarely had sufficient tradition to constitute the sort of full-length biographies that I treat elsewhere in this book. Some of them are only a few paragraphs long.

This observation, however, significantly reduces their value for comparison with the Gospels. The Gospels are all considerably more extensive than the tradition of the lives of the poets; the Gospels much more closely resemble the larger narrative works about public figures,¹⁷⁹ because the Gospels, like the latter sort of biographies, had much more information available about their subject than did ordinary biographers of poets.¹⁸⁰

Because public history focused on politics and war, historians provided plenty of material for biographies of statesmen and generals, but little of poets.¹⁸¹ Biographers composed such lives of poets, who left few traces about their lives, very differently than they composed lives of generals and kings, whose deeds were recorded by historians, or lives of philosophers, whose disciples preserved their memories.¹⁸² Lives of poets thus “are traditionally considered more imaginative than their political counterparts.”¹⁸³

While most scholars recognize the differences between full biographies and the generally brief lives of poets, we can understand the rationale behind the formation of the latter. When publishers today lack contemporary images of NT figures or events, such as Jesus or Pentecost, they often employ on book covers scenes of these figures or events painted by medieval or Renaissance artists. Such images may be relevant to the history of interpretation, but no one supposes them to be authentic portraits.

In antiquity, when biographers wrote about figures of the distant past or very obscure figures, they would sometimes recount unlikely traditions because, like modern book cover designers, that was all they had. If the poet did not flourish within living memory, his or her biographer could not draw on historians or personal contacts as he could for political figures.

In the Hellenistic period, desire to fill this void led to vastly improbable speculations (we might compare some extreme speculations in the history of biblical interpretation). Greek writers in the Hellenistic period did focus especially on intellectual biography, often concerning poets.¹⁸⁴ Many writers inferred information about the poets’ personal lives from their writings.¹⁸⁵ Since Mary Lefkowitz argued this case,¹⁸⁶ the consensus has been that the lives of poets, based on such inferences, are unreliable historically.¹⁸⁷ Still, even here historical information sometimes surfaces; poets could, after all, influence their own reception.¹⁸⁸

Some, especially from before (but also some after) the heyday of historical biography, were purely fictitious. For example, Ps.-Herodotus’s Life of Homer and other lives of the poets are meant primarily to entertain, not to give historical details.¹⁸⁹ Later, Ps.-Plutarch’s¹⁹⁰ Life of Homer “bears a strong resemblance to a fairy tale.”¹⁹¹ But even Plutarch himself (not the genuine author of Life of Homer) had to work with more limited kinds of sources when he wrote about the distant past, poets or not, as his work about Theseus confirms; such work differs qualitatively from what he wrote about figures within living memory, namely, Galba and Otho (see ch. 10).

If writing about poets, especially much earlier ones, generally required more creativity than writing about better-documented figures, especially more recent ones, the difference between the two forms of lives grew more stark as the latter model prevailed in the early centuries of the empire. “Sober biographers like Nepos, Plutarch and Tacitus,”¹⁹² who wrote historically oriented biographies, were quite different from entertainment-focused, more fictionalizing lives of the poets.¹⁹³ From at least as early as Nepos onward, biographies of public figures contained historiographic elements no less than encomiastic ones.¹⁹⁴ Not surprisingly, then, Suetonius’s political biographies differ significantly from his literary ones.¹⁹⁵

Nevertheless, even regarding lives of the poets, standards of the early empire reveal an increased measure of historical sensitivity. Even in his generally brief lives of poets, Suetonius seems to do his best to offer historical information. Sometimes he does work from inference,¹⁹⁶ but sometimes he cites general knowledge or belief;¹⁹⁷ periodically he names his sources.¹⁹⁸ He sometimes indicates his acquaintance with a range of sources, even though, as in his imperial biographies, he names them only selectively.¹⁹⁹ Besides authors, he cites preserved speeches,²⁰⁰ epigrams about the person,²⁰¹ letters,²⁰² and the authors themselves where they refer to themselves.²⁰³ Sometimes he personally recalls oral reports spoken by witnesses.²⁰⁴ At other times he lists no sources yet provides the same sort of details we find in his lives of emperors.²⁰⁵ Sometimes he supplies historical context.²⁰⁶ Sometimes his information is paralleled or somewhat paralleled elsewhere.²⁰⁷

When Suetonius knows that his sources may be fictitious, he frames his claims cautiously here, as he does in the Caesars.²⁰⁸ He is sometimes critical, rejecting some sources as spurious or contrary to better information,²⁰⁹ or citing variant versions.²¹⁰ He often identifies “gossip” as such.²¹¹

Because he has limited material available for lives of the poets, he is forced to use what he has to express his subject’s character.²¹² Nevertheless, he is unwilling to do so at the expense of “his credibility as a factual source.”²¹³ He is limited by his sources; thus, for many figures he can offer only a few paragraphs or, quite often, just a single one.²¹⁴ Sometimes he does so even when much more information must have been available.²¹⁵ Like historians filling out details lacking in reports of speeches, Suetonius stays as close to verisimilitude as possible, but some of his sources allow greater certainty or plausibility than others. Suetonius avoids the inventions “found in earlier literary biography.”²¹⁶

Suetonius’s Lives of the Caesars may have been longer than his lives of poets for the same reason that he had more material for some Caesars than for others: for some he had more source material.²¹⁷ The ideal, as exemplified in most biographies of public figures from this period, was a full volume on a person, and this is the ideal to which the Evangelists would have aspired and the form that the Gospels take.²¹⁸ Overall, the Gospels are far more like biographies of public figures, as in Nepos and Plutarch, than they are like lives of poets.²¹⁹ Again, this may be partly because of the nature of their sources: the Gospels are from within living memory of Jesus’s ministry, potentially dependent on reports that go back to Jesus’s disciples, who were also the movement’s leaders (see Gal 2:9).

Unlike poets, whose initial appeal was solely their writings, or even some philosophers or other teachers, in whom only a few immediate followers were interested, Jesus was a public figure. The Gospels affirm that he drew crowds (Mark 2:4, 13 and throughout), and he was a figure significant enough to warrant public execution and comment in Josephus (Jewish Antiquities 18.63–64). Most important, his movement mushroomed to “public” proportions while his disciples remained leaders in the movement, sufficiently so that the movement soon drew attention even in Rome (Tacitus, Annals 15.44, for some three decades after Jesus’s ministry; cf. Suetonius, Claudius 25.4, in the second decade). Jesus remained by far the central figure in this movement.²²⁰ This means that in a fairly early phase of the movement, widespread interest in him flourished, quite in contrast with the lives of typical poets.

2.7. Errant Aretalogies?

Some scholars suggest that religious aretalogies helped generate the new genre of novel,²²¹ although religious propaganda does not seem to be the primary function of most ancient novels. Defining aretalogies as narratives celebrating marvelous deeds of heroes, some have compared the Gospels with such aretalogies,²²² or view their genre as aretalogical biography or novel.²²³

There is, however, no single ancient genre of aretalogy,²²⁴ especially of early Hellenistic aretalogy with any predictable form.²²⁵ Classicist Patricia Cox complains that scholars who treat aretalogies as a prototype for collections of gospel miracle stories exploit works much later than the Gospels, such as Philostratus’s Life of Apollonius of Tyana and Porphyry’s and Iamblichus’s Pythagorean Life, to suggest pre-Gospel aretalogies, of which we lack extant examples.²²⁶ In so doing, she warns, NT scholars have distorted even the point of these later works!²²⁷

Technically, in antiquity an “aretalogy” was simply “a list of titles and prerogatives pertaining to a god,”²²⁸ or “recitations of the virtuous and miraculous deeds of a divinity.”²²⁹ These were always of deities, never a way of divinizing mortals, and they do not provide a unified pattern for the post-Gospel works about divine men.²³⁰ Another classicist complains that “anyone who cites Philostratus’ life of Apollonius” as an example of miracle-heavy aretalogies “should be forced to read every one of its laboured speeches,” where miracles are played down more often than highlighted.²³¹

In contrast to such brief narrations or lists of divine acts, biographies that contain fuller episodes about their characters offer better analogies for the Gospels as whole works.²³² Even regarding miracle stories, the episodic Elijah and Elisha narratives in the OT offer a much more obvious background for works such as the Gospels, which conspicuously ground Jesus’s ministry in the monotheistic heritage of Israel.²³³

Some others have gone so far as to use the later apocryphal gospels as analogies for the canonical Gospels.²³⁴ This comparison, however, is not merely mildly anachronistic but particularly conspicuously anachronistic, since apocryphal gospels are a later and, more important, derivative genre.²³⁵ We should no more read these developments into first-century Gospels, composed within living memory of Jesus, than we should read Paul’s first-century letters in light of the theology of Origen, Tertullian, or Cyprian from that later period.

Most apocryphal gospels also stem from the heyday of ancient novels, the late second and early third centuries.²³⁶ Because of their date and novelistic features,²³⁷ these later Gospels are recognized by the majority of scholars as novels, not biographies.²³⁸ There is moreover in them (as opposed to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) little indication of Judean or Galilean elements or other signs of earlier tradition.

2.8. Fictionalized Elements in Historical Biographies

Some scholars suggest that the “borderline between historicity and fictionality is profoundly blurred in many ancient biographies,” so that we dare not “use these texts unproblematically as historical sources.”²³⁹

While most scholars recognize that neither the Gospels nor ancient biographies in general are novels, the question of “fictionalization” is a different one. Fiction is a playful genre, not meant to be believed; fictiveness, by contrast, is merely something that is not historically accurate.²⁴⁰

Some definitions of “fictionalization” are so broad that not even modern historical studies can evade the charge at points; other definitions are narrower. Defining terms is thus important here. While ancient (and even modern) biographies may include considerable fictionalization by some definitions current in modern literary criticism, we should beware of anachronistically imposing these definitions on ancient authors, who probably would not have agreed with them.²⁴¹

Most scholars find at least some fictionalization in ancient biography. Thus Richard Burridge quotes approvingly here another specialist in ancient biography, Christopher Pelling: “While Plutarch did not allow himself wholesale fabrication (as happened in encomium or invective), he does have an element of imaginative ‘creative reconstruction’ of the truth as he saw it, in order to illustrate the way ‘it must have been.’ ”²⁴² (In other spheres we might speak of storyteller’s license, poetic license, or preacher’s license.)²⁴³

Postmodern perspectives rightly help us to recognize that everyone (including postmodernists) has perspectives. In the wake of postmodernism, however, it has become fashionable in some circles to define fictionalizing so broadly as to obscure the difference between interpreted information and free imagination, between substantially information-grounded works and pure fantasy. Most scholars, however, do not take matters so far and often explicitly qualify their claims. Thus, for example, one scholar observes that “poststructuralist historiography” recognizes that “language, rather than providing a transparent window onto the past, instead plays a constitutive role in creating the past.” This much is true, but when she goes on to note that “the practice of writing historical narratives is identical to the practice of writing fiction,” she rightly qualifies this claim with the caveat, “insofar as historians represent past events through emplotting them in narrative form.”²⁴⁴ She explains that this approach does not deny that past events happened, but simply that our recounting of the past includes interpretive structuring; the “fictive” element (the narrator’s selection and adaptation of information) is inevitable.²⁴⁵

Insofar as one employs the language of fictionalization with such limitations understood, few would disagree, although many would still prefer to avoid the language of fictionalization to avoid obscuring distinctions between fully fictitious works and those narrativizing substantial information. Most scholars do allow for distinctions, but not always with the same nomenclature,²⁴⁶ so it is important to clarify what different disciplines and scholars mean by “fictionalizing.”

Postmodern critic Hayden White argues that all narrative, including narrative history, includes fictionality; its very narrativity transcends mere data, providing temporal structure, and thus fictionalizes.²⁴⁷ In the absence of a controlling metanarrative, the arrangement of data into a collected plot thus constitutes fictionalization, mixed freely with fact.²⁴⁸ To be consistent, one would need to apply this designation to any work that focuses on a particular theme and explores connections and causes—such as most of the best historical research today.²⁴⁹

Humans narrativize even personal-event memories;²⁵⁰ such narrativization organizes memory, and may do so from the start, even from the first participants in the events.²⁵¹ Some thus describe all memory as “fictional to a certain extent,” not because it never depicts historical events but because “it involves selectivity, rearranging, redescription, simplification, etc.”²⁵² If we use such a broad definition, of course, no one will object that any narration, no matter how connected with past events, includes fictional elements. Clarity is important, however, since this is not how everyone uses the term. (Others of us simply prefer “narrativization,” which includes both deliberate fiction and works seeking to represent actual persons and events.)²⁵³

When some scholars speak of “fictionalizing” in biographies, sometimes they refer to the historical novels or lives of the poets that we have mentioned.²⁵⁴ This is a matter of semantics regarding the label “biography”; they are using a definition of biography that includes such works that all of us agree are largely fictionalized. If we subdivide such “biographies” in terms of where they stand on a continuum of apparent historical intention, virtually everyone will classify Philostratus’s Life of Apollonius or Ps.-Callisthenes’s Alexander Romance quite differently from the hasty but historically based lives of generals in Cornelius Nepos. Simply surveying a synopsis of the Gospels shows how strongly information-based Matthew and Luke are, and how information-based they expected Mark to be. As such, they fall much closer to Nepos than to the novels in terms of dependence on prior information.

Sometimes scholars count as fictionalization any encomiastic summaries of characteristics rather than recounting specific deeds; the latter serve a more deliberative purpose, offering greater rhetorical attention to moral lessons.²⁵⁵ In other cases, however, they refer to the kinds of adjustments to which I refer more fully in chapters 5 and 11. I would define these as literary or rhetorical adjustments rather than as fictionalizing. The latter label risks anachronism, since ancient authors and audiences accepted such adjustments as simply part of making a narrative coherent. Many scholars have adopted for such adjustments the language of fictionalizing, however, and to some degree the difference is a matter of semantics—in this case regarding fictionalization—and of approaching the narrative from different subdisciplines. Various scholars may recognize the same techniques while assigning them differing nomenclature based on the sorts of comparisons being made.

Nomenclature aside, however, these adaptations were part and parcel of ancient biography and of historiography more generally²⁵⁶ and not entirely absent in those genres’ modern progenies. There is no question that some of these features appear also in the Gospels and Acts. Some of these features, such as perspective and agendas, are inherent in human communication in general; I believe that defining all such features as “fictionalizing” sunders objectivity and subjectivity more strictly than communication will bear.

Whatever one’s preferred nomenclature, it is clear that such adjustments do not identify a work’s genre. Literary devices such as characterization, which some treat as fictionalization,²⁵⁷ are not limited to novels but appear in other narratives, including biographies and histories that tell their stories well.²⁵⁸

Keying figures to earlier paradigms is also sometimes treated as fictionalization.²⁵⁹ Authors often conform scenes to earlier scenes.²⁶⁰ On this approach, making allusions to an earlier work implies a work as literature and thus fictionalized.²⁶¹ For example, in late antiquity Sulpicius Severus keys his story of Martin to the Bible, filling in his accounts of Martin with biblical allusions.²⁶² Borrowings and parody in ancient works often took for granted that the works’ ideal ancient audiences would catch the allusions.²⁶³

Nevertheless, scholars who consider such keying itself fictitious recognize that it appears in nonfictitious narratives such as historiography;²⁶⁴ such historiography surely includes Israelite historiography that the Evangelists would have viewed as authentically historical.²⁶⁵ Early biographers of Washington viewed him as “the American Moses” and compared him with the Roman Cincinnatus and other figures, but they did not in so doing create Washington’s story from whole cloth.²⁶⁶ By reading Jesus within the context of Israel’s history (cf. “according to the Scriptures” already in 1 Cor. 15:3–4), early Christian interpreters did not see themselves as changing his story.²⁶⁷

Skilled authors often developed or highlighted such parallelisms from interpretive observations of similar incidents in their sources rather than wholesale creation.²⁶⁸ Keying is not deemed fictitious if the biographee modeled himself after someone, such as Lucian’s Demonax after Socrates or, we might argue, John or Jesus after Elijah.²⁶⁹

Framing a death scene to evoke an earlier death scene could be an author’s invention,²⁷⁰ but sometimes it might require only slight adjustments to the narrative or tradition to imply such a connection. At other times deaths lent themselves to similar framing because some deaths happened in similar circumstances²⁷¹ or because the persons dying orchestrated their deaths in a way to evoke heroes of the past, as when Seneca dies like Socrates.²⁷² Earlier models of greatness could set expectations for subsequent ones.²⁷³ Certainly Luke offers many implicit comparisons among figures and substantial patterning.²⁷⁴

One may define bias as a fictionalizing tendency, but it does not make biographies into novels; otherwise there would not be ancient biographies or histories, since in literature unbiased works do not exist. We take bias into account when we read works of ancient biography or history, yet at the same time we depend heavily on these sources to understand the persons about whom they wrote (on their often substantial information, see ch. 10). If this is true for other figures of antiquity, why should it be any less true of Jesus? (And if some of us assume that it must be less true of Jesus, because he posthumously became a famous religious figure, what must that say about our own biases?)

I address some such points later as features of historical biography, but suffice it to say that, while these techniques affect detail and perspective, in mainstream biographies (vs. historical novels), they normally need not entail the biographer’s creation of events.²⁷⁵ Novels, including historical ones, were not written about a real person from within living memory, whereas biographies did seek to convey prior information, sometimes about such recent figures; novels did not need to stick close to their material the way Matthew and Luke do, or the way that Matthew and Luke presumably believed that Mark did when they used his material in this way.

Constructive techniques do not necessarily constitute an entire narrative as fictional; ancient historians’ constructions of speeches in character, in the context of more accurate narrative information, are a case in point.²⁷⁶ More encomiastic early biographies such as Xenophon’s Agesilaus often focused only on the subject’s good features, offering a historically distorted perspective.²⁷⁷ Such an exclusively positive approach contrasts with willingness to highlight negative features in later biographies.²⁷⁸ Even Xenophon’s imbalanced perspective, however, need not require us to discount the information that Xenophon does supply. (I discuss Xenophon’s Agesilaus further in the next chapter.)

Affecting even modern biography, fictionalization is said to include “conjecture, interpretation and reconstruction of actions, private moments, motivations and attitudes.”²⁷⁹ By the wider definition, any biography that considers the subject’s own thinking “goes beyond the mere compilation of vital facts” and so is involved in some fictionalization.²⁸⁰ Certainly ancient biographies were much more prone to inferring characters’ thoughts, thus creating a more engaging narrative, but such details can appear also in ancient historiography.²⁸¹ They may predominate in more popular-level works, but this predominance reflects the social level of the ideal audience more than whether the work’s author has interest in the past or some prior information. What we might deem fictionalization, ancient historical writers could deem historical reconstruction—not always of what they knew happened, but at least of their best guess of what happened. That is, such characteristics do not collapse biography or historiography into novels; by themselves they do not identify traits specific to particular ancient genres.

Because “what if” questions (“what might have happened” under different circumstances) are counterfactual, some treat them as fictionalization.²⁸² Both Plutarch and the historian Livy explore such questions.²⁸³ One should note, however, that they appear both in ancient historiography and regularly in modern historiography.²⁸⁴ Nor are edifying concerns, characteristic of ancient biography, entirely absent from its modern descendant.²⁸⁵ That is, if one defines fictionalizing in such a broad way, we should also recognize its presence in works designed especially to communicate information.

2.9. Conclusion

The Gospels are premeditated foundation documents. Scholars have proposed various genre forms for the Gospels; some proposals, such as novels, are wide of the mark; some others, such as “unique,” are not very helpful. Still others, like “memoirs,” are on the right track. Clearly the Gospels are not mythography, novels, or pure drama (which required poetic form). As works focused on a single, historical character, drawing on significant amounts of historical tradition, the Gospels are most readily recognized as ancient biography.

Although ancient biography differed from its modern heir and namesake, it was supposed to deal in historical information rather than the fanciful creation of events. Some biographies were more true to historical information than were others (typically, those about recent generations were much more reliable than those about the distant past). But most full-length biographies clustered around historical intention, certainly where they narrated about an individual based on prior sources. Even if one Gospel substantially adapted such central expectations for full-length biographies about recent figures, one would hardly expect all four to do so independently. If some scholars today argue for such adaptation, it must be on grounds other than ancient expectations.

Ancient writers, whatever their human biases, were normally in a better historical position to evaluate matters of their day than we are today.²⁸⁶ Luke was able to investigate or at least be aware of the information passed on to him. Roughly the same critical tools were available to him as are available to us, and much more information was available to him than is otherwise available to us. While we may recognize the Evangelists’ emphases and question them on matters of detail, we ultimately have little to work with for alternative reconstructions if we dismiss the Gospels’ materials.

1. See, e.g., Talbert, Gospel, throughout; Kennedy, “Source Criticism,” 128–34; Cancik, “Gattung”; Dormeyer and Frankemölle, “Evangelium”; Aune, Environment, 46–76; Aune, “Biography or Theology”; Aune, Dictionary, 204; Stanton, Preaching, 117–36; Stanton, New People, 63–64; Stanton, Gospel Truth?, 137 (reversing his earlier skepticism in Stanton, Gospels, 19; Stanton, “Reflection,” 544–49); Robbins, Teacher, 10; Chance, “Fiction,” 128–31; Burridge, Gospels, 105–251; Burridge, “People,” 121–22; Burridge, “Biography, Ancient”; Burridge, “Genre”; Burridge, “Reading”; Fitzgerald, “Lives”; Dormeyer, “Ewangelie Marka”; Dunn, Remembered, 184–85; Dunn, “The Tradition,” 173–74; Perkins, Introduction to Gospels, 2–11; Powell, Introduction, 7–9; Frickenschmidt, Evangelium, 351–510; Frickenschmidt, “Evangelium”; Culpepper, Gospel and Letters, 65–69, 86; Zuntz, “Heide”; Cross, “Genres,” 402–4; Wright, People, 384, 390–91, 418; Tuckett, “Jesus and the Gospels”; Witherington, Mark, 1–9; Pelling, “Biography, Greek,” 242; Balch, “Gospels: Forms,” 948; Ehrman, Introduction, 62–65; Plümacher, Geschichte, 13–14; Allison, Studies, 142–47; Jáger, “Evanjelium”; Keener, Matthew, 16–24; Keener, John, 11–37; Keener, Historical Jesus, 73–84; Ytterbrink, Biography, 9–10; Smith, “Genre”; Freyne, “Gospel,” 65; Bauckham, Eyewitnesses, 511; Bauckham, World, 96; Aletti, Birth; Rogers, “Baptism”; Pitre, Case, 67–83, 100–101; Schnabel, Jesus in Jerusalem, 4–5; Holladay, “Matthew”; Niebuhr, “Idea,” 1; cf. Berschin, “Biography,” 653; Crossan, “Necessary,” 27. Kee, Origins, 144–47, argues that Luke combined Mark with Greco-Roman biography. Note also the response in Burridge, “Review,” to the otherwise generally helpful work of Hägg, Biography.

2. Fitzgerald, “Lives,” 211; Smith, “Genre,” 184; Smith, βίος, 20; Burridge, Gospels, 253, 271; Walton, “Burridge’s Impact”; Black, “Kennedy,” 65; Walton, “Gospels,” 48, 52–57 (esp. 52–54); Kwon, “Charting,” 59, 65; Goh, “Galba,” 173; Henderson, “Comparison,” 263; Licona, “Viewing,” 323; Bird, Gospel, 239; Adams, Genre, 58; Aletti, Birth, 25; Deines, “Jesus and Torah,” 4. See now the extensive engagement with the secondary literature in Burridge, “Gospels and Biography.”

3. Moles, “Influence,” 99.

4. Cf., e.g., Aletti, Birth, 9. Against Lucian’s Demonax as a possible fiction (Clay, “Lucian,” 3425–26; cf. De Temmerman, “Formalities,” 11), a view based on extreme minimalism, see Beck, “Demonax.”

5. Robbins, Teacher, 2–3.

6. See helpfully, e.g., Pennington, Reading Wisely, 25–35; Shim, “Suggestion,” esp. 70–75; cf. Freyne, “Imagination,” 10; Freyne, “Gospel,” 72; Ytterbrink, Gospel, 16, 117, 224–29. The contrasts in Bruggen, Narratives, 75, involve modern biography.

7. See also, e.g., Dormeyer, “Ewangelie Marka”; cf. Aune, “Biography or Theology”; Aune, “Hellenistic Biography,” 9; Telford, Mark, 100; Edwards, “Genre,” 59.

8. Bockmuehl, Seeing, 185, cites Justin, Dialogue with Trypho 100.4; 101.3; 102.5; 103.6, 8; 104.1; 105.1, 5, 6; 106.1, 3h, 4; 107.1; 1 Apology 33.5; 66.3; 67.3; see also Stanton, New People, 62–63; Abramowski, “Memoirs”; Edwards, “Genre,” 54 (although not viewing this form as biographic).

9. Ehrman may make too much of the lack of early explicit names of Gospel authors, but he is correct that most of the earliest sources except Papias pay little attention to this (Ehrman, Before Gospels, 118–24). Most lay Christians today, however, also cite “Jesus” or “the Gospels” rather than a particular Gospel, esp. when their source is one of the Synoptics.

10. Justin, Dialogue with Trypho 103.8 (my rough translation).

11. See, e.g., Aragione, “Justin”; Moeser, Anecdote, 65–66, citing Theon, Progymnasmata 3.5–6, 15–18; Hermogenes, Progymnasmata 6.15–17; P.Oxy. 85.

12. Note Plutarch, Brutus 13.3, in Moeser, Anecdote, 65.

13. Cf. here, e.g., Votaw, “Biographies,” 217; Robbins, Teacher, 66–67; Edwards, “Genre,” 54; Freyne, “Gospel,” 65–66.

14. Robbins, Teacher, 62–67; Stanton, New People, 62–63. See earlier Kennedy, “Source Criticism,” 128–30 (cf. 136–41; although in discussion allowing flexible contours for genre; note Fuller, “Classics,” 189).

15. Frickenschmidt, Evangelium, 501, in summarizing his history of research on 3–76.

16. Frickenschmidt, Evangelium, 501; note Wiles, Gospel, 14 (cf. 16–19).

17. See Frickenschmidt, Evangelium, 3–5, 16, 21, 501.

18. See Weiss, Evangelium, 11, 15 (comparing Plutarch; as cited in Collins, Mark, 22, 24); Votaw, “Biographies.”

19. Collins, Mark, 19. See Schmidt, “Stellung”; followed also by Kümmel, Introduction, 37; discussion in Burridge, Gospels, 7–16. Some circles also perverted Romanticist interest in the Volk in sinister ways; see Heschel, Aryan Jesus, 29, 31. Frickenschmidt, Evangelium, 508, attributes this loss of focus on historical matters to theological agendas on a prenarrative kerygma.

20. Note criticisms in Byrskog, “Century,” 5; Kwon, “Charting,” 63–64.

21. Bultmann, Tradition, 371–72.

22. Bultmann, Tradition, 372.

23. Wansbrough, “Introduction,” 12.

24. Downing, “Literature”; Aune, Environment, 12, 63; Burridge, Gospels, 11, 153. Rhetorical principles influenced narrative techniques; see, e.g., Dowden, “Apuleius.”

25. Koester, Introduction, 1:108; Kodell, Luke, 23; cf. Perry, Sources, 7. This estimation becomes even clearer in view of Luke’s architectonic patterns (for which, see Goulder, Type; Talbert, Patterns; Talbert, Luke; Tannehill, Luke; Tannehill, Acts).

26. E.g., contrast the popular “Life of Aesop” with the more literary Agricola.

27. See Talbert, Gospel, 2–3; Stanton, Gospels, 15–17.

28. Burridge, Gospels, 93, following Cancik, “Bios.”

29. Talbert, Gospel.

30. Aune, “Problem”; Burridge, Gospels, 81–82.

31. Burridge, Gospels, 81, credits him “for the paradigm shift away from form-critical notions of the gospels’ uniqueness.”

32. Shuler, Genre.

33. See Burridge, Gospels, 83–86.

34. Berger, “Gattungen,” using a very wide definition of biography.

35. Note esp. Frickenschmidt, Evangelium, 504–5.

36. As Burridge, Gospels, 285–86, notes, citing Frickenschmidt, Evangelium, 65–68.

37. See esp. the summary on Frickenschmidt, Evangelium, 505–6. For independent lists of rubrics covered in many biographies, see Martin, “Topic Lists,” 21–23; Sollenberger, “Lives of Peripatetics,” esp. 3800 (discussion in Smith, βίος, 73–74).

38. Burridge, Gospels, 101, 283.

39. Burridge, Comparison; revised as Gospels. For criteria for genre, see Burridge, Comparison, 109–27 (Gospels, 105–23); for pre-Christian Greco-Roman biographies, 128–53 (Gospels, 124–49); for later ones, 154–90 (Gospels, 150–84). For further helpful nuancing of his work on genre in light of more recent studies, see Shively, “Recognizing”; Shively, “Penguins.”

40. Although the soil had become somewhat ripe for this transition; see the survey of approaches in ch. 4.

41. Burridge, Gospels, 185–212 on the Synoptics, and 213–32 on John.

42. Stanton, New People, 63; Stanton, Gospel Truth?, 137, reversing his own earlier skepticism in Stanton, Gospels, 19.

43. Talbert, “Review,” 715; cf. also Stanton, New People, 64; Walton, “Burridge’s Impact.”

44. Burridge, Gospels, 265–66, challenging the argument.

45. I owe the insights in this paragraph to James R. Harrison, now research director at Sydney College of Divinity and an honorary associate of the Macquarie Ancient History Department, personal correspondence, May 26, 2011. See also Boterman, “Heidenapostel,” 64, 73 (as cited in Schnabel, Jesus in Jerusalem, 4); Nobbs, “Historians.”

46. As noted in Pervo, “Introduction,” 3; Pervo, “Losers,” 129–35 (cf. Horsfall, “Ephemeris”), novelistic accounts of Dares and Dictys exploit traditional markers of historical narratives (though Pervo emphasizes their use in fiction), misleading subsequent readers (though not necessarily their contemporaries).

47. Indeed, several noted historical-Jesus scholars display fairly little awareness of Gospel scholars’ research, even while mining the Gospels selectively for information supporting their a priori hypotheses.

48. Cf. Dubrow, Genre, 2–3, 31–34, 95; Shuler, Genre, 25–28; Hirsch, Interpretation, 68–126; Smith, “Genre,” 215; Adams, Genre, 1; Konstan and Walsh, “Biography,” 42; Kirk, “Collective Memory,” 60.

49. Cf. Smith and Kostopoulos, “Biography,” 397, 400, 410, using the language of Hägg, Biography, xi.

50. E.g., Theon, Progymnasmata 2.5–33 (Butts); Quintilian, Orator’s Education 10.1.36; Maximus of Tyre, Philosophical Orations 26.4; 38.4; cf. Houston, “Evidence,” 243 (noting flexibility on 244, 246); Race, “Introduction,” 1. Of various models for genre criticism in antiquity (see Dubrow, Genre, 45–81; Adams, Genre, 26–57), Aristotle’s (cf. Adams, Genre, 27–31) prevailed longest (Burridge, Gospels, 26–28).

51. Pelling, Texts, 2; see also Pelling, “Epilogue”; Pelling, “Bounds,” 256.

52. See, e.g., examples in Malherbe, “Theorists”; Aune, Dictionary, 419.

53. Adams, Genre, 43, 53, citing, e.g., Horace.

54. Adams, Genre, 55–57, 67; Aune, Dictionary, 419; Shively, “Penguins”; Becker, Birth, 72, citing for literary innovation esp. Velleius Paterculus, History 2.9; Horace, Epistle 2.1.

55. With, e.g., Dubrow, Genre, 37, 106; Aune, Environment, 23; Smith, “Genre,” 186–87; Smith, βίος, 28; Buster, “Genre,” 153; Shively, “Penguins,” 282, noting Frow, Genre; Newsom, “Spying.”

56. Although genre categories cannot be applied rigidly, wholesale deconstructionist dismissals of their value are also misplaced; see Eddy and Boyd, Legend, 318–20.

57. Votaw, “Biographies,” 49. Cf. focus on a person in Shively, “Penguins,” 283.

58. Momigliano, Development, 11.

59. Adams, Genre, 70.

60. Geiger, Nepos, 14–15.

61. Talbert, Gospel, 17, helpfully; note his contrast between biography and historiography, on the one hand, and biography and novels, on the other (16–17).

62. Geiger, Nepos, 15.

63. Frickenschmidt, Evangelium, 211 (cf. 217, 224), 227, 238.

64. Frickenschmidt, Evangelium, 233–37, citing, e.g., Plutarch, Alexander 1; Aemilius Paulus 1; Nicias 1; Cimon 2.

65. Plutarch, Aemilius Paulus 1, in Frickenschmidt, Evangelium, 234.

66. Again, see, e.g., Pennington, Reading Wisely, 25–35.

67. E.g., Riesenfeld, Tradition, 2; Guelich, “Genre.” For the distinctiveness of the Gospels more helpfully and less rigidly, see Pennington, Reading Wisely, 25–35.

68. Aune, Environment, 18, citing e.g., Justin, Dialogue with Trypho 10.2; 100.1; cf. 1 Apology 66; see also, e.g., Papias, frag. 3.14; 6.2; 19.1; 20.1; 21.1; Irenaeus, Against Heresies 1.20.2; Diogn. 11.6; perhaps already Did. 8.2; 11.3; 15.3–4.

69. Bauckham, Eyewitnesses, 537–38, noting esp. Kelhoffer, “Book.”

70. Stuhlmacher, “Theme,” 19–25; Betz, “Gospel.”

71. E.g., Kelber, Story, 15; Collins, Mark, 3. Some suggest Matthew (cf. Stanton, New People, 14–16), but cf. Marxsen, Mark, 25, 150n106, 205–6.

72. Edwards, “Genre,” 60.

73. Ytterbrink, Gospel, 227.

74. Genres function as both cultural and cognitive schemas (with, e.g., Kirk, Memory, 219–20; cf. also 7, citing Zimmermann, “Gleichnisse,” 108); an individual work’s “uniqueness” precludes the comparative activity implied in discussion of genre with respect to whatever aspects are unique. For their role in tradition formation, see Zimmermann, “Gleichnisse,” 109 (cited in Kirk, Memory, 64, 78, 220).

75. Luz, Matthew, 1:44–45.

76. Becker, Birth, 71.

77. Ehrman, Introduction, 64–65.

78. Cf. the polemical Apocriticus 2.12–15 (possibly from Porphyry); Mack, Myth, 11, 322–23; cf. the comparison in Tolbert, Sowing, 48–79; for the debate historically, see Cook, Interpretation, 14, 26–27, 336–37. One can speak of dramatic modes in a range of genres (Brant, “Drama,” 87, 90), but the prose character of the Gospels rules out excessive analogies with ancient drama in the sense of plays (see Aristotle, Poetics 6.9, 1450a). Although intriguing, the wide net for parallels for Gospel narratives in Heever, “Tales” (including apocalyptic narratives [191], second-century cases of fraud [185], and a wide range of New Religious Movements [181]), requires qualification. Ron Hubbard was a science fiction writer before he inaugurated Scientology (181), a setting quite different from Jesus and his earliest movement. Moreover, why compare only religious figures, which could imply that stories from religious movements are invariably more fictionalized than political or literary or philosophic movements? And if one compares religious figures, why compare what most observers consider the deliberate fictionalizing of Hubbard and not, say, religious figures such as John Bunyan or Catherine Booth, about whom we have solid historical information? For ancient contexts, cf. Keener, “Parallel Figures.”

79. As in, e.g., Fullmer, Resurrection, 15–26; Starner, Kingdom; for Acts, e.g., Chance, “Prognostications.”

80. See Burridge, Gospels, 238–39; Aune, Dictionary, 285; Porter, “We Passages,” 550–52; Marguerat, Historian, 29; Soards, “Review,” 309; cf. Rothschild, Rhetoric, 291–92.

81. E.g., Roman historiography borrows some style details from Roman epics (Rebenich, “Prose,” 312).

82. Cf. (regarding Acts) the remarks of Smith, “Understand,” 49–50; Keener, Acts, 1:63, 65, 72, 89. The primary readership of novels, however, was people who were literate, leisured, and well-to-do enough to afford them (see Bowie, “Readership,” 452–53; Stephens, “Who Read Novels?” 415).

83. Many of the biographies noted below are on roughly the same reading level as novels, though, like novels (see the note above) and unlike the Gospels, most of the surviving ones are written for the elite.

84. Burridge, Gospels, 282–84, cites Vines, Problem, noting that Vines devotes only sixteen pages to Jewish novels, where he believes he finds the most significant genre parallels, and observing Vines’s ultimate admission that the anecdotal, episodic approach of Mark does not fit the novels. Again, this complaint does not reduce the value of literary comparisons, and for more useful comparisons with Gospels in terms of their generally popular level, Burridge, Gospels, 92, cites Tolbert, Sowing, 59–79; Reiser, “Alexanderroman.”

85. See my fuller discussion regarding Luke’s work in Acts, 62–83.

86. See, e.g., Fusillo, “Novel,” 838–39; Konstan, “Apollonius and Novel,” 173; Konstan, Symmetry; Konstan, “Subjectivity”; possibly Burrus, “Desiring.” Cf. the German Roman, meaning “novel,” albeit without “romantic” connotations.

87. Rather than expending space to defend this relatively noncontroversial point, I refer again to Ehrman, Did Jesus Exist? The questions that extreme skeptics raise about Jesus could be raised even more easily about many other ancient figures; see, e.g., De Temmerman, “Formalities,” 11; esp. Beck, “Demonax,” 80–82.

88. One may compare works such as the Acts of Paul and Thecla or Acts of John 53–64, 73–80, where elements of the romance story line are followed, except that the women become devotees of the male teacher in chastity, devoted not to sexual love but to God’s word. See Hofmann, “Novels: Christian,” 847–48; Eddy and Boyd, Legend, 338–39; cf. Aubin, “Reversing Romance,” 260–62 (noting the subversion of conventional gender assumptions); Thomas, “Fluidity,” 277. Later, see Gray, “Monk,” 120, 127, citing Jerome Vita Malchi ch. 10.

89. Momigliano, Development, 55.

90. See Tilg, Chariton; but cf. Smith and Temmerman, “Ideal.”

91. Besides the biographically shaped novels below, see also the Trojan accounts in Merkle, “True Story,” 183–84; Schmeling, “Spectrum,” 23; more extensively, Pervo, “Losers” (though noting that subsequent readers treated these stories as true). The degree of fictionalizing (or epicizing) of historic events such as we find in Lucan, Civil War (see, e.g., Chiu, “Importance”), is largely limited to poetry (cf. Fantuzzi, “Historical Epic”).

92. Polybius, Histories 34.4.1–3 suggests that the Odyssey mixed history and myth; see ch. 9 for the contrast between history and myth.

93. See, e.g., Morgan, “Fiction,” 554; Wiersma, “Novel”; Konstan, “Invention,” 5–6; cf. also Tob 1:2–4; Jdt 1:1, 7; Droge, “Anonymously,” 515.

94. See, e.g., Barr and Wentling, “Biography,” 81–88; Pelling, “Biography: Greek,” 241. Bowersock’s examples of fictitionalized history (Fiction, 21) are also distinctly novelistic.

95. Pitre, Case, 77–78, cites Josephus, Life 336–39; Lucian, Demonax 1.

96. De Temmerman, “Formalities,” 7–10. Pervo, “Losers,” 135–36, is probably right to doubt that such authors (in his case, Dares and Dictys) intended to deceive, and is certainly right to note that many later readers were deceived; he suspects that they could have known that some would construe their stories literally, but rightly prescinds from certainty about their motives. Nevertheless, external tests show them fictitious (in contrast to, say, Acts; see Talbert, Mediterranean Milieu, 201–8; Keener, Acts, 1:166–57).

97. Kennedy, “Source Criticism,” 139, cites Plutarch and Suetonius (both from the early empire) as the prime examples of biography; these are a far cry from Life of Aesop or Ps.-Callisthenes.

98. Chance, “Fiction,” 136–41.

99. Chance, “Fiction,” 141. Cf. Almagor, “Narratives,” 78 on the “very thin line between fictionality used to arrive at historical truth (used by historians) and fiction employed for its own sake.”

100. Pelling, Texts, 9.

101. Fowler, “History,” 196. Fowler acknowledges that this ancient distinction, while significant, can be overdrawn (196–97).

102. Bauckham, “Response,” 247–48.

103. For some other ancient historical novels, see, e.g., Lindenberger, “Ahiqar”; and, not biographic but exploiting in conspicuous fiction the historiographic convention of eyewitnesses, Merkle, “True Story,” 183–84; Schmeling, “Spectrum,” 23; Ní-Mheallaigh, “Pseudo-Documentarism”; Ní-Mheallaigh, Fiction, xi. Earlier Jewish novels include Tobit (cf. Rost, Judaism, 63; Doran, “Narrative Literature,” 296–99) and Judith (cf. Nickelsburg, Literature, 106; Baslez, “Polémique”; Gray, Letters, 11–12); closer to the model of Hellenistic romance (cf., e.g., West, “Joseph and Asenath”; Doran, “Narrative Literature,” 290–91) is Joseph and Aseneth, though this work might include some motifs from Christian sources (cf. discussion in Keener, Acts, 2:1608).

104. Cf. Frickenschmidt, Evangelium, 188–90, classing together in one period Alexander Romance, Iamblichus’s Pythagorean Life, and Philostratus’s Life of Apollonius.

105. Smith and Kostopoulos, “Biography,” 396, call it “impossible-to-classify,” referring to Gera, Cyropaedia, 1.

106. Note the offhanded observations in Hägg, Biography, 7, 320–21, though Hägg classes them loosely as biographic; but cf. 197–98 for Nicolaus’s Augustus, undoubtedly longer than usual.

107. Frickenschmidt, Evangelium, 112–13; Miller, “Introduction,” viii.

108. Noted by Chance, “Fiction,” 138.

109. Cicero, Letter to Brother Quintus 1.1.8.23. Chance, “Fiction,” 138, adds Diogenes Laertius, Lives (Plato 3.34, though this is an inference from the less specific Plato, Laws 694). Cf. Socratic features (e.g., Xenophon, Cyropaedia 3.1.17) with Xenophon, Memorabilia, throughout. For the verdict of a modern commentator, see Hägg, Biography, 51–52.

110. Hägg, Biography, 65, following also Stadter, “Narrative,” 467, and calling it a “utopian biography.” (I would prefer “utopian novel,” but Xenophon predates the later narrative categories.)

111. Momigliano, Development, 55, adding on 55–56 the subsequent popularity of “Xenophon” as a pseudonym for late antique novelists.

112. Beck, “Demonax,” 81–82.

113. Momigliano, Development, 56–57, deeming fiction as even more common in that period’s biography, given its popular level.

114. Also noted by Bowie, “Portrait,” 143.

115. Jones, “Apollonius Passage,” regarding it as a “travel romance.” For complaints about ridiculous geography, see, e.g., Lucian, How to Write History 24. Although Capra, “Detour,” blames a later copyist for a geographic anomaly in Xenophon, Ephesiaca 5.10.2, novelists were less committed to accurate geography.

116. Hägg, Biography, 321, though his exceptionally broad definition of biography includes it.

117. Aune, Dictionary, 321; Pitcher, “Story,” 296–98; Ní-Mheallaigh, “Pseudo-Documentarism”; cf. Fowler, Kinds of Literature, 93. Ancient discussions of prose genre always begin with history (Adams, Genre, 51, citing, e.g., Quintilian, Orator’s Education 10.1.73–5, 101–4).

118. Robiano, “Apologia,” 97.

119. Licona, Differences, p. 6.

120. Bowie, “Apollonius,” esp. 1664, as cited in Chance, “Fiction,” 138–39; Bowie, “Portrait,” 143.

121. Collins, Mark, 26n73.

122. Votaw, “Biographies,” 63; Bowie, “Portrait,” 142.

123. In contrast to, say, Arrian’s treatment of Epictetus or Xenophon’s of Socrates; cf. Votaw, “Biographies,” 55.

124. Bowie, “Portrait,” 142.

125. Philostratus, Life of Apollonius 1.3, 19.

126. Votaw, “Biographies,” 65.

127. Philostratus, Life of Apollonius 1.3.1. See Robiano, “Apologia,” 100.

128. Cf. Conybeare, “Introduction,” vii; Votaw, “Biographies,” 61, 63–64; Derrenbacker, Practices, 71–74. That is, unless his relationship with the empress was such that she would enjoy being pulled into the fiction.

129. Jones, “Apollonius Passage”; Klauck, Context, 170; Edwards, “Damis”; Hägg, Biography, 325, 331–32 (citing Bowie, “Apollonius,” 1663–64; Bowie, “Philostratus,” 189; Gyselinck and Demoen, “Author,” 99–101); Bowie, “Portrait,” 142–43.

130. Though cf. Conybeare, “Introduction,” vii.

131. Philostratus, Life of Apollonius 1.3.

132. Philostratus, Life of Apollonius 3.41.

133. Bowie, “Apollonius.”

134. Bowie, “Apollonius,” regards this as the usual view.

135. Raynor, “Moeragenes,” noting Moeragenes’s title Memories of the Magus and Philosopher Apollonius of Tyana, which he thinks evokes Xenophon’s Memorabilia, and doubting that one would devote four volumes to one considered a charlatan.

136. Origen, Against Celsus 6.41.

137. Anderson, Philostratus, 299–300, here 300. Lucian, Dio Cassius, and Apollonius’s letters also see him as a magician. The infancy material in Maximus of Aegae, used in Life of Apollonius 1.12, is probably later, like Christians’ Protevangelium of James.

138. On which, see, e.g., sections 16.11–13 later in this book.

139. See Keener, Miracles, 1:53–56, esp. 55, and sources cited there.

140. Klauck, Context, 170. Admittedly, stories of Jesus as miracle worker are limited in extant apocryphal gospels (Achtemeier, Miracle Tradition, 177–78; cf. Remus, Healer, 92–95); but miracle stories are abundant in apocryphal acts (Achtemeier, Miracle Tradition, 179–88; cf. Remus, Healer, 102–3).

141. Cf. Moles, “Influence,” 99.

142. Regardless of their authenticity (it may be doubtful), they predate Philostratus’s story. The letters focus on Greek cities where Apollonius probably actually traveled (not Ethiopia, India, etc., where Philostratus’s most fanciful tales transpire).

143. See further Keener, Acts, 1:330–33. Generic parallels (Votaw, “Biographies,” 65) largely reflect the biographic format; differences in content (66) are substantial.

144. Talbert, “Monograph,” 72.

145. E.g., Alexander Romance 1.23.

146. Bosworth, “Pseudo-Callisthenes.” On historical information dramatically transformed for narrative purposes, see Hägg, Biography, 126–27.

147. Zambrini, “Historians,” 211; cf. Hägg, Biography, 4. Contrast Pervo’s designation of it as a “history” (Acts, 15).

148. Hägg, Biography, 100.

149. Konstan and Walsh, “Biography,” 27; see also 39n25.

150. Cf. Hägg, Biography, 99, for “some six hundred years or more.” It must have been completed by the time of its Latin translation in the fourth century; cf. Fusillo, “Pseudo-Callisthenes.”

151. Wojciechowski, “Tradition,” 101–2 (“a Hellenistic novel with satirical elements”); Frickenschmidt, Evangelium, 180–81; Hägg, Biography, 100 (most scholars today deem it a romance), 310 (its “novelistic plot”); Karla, “Life of Aesop,” 64. Cf. “forgery” in Momigliano, Development, 92.

152. Karla, “Life of Aesop,” 47.

153. Karla, “Life of Aesop,” 47–48 (Ahiqar, Hesiod, etc.).

154. Karla, “Life of Aesop,” 48.

155. Hägg, Biography, 99, suggests its present form dates to over six hundred years after Aesop.

156. Votaw, “Biographies,” 45–46 (cf. 71, wrongly comparing Philostratus); Reiser, “Alexanderroman,” 135–48 (comparing Ps.-Callisthenes), as cited in Chance, “Fiction,” 132; Tolbert, discussed in Freyne, “Gospel,” 68–70. Cf. traits in Karla, “Life of Aesop,” 51–52.

157. Karla, “Life of Aesop,” 51–52; cf. Aletti, Birth, 10.

158. Frickenschmidt, Evangelium, 181, noting esp. the biographies of Phocion in Nepos and Plutarch.

159. Cf. Byrskog, “Century,” 24. Cf. folkloristic lives of Homer. Folklore in a general sense need not refer to long-term oral tradition, but that is what I envision here.

160. Karla, “Life of Aesop,” 52–53.

161. Stephens, “Who Read Novels?” 415. For the longer survival of manuscripts that were highly prized and thus cared for, see Evans, “Longevity.”

162. Adams, Genre, 51–52; cf. Becker, Birth, 60.

163. See, e.g., Lucian, How to Write History 12; Plutarch, How the Young Man Should Study Poetry 2, Moralia 16F; see Mosley, “Reporting,” 26; Kany, “Bericht.” Usually they could also distinguish specimens of these genres, at least if figures were recent.

164. See Wiersma, “Novel.”

165. E.g., Longus is a countryman who knows the correct fauna of Lesbos, though much of his knowledge would apply to any eastern Mediterranean setting (and he apparently lacked firsthand acquaintance with trapping techniques; Arnott, “Realism,” 211).

166. E.g., on cities (Saïd, “City,” noting that some that were interested in cities used widely known information). On this point, Evans, World, 9–10, contrasts the first-century Gospels with later gnostic and apocryphal ones.

167. Though occasionally a novel could include a preface explaining how an author invented the story (as in Longus, Daphnis and Chloe. proem 1–2).

168. Cf. Becker, Birth, 92.

169. Dio Cassius, Roman History 1.1.1–2; Fornara, Nature, 120–33 (esp. 121, 133–34, citing Cicero, Letters to Friends 5.12.4); Palmer, “Monograph (1993),” 3, 29, citing, e.g., Cicero, Letters to Friends 5.12.5; Polybius, Histories 1.4.11; 3.31.13; Aune, Environment, 80; Aune, Dictionary, 285; cf. also Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Demosthenes 47; Tacitus, Annals 4.32–33; Maximus of Tyre, Philosophical Orations 22.5; Plümacher, “Fiktion”; Krasser, “Reading,” 554 (though including Ps.-Callisthenes’s Alexander Romance too readily in the history category); Burridge, Gospels, 146, 181–82, 237–38.

170. 2 Macc 2:24–25.

171. Edwards, “Introduction,” xii–xiii; cf. Hägg, Biography, 5.

172. See discussion in Maximus of Tyre, Philosophical Orations 22.5; 2 Macc 2:25; Tacitus, Annals 4.32–33; Fornara, Nature, 120–33.

173. Ytterbrink, Gospel, 116; Edwards, “Introduction,” xiii.

174. For some examples, see Sterling, Sisters, 78; Hunt, History, 208, 239; Tomkins, Wilberforce, 15–17.

175. Talbert, Gospel, 17.

176. Most obviously, the late second-century Apuleius, Metamorphoses, though some view even this work’s propagandistic element as satire.

177. E.g., Aune, Environment, 36.

178. Pelling, “Biography, Greek,” 241–42, in OCD, 241; Frickenschmidt, Evangelium, 158–59.

179. See Frickenschmidt, Evangelium, 504.

180. The Gospels date to within living memory and come from a discipleship movement, the sort of movement that normally valued information about the lives of their teachers. For Jesus’s public influence, see also Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 18.63–64.

181. Geiger, Nepos, 115.

182. Momigliano, Development, 88.

183. De Temmerman, “Formalities,” 4–5, following Pelling, Plutarch and History, 147–48.

184. Adams, Genre, 87; Frickenschmidt, Evangelium, 158–59. Cf. also the biographies On Illustrious Men in Adams, Genre, 94–101.

185. Geiger, Nepos, 115; Momigliano, Development, 70; Power, “Poetry,” 217, 221, 236. This was presumably not unlike the sort of hypothetical guesswork involved in Judean and Babylonian midrashic haggadah.

186. Lefkowitz, Lives, ix, 70, 128, 177; also Lefkowitz, “Poet.”

187. Adams, Genre, 87; Irwin, “Biographies,” 13. Trepanier, “Review,” warns that Chitwood’s explanations of philosophers’ deaths via their writings, using Lefkowitz’s model from lives of poets (Chitwood, Death), is highly speculative.

188. Irwin, “Biographies,” 14.

189. Adams, Genre, 2. Ps.-Herodotus Life is less than a third the length of Mark or a sixth that of Matthew or Luke. Still, among lives of the poets it is one of the most comparable in form; it has biographic structure and, like the Life of Aesop, surely draws on existing traditions. It may even date to the second or third century CE, although it might depend on a pseudepigraphically Herodotean source (cf. ¶ 1).

190. So see Keaney and Lamberton, Essay. There were also many other lives of Homer in antiquity—see Pitcher, “Story,” 293, 295.

191. Konstan and Walsh, “Biography,” 27. Nevertheless, the author claims only to recount traditions, some from named sources (e.g., 1.2–4; 2.2–3) and others anonymous (1.5; again, 2.2–3).

192. Frickenschmidt, Evangelium, 159.

193. Frickenschmidt, Evangelium, 161; Power, “Poetry,” 236.

194. Frickenschmidt, Evangelium, 504. Likewise, encomiastic elements in some histories (Fornara, Nature, 36) did not make the histories fictitious (64–65).

195. Power, “Poetry,” 237.

196. As in Suetonius, Vergil 9.

197. “It is believed,” or “it is said” or “some say” (Suetonius, Horace 1, 4; Grammarians 5; 7; 13; 16; 23; Rhetoricians 3; an absurd claim in 4); “common talk” (Grammarians 23, probably not credited); “some” vs. “the general opinion” (Vergil 1); “common report” (Vergil 9) possibly countered by a named source (Vergil 10). In Eusebius, Dillon, “Interpretation,” 157, regards such language as appropriate for oral tradition distinct from documents. In Philo, however, it can reflect a written source or inferences from it (Hidalgo, “Study,” 278–80, on Moses 1.3.9; 1.4.13–14; 1.21.24, 135; 1.29.165–66).

198. Suetonius, Terence 3; Vergil 29, 34, 42, 46; Grammarians 4, 7–8, 11, 16.

199. E.g., Suetonius, Terence 5; cf. Grammarians 11: “According to some writers,” but the biographee “himself . . . declares.”

200. Suetonius, Rhetoricians 2; 5 (this one = Cicero, Philippics 2.17.42–43).

201. Suetonius, Horace 1; Tibullus; Grammarians 18; 22.

202. A number by Augustus (Suetonius, Horace 2–3; Vergil 31), to which he had access also in his Augustus; three by Cicero (Grammarians 14, citing Cicero, Letters to Friends 9.10; Letters to Atticus 12.26; Suetonius, Rhetoricians 2, citing one not today extant); and by others (Grammarians 10).

203. Suetonius, Horace 3; Grammarians 5.

204. Suetonius, Grammarians 4.

205. E.g., Suetonius, Lucan; esp. Aulus Persius Flaccus.

206. E.g., Suetonius, Grammarians 1; Rhetoricians 1.

207. E.g., Suetonius, Grammarians 9 (cf. Macrobius); Grammarians 16 (cf. Suetonius’s own Augustus 66).

208. Power, “Poetry,” 236–38.

209. Suetonius, Horace 4; Vergil 9–10; Terence 3–4.

210. Suetonius, Life of Pliny the Elder. Suetonius’s first version accords with (though he does not cite) Pliny, Letters 6.16.19 (written to Tacitus for use in his history). He offers the different accounts of Terence’s death (naming the one source that differed from most) in Terence 5 (discussed in a different connection in Davis, “Terence Interrupted”).

211. “Common gossip” (Suetonius, Terence 3), which he counters with a named source (Terence 4).

212. Power, “Poetry,” 237, 239.

213. Power, “Poetry,” 237.

214. See Tibullus; Passienus Crispus. In Grammarians: Saevius Nicanor (Grammarians 5), Aurelius Opilius (6), Marcus Antonius Gnipho (7), Marcus Pompilius Andronicus (8), Horace and Domitius Marsus (9), Cornelius Epicadus (12), Staberius Eros (13), Lenaeus (15), Quintus Caecilius Epirota (16), Marcus Verrius Flaccus (17), Lucius Crassicus (18), Scribonius Aphrodisius (19, very short), Gaius Julius Hyginus (20), Gaius Melissus (21), Marcus Pomponius Marcellus (22). So also Rhetoricians 2–5.

215. E.g., for Pliny the Elder.

216. Power, “Poetry,” 238. Aletti, Birth, 22, contends that Suetonius’s interest is recounting whatever is true about his subjects, “the good and the bad, so that the portrait is consistent with reality.” Cf. now “gist” in Licona, “Reliable.”

217. See Votaw, “Biographies,” 53; for source material determining length, cf. Geiger, Nepos, 27.

218. Cf. Frickenschmidt, Evangelium, 208–9, and the three-part, more complete biographic form characteristic of fuller biographies, as opposed to brief lives of poets (210–350).

219. Frickenschmidt, Evangelium, 169.

220. See, e.g., Mark 1:1; 1 Cor 15:3–11; Col 1:15–20; 1 Thess 1:10; Rev 1:17–18; 1 Clem. 7.4; 24.1; 36.1. Although Paul writes in the Diaspora before the Jesus tradition was as widely disseminated, he also assumes some knowledge of Jesus’s ministry and character (e.g., 1 Cor 9:14; 2 Cor 10:1).

221. Merkelbach, “Novel and Aretalogy,” 290.

222. Cf. Hadas and Smith, Heroes.

223. See Wills, Quest; Burridge, Gospels, 92, also compares Tolbert, Sowing, 59–79; Reiser, “Alexanderroman.”

224. Burridge, Gospels, 281–82; cf. in greater detail Kee, “Aretalogy”; Kee, Aretalogies.

225. Cox, Biography, 46, noting the designation’s origin in 1885 based on a dream interpreter inscription.

226. Cox, Biography, 3–4. This is not to deny their use of earlier legends; cf. Aune, “Prolegomena,” 92.

227. Cox, Biography, 4.

228. Edwards, “Genre,” 59.

229. Cox, Biography, 47.

230. Cox, Biography, 47; she argues against Hadas on 47–48 and Morton Smith on 48.

231. Edwards, “Genre,” 59.

232. Shuler, Genre, 15–20; cf. Talbert, Gospel, 12–13; Klauck, Context, 167–68.

233. Edwards, “Genre,” 59; cf. Frickenschmidt, Evangelium, 127–28; Collins, Mark, 29; Ytterbrink, Gospel, 39, 227–28.

234. Thus, for example, one knowledgeable scholar seriously proposes that while comparing the Gospels to biographies, I should have taken “into account ancient works like the Protevangelium of James and other apocryphal gospels that closely resemble the canonical Gospels in genre but obviously did invent material wholesale” (Powell, Figure, 260, summarizing the suggestion of Levine, “Christian Faith,” 103). I know of no mainstream historical-Jesus scholars (such as E. P. Sanders, John Meier, or Gerd Theissen) who appeal to such documents, whereas, by contrast, a biographic genre for the first-century Gospels is currently and historically the dominant position in Gospels scholarship.

235. Overlap with material in the canonical Gospels may reflect direct knowledge of them (likely by their period) but often via secondary orality; see Labahn, “Secondary Orality,” and the sources he cites on 363.

236. See Bowie, “Readership,” 443; Stephens, “Who Read Novels?,” 414; Aune, Dictionary, 322.

237. For novelistic features in the apocryphal gospels and acts, see Aune, Environment, 151–52; Lalleman, “Apocryphal Acts,” 67; Rebenich, “Prose,” 307–8; Bauckham, “Acts of Paul”; Keylock, “Distinctness,” 210; Krasser, “Reading,” 554; Hofmann, “Novels: Christian,” 846–48; Pervo, “Fabula”; Perkins, “World.”

238. See Aune, Dictionary, 199–204; Bauckham and Porter, “Apocryphal Gospels”; Charlesworth and Evans, “Agrapha.” Cf. also apocryphal acts as novels, Aune, Environment, 151–52; Lalleman, “Apocryphal Acts,” 67; Rebenich, “Prose,” 307–8; Bauckham, “Acts of Paul”; Keylock, “Distinctness,” 210; Krasser, “Reading,” 554; Hofmann, “Novels: Christian,” 846–48; Perkins, “World.” They do at least share a narrative framework (cf. Rodríguez, “Narrative Gospels,” 240, noting P.Egerton 2; P.Köln 255; P.Oxy. 840), unlike most gnostic gospels (cf. Mournet, “Sayings Gospels,” 349). The gnostic gospels develop the social memory of Jesus in their era (cf. Schröter, “Contribution”) but reflect a different, mostly nonnarrative genre, probably with knowledge of the earlier Gospels (Tuckett, Nag Hammadi, 149, 155, 158–59); even Thomas may be largely derivative (see Tuckett, “Thomas”; Tuckett, “Gospel of Thomas”; Tuckett, “Sources,” 130; Heyer, Jesus Matters, 102–5; Charlesworth and Evans, “Agrapha,” 496–503; cf. possibly Perrin, “Overlooked Evidence”; Perrin, Thomas and Tatian; but contrast DeConick, Recovering). Canonical sources (Paul, Q, and Mark) are our earliest extant sources (Allison, Jesus of Nazareth, 17); Mark is a biography, but Q’s genre is much more debated beyond the predominance of sayings there (Kirk, “Elements”; cf. Rodríguez, “Narrative Gospels,” 241).

239. De Temmerman and Demoen, “Preface,” xi.

240. De Temmerman, “Formalities,” 5–6.

241. See esp. De Pourcq and Roskam, “Virtues,” 180.

242. Burridge, Gospels, 169–70, citing Pelling, “Truth”; Pelling, Antony, 33–36. See esp. helpfully Hodkinson, “Features.”

243. “Storytelling” applies to any account concerning “a place and time different from” its narration (Person, “Storytelling,” 385).

244. Matthews, “Teaching Fiction,” 214.

245. Matthews, “Teaching Fiction,” 214n6.

246. E.g., already a generation ago, Caird, Language, 201–2, distinguished the actuality of an event from the language that signifies it. Although historical works and novels are both narratives, not every subgenre within narrative is fictitious in a narrower sense.

247. White, Tropics, as summarized by De Temmerman, “Formalities,” 14; cf. also Becker, Birth, 89. As Licona, Resurrection, 79–89, notes, most historians and philosophers today reject the radical postmodern approach that treats even the Holocaust or Apartheid as fictions (although allowing for individual facts behind them). Still, narrativization is an important step in preserving memory (see Zimmermann, “Memory,” 132).

248. Becker, Birth, 90.

249. See, e.g., Schnabel, Jesus in Jerusalem, 4. For examples of good modern historiography, which follow a particular issue in light of the remembered significance of its outcome, see, e.g., Tuttle, Riot; Foner, Reconstruction; Branch, Parting; Luijk, Children.

250. Elder, “Narrativity,” 242.

251. Le Donne, Historiographical Jesus, 52–59, 63.

252. Byrskog, “Hermeneutic,” 4.

253. See Le Donne, Historiographical Jesus, 63.

254. Cf. De Temmerman, “Formalities,” 4–5.

255. See Polybius’s distinction between treating an individual encomiastically or historically (with moralistic application); cf. Farrington, “Action.” For some fiction in ancient biography, see Chance, “Fiction.”

256. Cf. Dunn, Tradition, 200, responding to Holmberg, “Questions,” who finds fictionalizing in all historiography. For some examples, with differences from novels, see Keener, Acts, 1:74–77.

257. De Temmerman, “Formalities,” 21.

258. See Fornara, Nature, 185; Ash, Mossman, and Titchener, Fame.

259. Regarded in De Temmerman, “Formalities,” 21, as fictionalizing.

260. De Temmerman, “Formalities,” 23–25; Kirk, “Collective Memory,” 61; for an example in late antique philosophic biography, see Tieleman, “Orality,” 34.

261. Robiano, “Apologia,” 104–5, following Genette, Palimpsestes, 12 = Genette, Palimpsestes (1997), 5.

262. Praet, “Cloak,” 138, 143–57, esp. 143–48.

263. E.g., Pelling, Texts, 142–43.

264. De Temmerman, “Formalities,” 21. For example, whether deliberate or, more likely, unplanned, the similarity of an event such as Josephus, Jewish War 6.316 to Ps 74 (LXX 73):3–4, 7 does not lead us to suppose that the event did not occur.

265. See, e.g., Hays, Echoes, 101; Cotter, “Miracle,” 102; Levine, “Twice”; Keener, Acts, 1:573–74; in a contrasting manner, cf. 2 Chr 18:33; 35:23.

266. Schwartz, “Jesus in Memory,” 259–60.

267. See Schwartz, “Jesus in Memory,” 251, 254.

268. E.g., Plutarch, Sertorius 1.1–4; Cimon 3.1–3; see further ch. 8; Keener, Acts, 1:550–74.

269. Beck, “Demonax,” 95; De Temmerman, “Formalities,” 21; on Socrates as a common model, see 22–23; also, e.g., Musonius Rufus 10, p. 78.12–14; 18B, p. 118.16–18 (all references to Musonius reflect the Lutz edition); Seneca, Dialogues 1.3.12–13; 2.18.5; 4.7.1; 7.25.4; On Benefits 5.4.3; 5.6.2–7; 5.7.5; 7.8.2; Epictetus, Discourses 1.12.23; 1.25.31; 1.29.65–66; 2.26.6; 3.1.19–23; 3.5.14–19; 3.23.32; 3.24.60; 4.1.159–60; 4.5.2–4; 4.5.33; 4.8.22–23; 4.9.6; 4.11.19; Plutarch, How the Young Man Should Study Poetry 2, Moralia 16C; Diogenes, Letters 28; Dio Chrysostom, Orations 3.1, 29; Pelling, “Socrates”; Keener, Acts, 3:2605–6.

270. Cf. the contrast between 2 Chr 18:33 and 35:23.

271. E.g., assassins could find inspiration and models from previous assassinations; see Ash, “Assassinating Emperors,” 202. Likewise, some biographees may have been genuinely wise, provoked opposition, etc. (Chance, “Fiction,” 136).

272. Ash, “Assassinating Emperors,” 200, citing Tacitus, Annals 15.60–64. Cf. Cox, Biography, 30.

273. Chance, “Fiction,” 133.

274. See, e.g., Ytterbrink, Gospel, 227–28; Keener, Acts, 1:556–74.

275. One can argue that verisimilitude is merely imitation of historical information (cf. Ash, “Assassinating Emperors,” 214–15), but often where we can test it, it reflects the biographer’s (correct or incorrect) sources or inferences from them.

276. De Temmerman, “Formalities,” 14.

277. De Temmerman, “Formalities,” 4, noting further Pernot, Rhétorique; Hägg, Biography, 41–51, 97; and, for discussions by ancient biographers, Gyselinck and Demoen, “Author”; Hägg, Biography, 197–204.

278. Kwon, “Reimagining,” 288, after charting the use of compositional devices in Xenophon on the one hand and later biographers of Galba and Otho on the other.

279. De Temmerman, “Formalities,” 4.

280. De Temmerman, “Formalities,” 4, citing Cohn, Distinction, 18–37, esp. 26; Cohn, “Lives,” 9–10.

281. E.g., Tacitus, Histories 2.74; Annals 4.38–39; 12.4.

282. Almagor, “Narratives,” 65–66. Pace Almagor (“Narratives,” 66, 69), however, Aristotle Poetics 1451b1–8 probably refers to epic poetry, not to hypothetical speculation in historiography.

283. Almagor, “Narratives,” 67–68; cf. Plutarch’s use of this approach to add new twists to old stories, 78–79.

284. Pelling, Texts, 79, 81; Almagor, “Narratives,” 66 (though the latter finds it more in biography, 69–70); esp. Sheppard, Craft, 172–78.

285. See Dillon, “Interpretation,” 164.

286. With, e.g., Sumney, Opponents, 86.

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