3.7. Conclusion
Examples and Development of Ancient Biography
One reason that Philipp Vielhauer in the 1970s rejected the biographic character of the Gospels is that he considered ancient biographies later than Mark, because his basis for comparison was Lucian’s second-century Peregrinus and the still later Life of Apollonius and Alexander Romance.1 But Vielhauer’s basis for comparison was too limited. Partly biographic treatments of Greek sages, many now preserved only in fragments, predate the Gospels by a number of centuries,2 and surviving, full-scale biographies predate them by at least a century.
This chapter surveys some examples of ancient biography, noting some general patterns in their development. The period of the early empire, fortuitously for NT scholars, is both the period of the Gospels and also the “best-documented period”3 of ancient biography. From earlier times we have only fragments and titles,4 but as Momigliano notes, the major Greek or Roman biographers we typically envision, such as Plutarch, Suetonius, or Diogenes Laertius, “all belong to the Imperial Age.”5
3.1. Protobiography and Early Greek Biography
A number of generic predecessors with various degrees of biographic focus came before what we are apt to call full biographies. These works usually differ considerably, not least in the matter of interest in and commitment to historical accuracy, from biographies of the early imperial period. Although authors composed many monographs about kings in the Hellenistic period, only samples—mostly fragments and titles—remain.6 Because little from this period survives, comments are limited especially to the extant material, which differs considerably from most material from the early empire.
Possibly under Persian influence,7 as perhaps in the case of Nehemiah8 and Xenophon, Greeks developed a form of biographic writing in the fifth century BCE.9 The works of this period probably focused on mythical heroes, past notable poets whose works generated public interest, and outstanding contemporaries, some perhaps autobiographic in character.10 Such works are technically not biographies per se, but they did influence the development of biographies.11
The increased interest in great persons caused something prefiguring later biography to flourish more as a genre in fourth-century Greece.12 For the fourth century, the key surviving samples are the Euagoras and Agesilaus, “which describe themselves as encomia, and . . . a philosophical novel, Xenophon’s Cyropaedia”; from the third century we have little more than “a fragment of Satyrus’ life of Euripides.”13
Exemplified by the orator Isocrates, the fourth century generated the prose encomium, which valued praise of an individual above balanced, critical evaluation.14 It was thus like a eulogy, but in incipient biographic material of Isocrates’s Euagoras and Xenophon’s Agesilaus, it was of a contemporary figure.15 Encomiastic form, like that of a funeral oration, does not mean that all the contents must be fictitious, but one should certainly not expect a balanced or always truthful picture.16 Socrates’s followers, most notably Plato and Xenophon, experimented with what are often considered biographically interested treatments of Socrates, yet with only limited interest in historical precision.17 That is, most scholars contend that in this period the historical aspect of biography had not yet developed much beyond Isocrates.18
Isocrates’s Euagoras claims to recount truth, in contrast to the accounts of epic poetry,19 the point of which was not historical education. Isocrates’s stated purpose is, however, preserving forever the memory of Euagoras’s virtues and inviting others to imitate him.20 Euagoras’s virtues include such later “cardinal” virtues21 as “manly courage, wisdom and justice.”22 Isocrates narrates events such as his flight to Cilicia and his getting the throne,23 but Isocrates dwells on his character.24 Isocrates achieves this effect partly by comparing Euagoras with many other figures,25 a practice that becomes common in many ancient biographies.26
Isocrates recounts Euagoras’s virtues, but only his treatment of others’ reactions to his achievements is arranged chronologically;27 unlike later biographies, he does not narrate episodes.28 Isocrates also had written biographic sketches, notably about Alcibiades, but he viewed his Euagoras as “the first attempt at a prose encomium by a contemporary.”29 Nevertheless, even this work probably had predecessors.30
Because these early biographic works were so closely related to encomium, encomiastic motifs surface frequently in the genre’s later iterations.31 But historiography as well as encomium fed into these early biographies.32 In addition to his biographic experiments, Xenophon was one of the leading historical writers of his generation,33 although not at the level of Thucydides.34 Many histories had biographic sections,35 and Polybius, a historian, also wrote an encomium, albeit explicitly with much less balance than his historiography.36 Whereas historians focused on individuals primarily in relation to larger matters of the state, however, antiquarians wrote about a range of matters, including personal concerns such as those more prominent in biographies.37
Isocrates’s Euagoras and Xenophon’s Agesilaus and (still more) his Cyropaedia are not biographies in the fuller sense in which biographies appear in the imperial period.38 For the purpose of distinguishing them from the form as it developed in succeeding centuries, it might be more helpful to designate them, with some scholars, as “protobiographies.”39
Although Isocrates’s Euagoras is encomiastic prose rather than a full biography, it remains relevant to the discussion because of its influence on subsequent biographies.40
Isocrates’s biographic interest influenced some contemporary historians41 and served as a model for Xenophon’s Agesilaus soon afterward,42 although Xenophon had also shown earlier interest in individuals in his historical work.43 Xenophon’s various biographical experiments in turn became models for later biographies.44
Xenophon wants to honor and defend Agesilaus, as well as use him as a model for others to follow.45 Xenophon divided Agesilaus into (1) chronological treatment, as in Isocrates, but also (2) “a nonchronological, systematic review of Agesilaus’ virtues.”46 He arranged these virtues in a traditional way also followed by other contemporaries.47 But Xenophon, whose other works demonstrate clearly his (often accurate)48 historical predilections,49 holds greater interest in Agesilaus’s deeds than did Isocrates in those of Euagoras.50
Xenophon wrote more encomiastically about Agesilaus in his work of that name than he did in his Hellenica, which included Agesilaus but focused on public events rather than Agesilaus’s character.51 But in Xenophon’s first section on Agesilaus, where he treats his actions chronologically before turning to his virtues, there is considerable overlap with what Xenophon treats earlier in his Hellenica.52 The overlap shows Xenophon’s strong historical interests; the divergences largely emphasize his greater concern for making Agesilaus look good.53
Xenophon also appeals directly to wide public knowledge available in his day; he avoids naming most individual witnesses not because they are too few but because they are too many.54 Encomiastic though the protobiography may be, it reflects Xenophon’s direct acquaintance with Agesilaus and thus significant historical information, more than is found in Isocrates’s Euagoras.55
Besides his greater encomiastic focus, Xenophon’s protobiography differs from most later biographies in some other respects. He quotes Agesilaus less often than one would expect from later biographies.56 Despite Agesilaus’s allegedly divine, Heraclid lineage, Xenophon also shows no interest in his birth or childhood.57
How does it compare historiographically? Resources for concrete evaluation are somewhat limited. The vast majority of Xenophon’s material about Agesilaus is singly attested and can neither be verified nor dismissed a priori. The evidence, however, is compelling that he knew Agesilaus personally, which both strengthens and weakens his depiction: Xenophon knew much about Agesilaus, but he also was strongly partisan in his favor and probably dependent on his benefactions. Many others in antiquity (particularly Agesilaus’s political enemies) construed Agesilaus’s actions less favorably.
While perspectives do not require the fabrication of information, Xenophon’s encomiastic approach probably did distort information at times. Comparing Xenophon’s epideictic (i.e., encomiastic, praise-oriented) Agesilaus with his more sober Hellenica (as well as some other early sources such as the Hellenica Oxyrhynchia)58 suggests that Xenophon’s protobiography significantly changes some accounts about Agesilaus.
At the same time, the comparison shows that more often, where we can test him, the biography agrees on events with other extant sources.59 Such protobiography was encomiastic, but its reports of events appear to be based on actual happenings more often than not. This does not mean that he does not invent material to supply narrative transitions where needed, for example, the path taken to a battle; the battle, however, appears to reflect authentic information about an event.60
3.1c. Xenophon’s “Memoirs” about Socrates
Xenophon, too creative a writer to be limited by artificial genre boundaries, experimented with a range of person-centered forms, from an early novel about a historical person (the Cyropaedia) to a protobiography (the Agesilaus, a biographic encomium) to something in between (his apologetic Apomnemoneumata,61 today usually called Memorabilia, about Socrates).62 Here Xenophon writes apologetically, defending Socrates’s character against posthumous criticisms.63 This approach does not invite a chronological structure.64
Xenophon recognized that traditional history did not recount noteworthy sayings,65 in contrast to a more focused work on a person. This is not to say that no one collected sayings of sages before; these were apparently circulating already in the previous century,66 and aphorisms are more often preserved in oral traditions than are other forms.67 (Aphorisms or maxims are short, succinct statements that are easily recalled, such as, “Whoever is not against us is for us,” Mark 9:40.68 These appear in some form in most cultures.)69
Xenophon’s Memorabilia probably recalls some noteworthy sayings of and surely themes and teachings of Socrates,70 and sometimes his style.71 Dialogue also was, as Plato and Xenophon together recognize, inherent in Socrates’s pedagogy. Nevertheless, Xenophon’s and the early Plato’s depiction of Socrates’s dialogues is a more apt portrayal of his pedagogic style than of any detailed content of actual specific conversations.72
The characters and probably even many occasions of dialogues were authentic, but we no more dare take them as a transcript of actual conversations73 than we do the poetic account of Job and his comforters (Job 3–41). Dialogues continued to be an accepted, transparently fictional literary form for conveying an author’s ideas.74 Ancient critics could thus recognize that Plato’s reports of Socrates’s speeches were fictitious.75 Later writers collecting biographic material about Socrates likewise felt freer to draw on Xenophon’s or Plato’s general information about Socrates than on their dialogical content.76
In 1915 Clyde Votaw observed that “Plato and Xenophon give us a portrait rather than a photograph of Socrates,” shaping him to fit “their didactic and apologetic purpose.” But once we take into account “the nature of their compositions, we can with considerable success extricate the biographical data, and so come to know the real Socrates.”77 Even though Votaw’s confidence in historical reconstruction appears exaggerated (a feature more characteristic of his era than of ours), he rightly recognized that Xenophon drew on genuine information about Socrates.
3.1d. Aristotelians and Aristoxenus
Xenophon was not the only Socratic with biographic interests. Plato’s former pupil Aristotle used many biographic anecdotes,78 and his followers found anecdotes useful for illustrating vices and virtues.79 This sort of historical exploration of individuals offered a more inductive approach to virtues than mere extrapolation from accepted norms.80 Anecdotes would soon become a major feature of the biographic genre.
Although various Aristotelians displayed biographic interest,81 scholars usually attribute the first actual Aristotelian (Peripatetic) biographies to Aristoxenus.82 Despite Aristoxenus’s Peripatetic associations, however, he was one-sided in his criticism of Socrates and praise of Pythagoras, omitting elements that did not fit his portrait.83 Aristoxenus may have initiated the Hellenistic period of biographic depiction, with its mixture of “erudition, scholarly zeal, realism of details, and gossip”;84 the primary interest in this period seems to have been to entertain and satisfy curiosity.85
Only in the Hellenistic era did biographic writing achieve the title of bios, or “life.”86 Greek biographic literature in this period often speculated about the lives of poets, often making inferences from their poems.87 Other biographic literature focused on sages.88 Some scholars go too far, however, acknowledging only such intellectual biographies and denying that political biography existed in this period.89 Later citations belie that claim, at least if we define biography broadly; the early Alexander histories, drawn on by extant writers in the imperial period, blended elements of historical monograph, encomium, and biography.90 Biographies of public figures, for whom biographers had access to more information than they did for lives of poets, display stronger historical interests.91
Little biographic material is extant from the second century BCE.92 One fragmentary piece is Satyrus’s life of Euripides. The later writer Athenaeus associates Satyrus with the Peripatetic school, noted above; his biography of Euripides fits observations about lives of the poets already offered.93
Nevertheless, later surviving sources suggest that Antigonus of Carystus’s Lives of Philosophers established a new standard for accuracy in depicting the philosophers of his era.94 Providing biographic introductions for authors’ works, Alexandrian scholars in this period delineated, without respect to chronology beyond the subject’s birth and death, the subject’s works, lifestyle, students, and friends.95
3.2. Nearly Nepotism: Cornelius Nepos
Not all the earlier biographic materials shared the same historiographic commitments, but such commitments clearly dominated by the era of the Gospels.
Extant biographies in the fullest sense begin with Cornelius Nepos (ca. 100–ca. 24 BCE), who wrote in the final generation of the Roman Republic.96 Before this period, remains are too fragmentary to try to classify them or reconstruct the usual contours of the genre.97 With Nepos, however, begins the flowering of ancient biography,98 at least with regard to extant treatment of public figures.99 At least one of his biographies was of a person then living, probably one of the first of its kind in his era.100
Varro’s biographic work (including his autobiography) significantly influenced Nepos,101 who had already worked in various relevant genres.102 Late in his career, Nepos began writing lives of Roman and foreign generals,103 in the process paving the way for later comparisons of Greek and Roman figures such as those best known in Plutarch.104 His approach varies from one biography to another; sometimes his arrangement is more topical, whereas at other times it is more chronological.105
Of the minority of surviving biographies by Nepos, “some are openly laudatory, a few vituperative, the rest more historically balanced.”106 Nepos does make historical errors in his biographies, but these are most evident in the sources most distant from his sphere of cultural and historical knowledge. Tomas Hägg observes that Nepos “has been singularly unlucky regarding what happened to survive of his main work: among the famous men he chose to depict, the non-Roman military commanders were no doubt the figures farthest from his competence.” He lacks the context “necessary to assess and recreate their historical particularity,” and he was less “versed in Greek culture, or fluent in Greek.”107 By contrast, his work on Atticus is strong,108 fitting our expectations for a subject closer to the author’s own period.109
Like his predecessors, Nepos treated a subject’s manner of life as appropriate to biography in a way that it was not appropriate to historiography more generally.110 Nevertheless, his works provide a standard of accuracy missing in what we know of Hellenistic biography.111 Nepos was sometimes careless,112 but he offers our first extant examples of full biographies, and like the biographers who follow in the imperial era, he was clearly interested in using historical information.113 The historical interest in biographies has reached the range found in the early empire, while also assuming the basic three-part treatment of lives that differed from the continous flow in standard historical works.114
Biography served a useful public purpose by offering moral examples, yet it differed from nonhistorical genres by using historical information to do so. Nepos exemplifies both historical and encomiastic interests, as in the Gospels.115
Some have argued that in the first century BCE some historical writers stopped emphasizing utility as their purpose and emphasized instead that they simply would write a “true account of something.”116 Given our relatively few extant sources, however, it seems premature to play these purposes off against one another; in the second century CE, Lucian embraces both functions.117 It is true, however, that historiography now emphasized greater attention to historical truth.
3.3. Biographies in the Empire
By the period of the empire “a new atmosphere” prevails.118 Imperial-era biographies retain interest in gossip and irrelevant detail, but like the biographies of Nepos, most of them depend fairly heavily on prior information.
Nicolaus of Damascus wrote in Greek in the same part of the empire in which Jesus’s movement later started.119 His historical work comprised 144 books, nearly all now lost,120 but it does reveal his strong interest in the remembered past. His fragmentary bios of Augustus is more encomiastic than some other early imperial biographies, harking back to Hellenistic models.121 Nevertheless, Nicolaus occasionally reports his hero’s early weaknesses, though trying to interpret them positively,122 and is probably interpreting material from Augustus’s own autobiography.123 Some biographies of Nero that have not survived stem from roughly the same time as Mark’s Gospel, though Josephus complains about their bias.124 Other biographies from this period remain, however, biographies that we can evaluate more directly and fully.
Before the Gospels, the widely known125 Jewish author Philo composed some works that exploit Greco-Roman biographic conventions. Some regard Philo’s Flaccus and Embassy to Gaius as something like detailed biographies of figures in recent memory.126 Although he is particularly adept at writing philosophic treatises, Philo can follow the conventions of biographic and historical genres when he uses them.127
Some of Philo’s Pentateuchal “lives”128 do not conform as well to mainstream Greco-Roman expectations for bioi.129 Granted, his purpose there is partly encomiastic, to praise the honorable ancestors, and partly to make them models for imitation.130 But most of Philo’s essays on biblical personalities, though reflecting some Greek biographic influence, are more philosophic.131 In these cases, his philosophic penchant for allegorizing Pentateuchal narratives somewhat limits the analogy for mainstream biographies.132
More relevant in terms of genre is his Life of Moses, clearly called a “life,”133 and with fewer allegorical features than many of his other works.134 Although Philo is influenced by elite Hellenistic philosophy far more than are any of our Gospels, he offers a specifically Jewish biography that is not (unlike Josephus’s Life) an autobiography. Philo’s Life of Moses has generated considerable attention.135
Like Xenophon and some others, Philo combines both chronological and topical arrangements concerning his subject.136 In book 1, Philo follows Moses’s story from the accounts in Exodus 1:1–17:15 and then Numbers 13, 20–25, 31–32, with rare topical digressions.137 In book 2, Philo’s treatment is primarily topical, except for Moses’s death;138 Philo includes much more allegory here (e.g., on details of the tabernacle) than in book 1, which follows the more common Greco-Roman biographic tradition.139 Even in the more chronological section, he sometimes displaces material chronologically.140
Like the Gospels, Philo certainly shapes his material to communicate his message, for example, presenting Moses as a philosopher-king141 and a military leader,142 or contrasting Moses and Balaam.143 Especially in his topical section, Philo presents Moses as a philosopher-king and corrects outsiders’ misunderstanding of Moses as divine.144
Philo’s Life of Moses, which we can compare with his OT source, follows the same literary techniques observed in Plutarch and the Gospels (see ch. 11). He follows quite closely the outline of the text. A majority of his expositional changes can be explained as inferences.145 He omits episodes and abridges,146 expands narratives with explanatory, apologetic, or dramatic details,147 and occasionally expands them allegorically—though very rarely in contrast to his expository, nonbiographic works.148 Often he follows the biblical narrative closely,149 and his expansions generally do not change “the essence of the” biblical picture.150
He selects and omits elements according to what suits his purposes.151 Not unlike traditional Jewish haggadic expansions, though here not to the same degree, Philo enhances his image of Moses by elaborations.152 Consciously or not, he might also read his own background into Moses’s life.153 Philo sometimes downplays other characters in order to highlight Moses’s role more fully.154 Some of Philo’s adaptations of biblical narrative, however, such as Moses’s education,155 may also adapt prior traditions.156 Thus scholars find both distinctive features and overlap with other early Jewish retellings.157
Philo thus tells the story in his own way but depends heavily on his sources for the material.
3.3b. Josephus’s Historiography
Like Philo, Josephus is of special interest as a Jewish author writing for the Diaspora. Later in the first century than Philo, Josephus writes historiography, apologetic, and an autobiography, his Life. Although Josephus may be a freer historian than many,158 his historiography provides our main source for postexilic Jewish history.159 Like other historians whose writings we possess, Josephus affirms his intention to write truth, in contrast to those historians he thinks are unconcerned for it.160 This claim recalls the standard that historians demanded but does not resolve the extent to which Josephus fulfills it.161
How does Josephus usually fare in his reports of the postbiblical period? Scholars on Josephus range from skepticism to appreciation, generally depending on the aspects of his historiography on which they focus their attention. On a number of points he fails to impress, for example, in his speeches,162 a point at which ancient historiographic convention diverges significantly from modern practice.163
Most historians today also argue that Josephus’s population estimates are unreliable and that he is sometimes mistaken on distances.164 Since it is unlikely that Josephus personally counted people or measured distances, such matters need not otherwise affect the substance of what he reports about events. Josephus occasionally makes mistakes on even his most public information,165 but this appears to be the exception rather than the rule.166 He is probably more accurate about specific events than in his summaries; he does not fabricate events, but he elaborates them and puts his slant on them. Indeed, his overarching summaries sometimes conflict with the information he himself reports.167
Josephus’s biases are difficult to miss. Even many of his adaptations of biblical accounts emphasize points pleasing to his Roman sponsors and Gentile audience.168 Some of his work favors Pharisees, a group to which he had allegedly belonged.169 His apologetic Tendenz conspicuously dominates his history and autobiography;170 he may also exaggerate Jewish privileges in the empire (albeit based on genuine precedents) to further his apologetic on their behalf; and he presented Jewish sects in terms of Greek philosophic ideals.171
He defends both Rome to his people and his people to Rome.172 He presents the Judean-Roman war as virtually an accident in which incompetent governors and a few Jewish “bandits” forced Judea into unwilling conflict with Rome;173 J. D. Crossan wryly but insightfully remarks of Josephus’s War, “Nobody from the highest aristocracy on either side is guilty of anything.”174 (Josephus’s own perspective, of course, is that of an aristocrat, favoring Jewish aristocrats.)175
Josephus’s biases do not, however, usually significantly hamper our use of his work for historical reconstruction. As one historian notes: “These biases are to be expected” and are usually easy enough to recognize; “with proper allowance made for his special interests and recognition that he was sometimes misinformed, the reader will find Josephus on the whole reliable.”176
If we leave aside examples of bias (including in summaries), speeches, and difficult estimates, however, Josephus proves generally accurate on matters of historical events. This probably suggests that most nonspeech events in his narrative reflect information that he believes to be correct. Inscriptions sometimes confirm his accuracy on disputed Judean details, sometimes against other historians.177 Archaeology allows us to test him regarding physical data; although it challenges some of his claims,178 it has vindicated him on many points of even minor detail where his accuracy could not be accidental.179
Apart from distance estimates, Josephus proves generally reliable on geographic matters,180 and archaeology confirms most of his observations about Jerusalem, which he knew well: here, despite some errors, he is often accurate in even some precise measurements.181 With some exceptions, excavations confirm his descriptions of Caesarea.182 Israeli archaeologist Yigael Yadin concluded that, despite Josephus’s prejudices, excavations confirm him for both his own period and previous ones.183
Despite reservations, therefore, scholars normally accept Josephus’s main outline of events as accurate.184 As Mosley points out,185 he not only claims accuracy186 (itself no guarantee of it), but he presented copies to Vespasian, Titus, Herod of Chalchis, and Agrippa—so he dared not have seriously misrepresented the events also known to them.187 While Josephus was not striving for modern standards of historical accuracy, E. P. Sanders concludes that “wherever he can be tested, he can be seen to have been a pretty fair historian.”188
3.3c. Josephus’s Autobiography
Although Josephus’s historiography is generally relevant to the matter at hand, our primary interest here is his autobiography. Although some have tried to strictly distinguish autobiography from other sorts of biographic writing,189 it was indeed a type of biography, certainly by this period.190 Autobiographic writing appears in some form even as early as Pharaonic Egypt.191 It developed further from journals and other personal memoirs,192 such as Xenophon’s eyewitness experience in the Anabasis.193
Autobiographic writing is known in the first century BCE, with one autobiography even by Emperor Augustus.194 More than a century after Augustus’s autobiography, Hadrian also produced autobiographic material, albeit pseudepigraphically and perhaps playfully attributed to some of his freedmen.195 Nevertheless, scholars often identify Josephus’s late first-century Life as the first surviving work that is a full autobiography.196
Rather than expounding evenly all of Josephus’s life journey, his Life focuses on the crucial period of his involvement in the Judean-Roman war,197 a period in his life that had drawn fire from his critics. Its clear connection with the Jewish Antiquities communicates the expectation that its texture will be historiographic, illustrating the compatibility of biography and history.198
How accurate was autobiography? It was considered sufficiently accurate to provide an acceptable source for subsequent biographies.199 Because of cultural disdain for unjustifiable boasting,200 autobiography was less free to be directly encomiastic than were biographies of other persons.201 As we shall see, however, Josephus’s autobiography takes liberties, though these may be akin to the liberties in his other historical work.
Comparisons with Josephus’s accounts in his Antiquities, a historical work, show some significant differences.202 Perhaps most significantly, Josephus must now address Justus,203 whom he previously ignored, because Justus had now composed his own account of the events.204 A later writer familiar with both authors prefers Josephus’s account to Justus’s,205 but in Josephus’s day Justus offered serious potential competition. As Josephus also wrote an apologetic history of the Jewish people (the Antiquities), Justus reportedly wrote a record of Jewish rulers from Moses to Agrippa II.206 More important, Justus worked for Agrippa and so was ready to challenge Josephus’s inconsistencies and especially any apparent criticisms of Agrippa.207 Josephus has to defend his reputation in Rome “as the literary spokeman of his people” and as loyal to the honored Agrippa.208
Still, Josephus is at least a firsthand source for what he claims. He condemns those who wrote about events without any firsthand knowledge, contrasting them with his own knowledge of the Judean-Roman war.209 Not only was he an eyewitness of much that he claims,210 he claims to have even taken notes,211 receiving reports also from deserters from Jerusalem.212
Josephus’s autobiography thus constitutes a useful source, when approached critically. But beyond testing with archaeological sources, we can test Josephus’s redaction of his material by comparing his treatment of the LXX (in his Antiquities) and his elaboration of the same events in different works. Josephus makes all the sorts of adaptations noted in chapter 11.213 Beyond speeches, however, he normally “does not create events or incidents, either out of his head or by midrashic exposition.”214 In this respect he resembles Plutarch,215 addressed below.
While we see that Josephus tells essentially the same story as his source material, he also takes literary freedoms that modern academic biographers would not allow, but with which ancient audiences were apparently more comfortable. The greatest differences far exceed the typical differences between John and the Synoptics. See the discussion in chapter 10.
Tacitus is a highly respected historian of the early empire.216 Like other historians of his era, he believed that history provided many illustrations relevant for moral instruction,217 yet he insisted that historical writing be based on accurate information.218
Ancient genres were flexible, and Tacitus’s Agricola mixes genres by bringing his other strengths to bear. Although Publius Cornelius Tacitus (58–120 CE) writes primarily in honor of his deceased father-in-law, Gnaeus Julius Agricola (40–93 CE), he also weaves in a massive amount of material related to the other genres in which he worked elsewhere: ethnography (such as his Germania) and historical content (such as his Histories and Annals).219 Given the long tradition of geographic excurses in biographies (and histories), however, and the overlap between history and biography (see ch. 6), we may still read the Agricola as significantly biographic.
Tacitus naturally respected his father-in-law, so encomiastic elements are not surprising.220 Such praise does not mean that he resorts to inventing fictitious episodes. Without distorting his historical core, Tacitus employs stock epideictic stereotypes to expand the account; archaeology confirms many of his reports.221
Plutarch (45–50 to 120–125 CE) wrote in Greek roughly one and a half centuries after Nepos’s Latin biographies, and he wrote at a much more sophisticated literary level.222 Plutarch writes mostly about public figures; even some of the intellectual figures about whom he wrote, such as the orator Demosthenes or Dion, a disciple of Plato,223 were also public leaders. Many of his reportedly 227 works have survived, including more than forty lives attributed to him.224 His biographies include a collection of twenty-four parallel Greek and Roman lives; biographies of Caesars, of which only those of Galba and Otho have survived; and biographies about other persons of interest, including some poets, heroes, leaders, and a philosopher.225
Like Nepos’s earlier biographies, those of Plutarch draw on historical sources that he believed to be historical, in contrast to some traditional biographies of poets.226 He probably had available some of Nepos’s own sources for his Roman biographies and may have followed Nepos’s model for comparing Greek and Roman lives, but his Greek lives reflect fuller information.227 Despite the frequent adaptations I will note in chapter. 11,228 so far as we can tell, Plutarch normally avoided inventing stories or falsifying matters he considered historically important, even when gaps in his information, such as in subjects’ childhood, seemed to invite this practice.229
Despite chronological displacements and often random arrangement of anecdotes, Plutarch follows a more chronological organization than a topical one.230 (His chronology is a narrative one, not necessarily corresponding to the sequence in which events happened, but it appears more historiographic-like.)231 As the apex of Greco-Roman historical biography (by modern literary and historiographic standards), Plutarch’s works will prove important in the chapters that follow.
3.3f. Suetonius’s Lives of the Caesars
As Matthew and Luke developed Mark, Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus (ca. 69 CE to ca. 130–140 CE) may have developed the models of his older contemporaries Tacitus and Plutarch.232 Suetonius began the Lives of the Caesars early in Hadrian’s reign (117–138 CE).
Suetonius had much more material available for writing about the earlier emperors. He wrote more concisely on emperors for whom he had less information,233 and considerably less in his separate works on poets and others for whom his sources were most slender. Although imperial biography was inseparable from the history of the period, Suetonius’s lives value anecdotes or gossip about the emperors’ private lives that would have been much more out of place in ordinary histories.234 But while Suetonius includes much gossip,235 he does not always agree with it.236 One study used inscriptions to test many of Suetonius’s claims, showing that such evidence usually supports and sometimes explains what Suetonius wrote.237
Still, as Adela Yarbro Collins notes, Suetonius’s approach to “collecting, ordering, and presenting material is that of the learned grammarian and antiquarian,” but “he moved beyond the scholarly type [of biographic writing] into the historical type.”238 In comparison with many historians and biographers, Suetonius is less committed to filling out a consistent portrait but demonstrates a greater degree of objectivity than in some other biographies.239 Like Plutarch, Suetonius will appear prominently in subsequent chapters, especially chapter 10.
Although Pilate executed Jesus as a public, political figure, Jesus was certainly also a sage. Thus Lucian’s Demonax, one of the few surviving biographies of a sage from the early empire,240 merits some extended comment here. Some consider Lucian’s critiques of Alexander and Peregrinus and his dialogues of Nigrinus biographic in the larger sense,241 but we can be much more certain that Lucian intended Demonax as a life.242
Lucian writes both to honor Demonax’s memory and to provide a contemporary model for imitation.243 In this case, Lucian (120–after 180 CE) has little reason to depend on secondary sources. He writes about a recent figure, with whom, he claims, he personally spent a significant amount of time, apparently as a disciple.244 Lucian, like Xenophon in the Agesilaus, personally knows his subject.245 Like Jesus, however, Demonax made much less of an impression on other contemporary sources not authored by his followers.246
Following a now-familiar biographic pattern, Lucian includes separate sections for encomium and anecdotes. Just as Xenophon’s Agesilaus praised the king’s achievements in a general way before providing anecdotes illustrating his virtues, so Lucian offers both.247 First he eulogizes Demonax in 3–11, employing familiar biographic topics, before turning to anecdotes about him in 12–62 and then finally a eulogizing treatment of his death and burial in 63–67.248 The many brief anecdotes in the long anecdote section seem to reflect no particular sequence, and Lucian uses them not to provide a comprehensive survey of the philosopher’s career but rather to illustrate his character.249 The emphasis on anecdotal scenes and the minor importance of chronology in the middle section resemble the Gospels.250
Whereas biographies of rulers and generals stress their deeds in those arenas, Lucian’s anecdotes about his philosophic mentor stress his quick and often insulting wit.251 In contrast to Jesus’s detractors, however, more of Demonax’s hearers seem to have taken his jibes in good humor;252 Demonax sometimes did not take himself too seriously either.253 Like any playful and familiar public figure, over time he became well-loved.254 Lucian, for whom such quick wit epitomized rhetorical and literary skill, naturally highlighted this aspect of Demonax’s memory more than did others,255 though Lucian’s own wit tends to be more biting than playful.
Philosophically eclectic,256 Demonax resembled the engaging Socrates in some ways257 and the frank Diogenes the Cynic in others.258 As with most ancient biographies,259 the character is flat and consistent rather than complex,260 though Lucian’s anecdotes paint a lively personality.261
3.3h. Philostratus’s Lives of the Sophists
Although I addressed Philostratus’s novelistic, literary biography of Apollonius in the previous chapter, Philostratus, like Xenophon, who wrote about Agesilaus as well as Cyrus, was capable of writing more historically oriented biographic material as well. Like the later biographer Eunapius, Philostratus (ca. 170–172 to 247–250 CE) collected lives of oratorical teachers in his Lives of the Sophists.
Not unlike Suetonius, Philostratus is ready to include significant “gossip and scandal.”262 Unlike the later Diogenes Laertius, Philostratus cites sources fairly rarely, apparently depending most often on his own reminiscences of what he heard from his teachers.263 Although most individual lives are short, they seem much better informed than Hellenistic lives of the poets.
3.3i. Diogenes Laertius’s Lives of the Eminent Philosophers
Although fragments, including those in Diogenes Laertius, demonstrate that Greeks had been writing lives of sages for centuries, it is Diogenes Laertius whose (probably) early third-century compendium survives as a whole.264 Diogenes probably overlaps with Philostratus chronologically,265 and these works highlight third-century interest in intellectual biography,266 as well as the increasing prominence of philosophers in the intellectual milieu. Relevant for comparison with the Gospels, Diogenes incorporates sages’ teachings as well as their lives.267
Diogenes Laertius’s collection includes ten books, each organized by a founder of a philosophic school, then his life, teachings, works, successors, and so forth.268 Anecdotes dominate Diogenes’s work;269 both these anecdotes and sayings seem to be arranged almost randomly.270 Perhaps because he treats many figures briefly, his lives, like many earlier lives of poets, lack the three-part structure characteristic of Nepos, Plutarch, and the Gospels.271 This might be partly because these earlier full biographies focus on public figures more than private teachers,272 although some of Diogenes’s biographees were well-known publicly. Certainly one could write fuller biographies of sages; sages could be well-known publicly, and Lucian’s Demonax shows a three-part structure.273 Although Diogenes’s sources, often from centuries after their subjects, vary greatly in their reliability, Diogenes’s work is far more antiquarian or historical than novelistic, as conspicuously demonstrated by how tightly he is bound to the work of his predecessors. I address Diogenes Laertius somewhat further in chapter 4, with reference to biographies of sages.
3.4. Later Biographies and Hagiography
The Historia Augusta, probably from the late fourth to early fifth centuries, again differs from the acme of historical biography encountered in the early empire. It contains thirty lives (occasionally grouping some emperors together in a life), and most scholars today (as opposed to the past) attribute it to a single author.274 Comparison with other evidence shows that the author takes a very free hand with historical information, incorporating far more deliberate fiction than we find in biographers from the early empire.275 The fictive elements in the Historia Augusta were probably meant to be recognized as such.276
The most notable development of biography in late antiquity, however, was its embrace of hagiography. Rooted in the element of encomium that had always remained part of ancient biography, such sacred idealization of the subject became a major force. After Constantine, therefore, biography changed significantly. “Pagan philosophers and sophists and Christian saints and martyrs,” Momigliano notes, became “the main subjects of late Roman biography.”277 Whereas Christian martyr stories traditionally followed the Gospels’ model of a suffering hero, by the fourth century CE emphasis shifted to the moral triumphs of the saints, more like civic biographies.278 Eventually, Burridge notes, “philosophical biography seems to have given way to hagiography.”279
Hagiography conflates the character concern of biography with the fictional and plot concerns of novel280 to a degree possibly found in Xenophon’s Cyropaedia but missing in our representatives of biographies of public figures in the early empire. A novelistic plot line in this sense281 contrasts with biographies’ emphasis on anecdotes, still found in other works of this period282 (although medieval hagiography can include some of both).283 It would be rash to assert, given the limited evidence, that no similar works intervened between Xenophon and late antiquity, but clearly what was once a marginal characteristic came to flourish as a dominant one in late antiquity.
Even in late antiquity, however, not all biographies were hagiographic. Patricia Cox, an expert on late antique, hagiographic biography, regards such works as largely imaginative caricatures of their subjects, involving “exaggerating, typifying, stylizing, idealizing, and so on,” expressing the “play between fact and fantasy.”284 Such biographies often evoke earlier figures,285 a feature that had long been part of history and biography. She includes in this category lives by Philostratus (regarding the Life of Apollonius), Porphyry, Eusebius, and Iamblichus.286
Moreover, as philosophers in late antiquity increasingly came to be depicted as holy men reflecting the divine,287 their biographies naturally moved to accommodate such notions.288 (Cox distinguishes here between biographies that depicted philosophers as divinities or offspring of divinities on the one hand and, on the other, those that were merely godlike.)289 This new tendency of biography to emphasize thinkers’ holiness or nearness to the divine reflects “the heated religious conflicts between pagans and Christians in the third and fourth centuries.”290 Moreover, although the line between human and divine had always been somewhat thin for Greeks,291 the increasing dominance of Platonism naturally exacerbated this tendency.292 Although miracles were still not characteristic of late antique biography in the way that they became in later periods,293 miracles begin to appear in some late antique pagan biographies to counter the frequency of miracles in Christian biographies.294
Others, however, have criticized aspects of Cox’s approach.295 In particular, John Dillon, an expert in Neoplatonism, deems her book as “rather annoying” and as following broader critical tendencies in modern literary philosophy rather than careful analysis of the texts. In his view, she blurs too much the distinction between bios and hagiography. Far from creating merely idealized figures, historical biographies continue to exist alongside hagiography and mixtures of the two. Eusebius’s Life of Origen and Porphyry’s Life of Plotinus are intended as more conventional biography, whereas Philostratus’s Life of Apollonius, the lives of Pythagoras, and Athanasius’s Anthony are more hagiographic.296
Eunapius insists on distinguishing “between securely-attested fact and piety-driven rumour,” even if we believe that he sometimes gets particular stories in the wrong category.297 Eusebius likewise distinguishes between documents, such as Origen’s letters, and oral reports from those who knew Origen.298 Although revering Plotinus, Porphyry is “yet simply concerned to give as much accurate information about him as he can, in an effort to throw light on his character.”299 He does not invent early-life incidents that he has not heard and is particularly trustworthy for Plotinus’s later life, with which he was personally acquainted. He includes faults as well as strengths.300
By contrast, Dillon acknowledges that Marinus’s work on Proclus is essentially hagiographic, though including factual information. Likewise, most lives of the saints, such as Antony, are hagiographic. Damascius’s Life of Isidore is encomiastic biography rather than hagiography, although it tends in the direction of the latter.301 Ultimately, then, Dillon argues that a range of works exists in late antiquity, and he faults Cox not for affirming that hagiography was growing in this later period, but only for lack of nuance.
Some have linked the Gospels with such later lives of holy men,302 but this comparison risks significant anachronism. Certainly Jewish biographies, such as Philo’s Life of Moses, include the religious element much earlier, no less for the life of a sage-king,303 with whose story the Gospels may thus be compared. Later sources draw, as we have seen, on the earlier Gospels, on civic biographies, on encomium, and on themes popular in novels.
Because the Lives of the Prophets is Jewish, it may prove relevant in many respects for study of the Gospels, but probably not so much in genre: the form is completely different. This Lives probably originated in Greek and evolved as a collection over time.304 The work’s different recensions might even suggest that it was collected more than once, when stories were in different stages of development.305
Some date the oldest recensions of the Lives of the Prophets to the first century, allowing them to stand as Jewish, possibly even Jerusalemite, examples of biography from the period of Philo’s Life of Moses.306 Unfortunately, this dating is probably too early. Robert A. Kraft, early Judaism expert and Berg Professor of Religious Studies Emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania, cautions that their current form may be from the Byzantine period, possibly in the fifth or sixth century.307 This work shares aspects of the character of hagiography from this period.308 Reconstructing its earliest phases thus becomes difficult.
Granted, the Lives of the Prophets may attest to the format followed in many earlier lives of the poets having persisted or having been revived, or at least at some point also being employed in a Jewish context. It not only appears similar in format to lives of poets,309 but it also appears to have often grown in an analogous manner, collecting various traditions and making midrashic inferences about the lives of the prophets from their writings.
Despite the subject matter, however, the format of the Lives is much less comparable to the Gospels than what we find in early imperial biographies of public figures. Following the paragraph formatting in the standard English translation of the Pseudepigrapha, edited by James H. Charlesworth, one life (Ezekiel) is five paragraphs, and another (Daniel) is four; the one on Jeremiah is three. Most, however, are two paragraphs or one,310 sometimes quite short, even as few as just two or three sentences.311
3.6. Other Early Jewish Sources for the Biographic Form?
Earlier Jewish biographic material probably contributes to the Gospels more in terms of character models than in literary form. Various cycles of OT stories focus on particular figures,312 some of them (such as the Moses313 or Elijah/Elisha314 narratives) very influential in the content of the Gospels. Nothing in earlier Jewish tradition opposed biographic interest, but little before Nehemiah would count as freestanding biography (i.e., it is otherwise embedded in larger works), and the conventional three-part biography of public figures rarely appears before the Roman period.
Such embedded biographic material continues in early Jewish historiography, including Ps.-Philo’s Biblical Antiquities315 and, closer to the Hellenistic biographic genre, Josephus.316 Already in the Hellenistic period, Artapanus arranged biographically his history of the Jewish people, focusing first on the Jews as a whole, then Abraham, and especially on Moses. Still, Jewish haggadic expansions of Pentateuchal characters317 are not close;318 they sometimes resemble mythography because they treat the distant past.319
Although extant first-century Gospels reflect abundant Judean/Galilean material, they cannot be compared as easily with non-Hellenistic ancient Jewish biographies, since there are not very many.320 It is well-known that later rabbis lacked interest in composing biographies.321 In form, rabbinic anecdotes parallel the Gospels (as they do many Greek sage biographies),322 but rabbinic literature lacks any overall genre analogous to biography,323 because their interest, unlike that of the Evangelists, was in the Torah rather than in specific teachers.324
Closer and more accessible to Gospel readers are the biblical stories of Ruth, Judith, Jonah, Esther, Daniel, and Tobit, particularly accessible in the LXX. At least some of these accounts were perceived as true accounts in this period, apparently including by some or all of the Evangelists.325 Yet even here, events rather than the public lives of leading characters often dominate.326 Except for Daniel, these works also are unified narratives, missing the apparent compilations of prior anecdotes that appear in most early imperial biographies, including the Gospels. Although not a compilation of anecdotes, Nehemiah offers a better example, as an autobiographic work that may involve the same literary stream that also came to influence Greek biographies.
The Gospel writers certainly did draw on the biographic content of biblical history (with which they were more likely familiar than individual Greek biographies); they probably also viewed some of these as containing substantial biographic material.327 The most conventionally Jewish of the Gospels, namely Matthew and John, may have also incorporated some midrashic techniques, at least to a minor degree.328 Like other Jews, the earliest Christians understood the OT as historically factual,329 though they would presumably allow themselves some of the same narrative flexibility they found in the OT itself.330
Surely the OT and the experience of Jesus offer the primary theological backdrop for the Gospels,331 but this observation does not negate the Evangelists’ use of a contemporary genre where the life or public life of an individual dominates a cohesive narrative. The Gospels exhibit a specifically Jewish and largely Judean-Galilean content, but as in the case of Philo’s Life of Moses or most of Josephus’s work, the form is a primarily Diaspora form as it was previously developed in the Greek and Roman world.332 We might thus speak of OT historiography continued in contemporary form, a form that other Diaspora Jewish writers had already developed.
Nevertheless, Diaspora Jewish audiences in the first century—our closest available analogy for most of the circles that first received the Gospels—expected some biographic conventions inherited from the Greek world even in their own stories. And if this is so, one should not expect fewer biographic conventions from biographic works for Diaspora Christian audiences (with mixed Jewish and Gentile memberships) in the same period.
Scholars often argue that biographic treatments in Josephus’s Jewish history, where he retains but adapts stories in ways more intelligible and amenable to a Hellenistic audience,333 reflect Greek literary, often biographic, conventions.334 Other Hellenistic Jewish historians probably used these conventions as well.335
Josephus and Philo wrote for more elite and very different sorts of audiences than any of our first Gospels; we may learn relevant points from their adaptations, while recognizing that the Gospel writers, especially Mark, probably wrote from their own monotheistic, biblical matrix with less self-conscious appeal than Philo or Josephus to audiences different from themselves.
Tracing examples of Greek and Roman biography chronologically reveals the development in their historiographic sensitivity. Expectations for reliable historical content seem to have been highest in roughly the period from the first century BCE to the early third century CE, perhaps peaking in the early second century. From the first century, we have two Jewish biographies and opportunities (developed somewhat further in chs. 10–11) to evaluate how they handle their sources. While literary techniques differ among ancient biographers and among the Evangelists themselves, biographies from the early empire offer the best model for exploring the expectations of the Gospels’ contemporaries for historiographic content in ancient biography.
1. See Collins, Mark, 20, regarding Vielhauer, Geschichte, 350.
2. Hägg, Biography, 187; biographic interest appears among Peripatetics in the fourth century BCE (Laistner, Historians, 18). For Greek works showing biographic interest from the fifth century BCE onward, see (although including forms other than what we in this work designate as biographies) Hägg, Biography, 10–98 passim (note esp. Xenophon’s memoirs on Socrates, 23–30; on Agesilaus, 41–51; on Aristoxenus, 69–77; memoirs of Antigonus, 89–93).
3. De Temmerman and Demoen, “Preface,” xii, on “the first centuries CE.”
4. Momigliano, Development, 9; Frickenschmidt, Evangelium, 153.
5. Momigliano, Development, 9.
6. Momigliano, Development, 8–9. See further Frickenschmidt, Evangelium, 153–62.
7. Momigliano, Development, 102; Burridge, Gospels, 67; Adams, Genre, 73. For possible earlier Egyptian and Hittite precedents, see Mayes, “Biography,” 1–2.
8. Burridge, Gospels, 67. Many compare Nehemiah with Late Period Egyptian funerary memoirs; see Von Rad, “Nehemia-Denkschrift”; Van Seters, Search, 129, 183–87; Mayes, “Biography,” 2; Rüpke, Religion, 36; also highlighting differences, Blenkinsopp, Judaism, 94–97.
9. Momigliano, Development, 12; see further discussion on 23–42; cf. also Frickenschmidt, Evangelium, 93–114; Burridge, Gospels, 68.
10. Momigliano, Development, 102.
11. Geiger, Nepos, 14–15.
12. Momigliano, Development, 43, 45; see further discussion in 43–64.
13. Momigliano, Development, 8.
14. Momigliano, Development, 102.
15. Momigliano, Development, 50.
16. Chance, “Fiction,” 133: not “necessarily . . . fabrication, but it did result in making the encomiast’s subject conform to preconceived notions of greatness—to fit a mold, so to speak.”
17. Momigliano, Development, 46; De Temmerman, “Formalities,” 4. As Collins notes (Mark, 25), Votaw compares the Gospels with these sources (Votaw, Gospels, 33–34, 58–59), but Plato’s dialogues are certainly not biographic in genre.
18. Momigliano, Development, 102.
19. Ytterbrink, Gospel, 76, cites Euagoras 10, 21, 36; see further Ytterbrink, Gospel, 76–80.
20. Ytterbrink, Gospel, 76, citing Euagoras 4, 76, 80–81. For the pedagogical function, see also Frickenschmidt, Evangelium, 108–9.
21. For some Stoic uses of the cardinal Aristotelian virtues, see Musonius Rufus 4, p. 44.10–22; p. 48.1, 4, 8, 13; 6, p. 52.15, 17, 19, 21; 8, pp. 60.22–64.9; 8, p. 66.7–8; 17, p. 108.9–10; Arius Didymus, Epitome 2.7.5a, p. 10.7–9; 2.7.5b1, p. 12.13–22; 2.7.5b2, p. 14.1–4; 2.7.5b5, p. 18.21–35.
22. Ytterbrink, Gospel, 77, citing Euagoras 23.
23. Ytterbrink, Gospel, 77, citing Euagoras 27–28, 32, 66.
24. Ytterbrink, Gospel, 79–80.
25. Ytterbrink, Gospel, 78, 84.
26. See, e.g., Frickenschmidt, Evangelium, 228, 505; Duff, Lives, 243, 257, 268.
27. Momigliano, Development, 49.
28. Momigliano, Development, 49–50.
29. Momigliano, Development, 47–49; see also Frickenschmidt, Evangelium, 110.
30. So Aristotle, Rhetoric 1368a17, in Momigliano, Development, 49.
31. Beck, “Demonax,” 93n34, citing, e.g., Dihle, Studien, 20–29; Burridge, Gospels, 62–67.
32. With, e.g., Adams, Genre, 73.
33. Votaw, “Biographies,” 225.
34. See Rhodes, “Documents,” 60; cf. Dewald, “Construction,” 95–96.
35. See Frickenschmidt, Evangelium, 136–42, on Herodotus.
36. See, e.g., Frickenschmidt, Evangelium, 142–43.
37. Cox, Biography, 5–6.
38. Momigliano, Development, 50; Geiger, Nepos, 15.
39. Konstan and Walsh, “Biography,” 29.
40. Adams, Genre, 74.
41. Momigliano, Development, 48.
42. Momigliano, Development, 50. Perhaps also his Memorabilia (Votaw, “Biographies,” 50).
43. Momigliano, Development, 51–52 (in his Anabasis). For other possible models for Xenophon, see Momigliano, Development, 47.
44. Momigliano, Development, 47. For Xenophon’s versatility in various forms of writing, see also Smith and Kostopoulos, “Biography,” 396.
45. Woldemariam, “Comparison,” 227, cites, for honoring him, e.g., Agesilaus 1.36; 2.24, 27–28, 37; 5.3–4; 8.4–6; as his “hero,” 3.1; 5.7; 11.1; for defending him, 2.21; 4.4; 5.6; and as a model, 10.2.
46. Momigliano, Development, 50; Ytterbrink, Gospel, 82; Adams, Genre, 75.
47. Momigliano, Development, 51; Ytterbrink, Gospel, 82.
48. Despite some biased omissions. See Brownson, “Introduction to Hellenica,” ix–xi; Brown, Historians, 93–94, 97. Like Thucydides, Xenophon largely avoids myth in his Hellenica (Fowler, “History,” 198).
49. See, e.g., Ytterbrink, Gospel, 82n87, following Frickenschmidt, Evangelium, 111–12. Later Roman historians apparently sometimes evoked Xenophon’s historical models; see Rood, “Cato.”
50. Ytterbrink, Gospel, 82–83, 86, noting esp. Agesilaus 1.6; contrast Cox, Biography, 9.
51. Momigliano, Development, 50.
52. Hellenica 3.3.1–5.1.3; I owe this observation to the comparisons charted in the dissertations of my PhD students Youngju Kwon and T. Wright (see Kwon, “Reimagining,” 144–219, esp. 158, 169; the chart on 159–60; adaptations using conventional compositional techniques, noted on 169–70). Plutarch, Agesilaus 8, also draws, directly or indirectly, on Xenophon, Hellenica 3 (Woldemariam, “Comparison,” 219–20).
53. Wright, “Reliability,” ch. 2.
54. Woldemariam, “Comparison,” 218, noting esp. Agesilaus 3.1; 5.7; for the public character of information about Agesilaus, cf. also Wright, “Exploration,” 240.
55. Burridge, Gospels, 126.
56. Ytterbrink, Gospel, 85.
57. Ytterbrink, Gospel, 83, 87, pace Cox, Biography, 9; cf. Cornelius Nepos, On Great Generals 17 (Agesilaus), 1.2.
58. This fragmentary work, possibly by Cratippus, is pieced together from several papyri; Diodorus Siculus followed but adapted the original.
59. I follow here the discussion and documentation in Wright, “Reliability,” ch. 2, who compares also all other reports about Agesilaus through the early third century CE and teases out, where possible, any independent sources on which they may have depended.
60. Again following Wright.
61. See Xenophon, Memorabilia 1.3.1.
62. Frickenschmidt, Evangelium, 111–14, esp. 111; Momigliano, Development, 52.
63. Momigliano, Development, 52–53. Cf. Xenophon’s Apology.
64. Adams, Genre, 75.
65. Momigliano, Development, 50, citing Xenophon, Hellenica 2.3.56.
66. Momigliano, Development, 53, citing esp. Herodotus, Histories 1.27; 2.134; Aristophanes, Wasps 1446. Earlier, cf., e.g., Proverbs; Ptah-hotep.
67. See chs. 14–15.
68. Even this brief saying in Mark might appear in a slightly different version in Q (Matt 12:30//Luke 11:23), though it is no less plausible that both versions reflect a wider sentiment in the Jesus tradition.
69. E.g., “If you merely chase away a spider into another room, you will find new cobwebs created there” (Kerala, South India; noted by George, Philippians, at Phil 1:12–26), or, “Wisdom is better than wealth” (Kenya; noted by Mburu, Hermeneutics, forthcoming); sayings of Confucius (China), Publilius Syrus (Rome), and the like.
70. For shared ideas between Xenophon and Plato, see Votaw, “Biographies,” 222, 233–45; esp. Marchant, “Introduction,” ix–xv.
71. See here Xenophon, Apology 1.
72. Momigliano, Development, 53–54.
73. Votaw, “Biographies,” 229, supposes that Diogenes Laertius takes this approach.
74. See Schenkeveld, “Prose,” 213–30; Cicero, Letters to Atticus 12.12; cf. Lucian, Nigrinus 1–12, 38.
75. Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Demosthenes 23.
76. See Diogenes Laertius, Lives 2.18–47, esp. (for Plato) 18, 28–30, 38–39, 45 (though cf. 40); (for Xenophon) 20, 29, 31–32, 45; for the claim that Xenophon took notes, see 2.48.
77. Votaw, “Biographies,” 247 (with greater confidence in Plato’s earlier dialogues and Xenophon’s Memorabilia bk. 1).
78. Momigliano, Development, 68–69; Burridge, Gospels, 69.
79. Momigliano, Development, 69; Chance, “Fiction,” 135.
80. Cf. Momigliano, Development, 103.
81. Momigliano, Development, 73.
82. Momigliano, Development, 74, 76, 79; Frickenschmidt, Evangelium, 154–55.
83. Cox, Biography, 10–11; Pelling, “Biography, Greek,” 241–42.
84. Momigliano, Development, 103; cf. Chance, “Fiction,” 135.
85. Momigliano, Development, 84.
86. Momigliano, Development, 12, noting that biographia is first attested in the late fifth century CE.
87. See Lefkowitz, Lives, ix, 70, 128, 177.
88. Adams, Genre, 87–88.
89. Geiger, Nepos, 65, 66 (cf. 116; the fuller treatment is in 30–65).
90. Frickenschmidt, Evangelium, 143–44.
91. See, e.g., Frickenschmidt, Evangelium, 161.
92. Momigliano, Development, 84–85.
93. Note here also Frickenschmidt, Evangelium, 158–59.
94. Pelling, “Biography, Greek,” 242; Walbank and Stewart, “Antigonus.”
95. Pelling, “Biography, Greek,” 242.
96. Momigliano, Development, 9.
97. Cf. Pryzwansky, “Nepos”; Adams, Genre, 79, noting esp. Swain, “Biography.”
98. For this depiction of the period from Nepos forward, see Frickenschmidt, Evangelium, 161, 163–91.
99. See Frickenschmidt, Evangelium, 163–66. He may have additionally composed some lives of literary figures (Geiger, Nepos, 91).
100. Geiger, Nepos, 95; cf. Hägg, Biography, 188–97, esp. 189–90.
101. Momigliano, Development, 96–97; others in Jenkinson, “Nepos.”
102. Geiger, Nepos, 116.
103. Geiger, Nepos, 88, 103–4, 116.
104. Momigliano, Development, 98; Stadter, “Biography,” 533.
105. Burridge, Gospels, 73.
106. Hägg, Biography, 189. The verb tenses in Cornelius Nepos, On Great Generals 25 (Atticus), chs. 13–18, might suggest that these chapters are revisions for Nepos’s second edition. Historians and biographers often revised their works; see, e.g., Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Thucydides 24. (Other writers also revised their works; see, e.g., Dionysius of Halicarnassus, On Literary Composition 9; Ovid, Amores prol.; Suetonius, Vergil 22–23, 33; Pliny, Letters 5.8.6–7; Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights 6.20.)
107. Hägg, Biography, 196.
108. Hägg, Biography, 197; Wright, “Reliability,” ch. 3 (far stronger than Xenophon).
109. In this case, he knew Atticus personally; see Hägg, Biography, 189–90.
110. See Nepos, On Great Generals 16 (Pelopidas), 1, cited in Momigliano, Development, 99n40.
111. Frickenschmidt, Evangelium, 159.
112. For a survey of scholarly emphasis on his errors, see Pryzwansky, “Nepos,” 97–100, cited by Christian, “Themistocles,” 104; more favorable, Stem, Biographies (from T. Wright).
113. Frickenschmidt, Evangelium, 159; Alfred, “Valuation,” 82–84 (in greater detail, see his “Source Valuation”); Christian, “Themistocles,” 105–39; also (noted by Christian) Titchener, “Nepos,” 90; Musnick, “Historical Commentary.”
114. Frickenschmidt, Evangelium, 190, 504.
115. Frickenschmidt, Evangelium, 166; on virtues, see Beneker, “Method,” esp. 112–15.
116. Callan, “Preface and Historiography,” 579–80.
117. Usefulness in Lucian, How to Write History 53, but this comes from truth alone in §9.
118. Momigliano, Development, 104.
119. Nicolaus was involved even with Herod the Great and provided a key source for Josephus; see Jewish Antiquities 1.94, 108, 159; 7.101; 12.126–27; 13.250, 347; 14.9, 68, 104; 16.29–30, 58, 183, 299, 333, 335, 337–39, 342, 370; 17.54, 99, 106, 127, 219, 225, 240, 248, 315–16; Jewish War 1.574, 629, 637; 2.14, 21, 34, 37, 92.
120. Develin, “Introduction,” 7.
121. See, e.g., Nicolaus, Augustus 1 (FGrH 125); 18 (FGrH 130).
122. Nicolaus, Augustus 9 (FGrH 127); 16 (FGrH 130).
123. Cf. Momigliano, Development, 86; Frickenschmidt, Evangelium, 166–67; Alfred, “Valuation,” 84 (who notes on his sources Bellemore, Nicolaus, xxiv–xxvi); on Nicolaus, see further Hägg, Biography, 197–204.
124. Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 20.154.
125. See Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 18.259–60.
126. So Borgen, John, ch. 13. Flaccus may fall closer to the genre of an apologetic historical monograph (Meiser, “Gattung”).
127. Smallwood, “Historians,” contends that Philo is even more accurate than Josephus when reporting the same historical events.
128. See Philo, Joseph 1; cf. Abraham 4.
129. Some more closely resemble allegorical exposition in the style of Alexandrian philosophic commentary; cf. Sandnes, “Markus.”
130. Ytterbrink, Gospel, 100–101, correctly noting Philo, Abraham 4–5, 217; for praise, cf. also Abraham 247, 255; Moses 2.191; Allegorical Interpretation 2.67. On panegyrics in Moses, see, e.g., Feldman, Portrayal, 20.
131. Canevet, “Remarques.” Philo adjusts figures to suit his idealizations of virtue (cf. Petit, “Traversée exemplaire”). For similarities between Philonic biography and Plutarch, see Niehoff, “Philo.”
132. Although one might consider some mildly allegorical literary techniques in John, e.g., 1:5; 13:30. Philo’s focus on characters of the distant past also allows him more freedoms than biographers writing about more recent figures.
133. Philo, Moses 1.1–4; 2.66; see also McGing, “Adaptation,” 118. Cf. Decalogue 1. Further on this work, see, e.g., Ytterbrink, Gospel, 94–100. For insightful comparisons and contrasts between Philo’s Life of Moses and one of the Gospels, see recently Holladay, “Matthew”; contrasts include Philo’s greater narrative symbolism and his far more explicit and abundant encomiastic asides (Holladay, “Matthew,” 17–18).
134. Burridge, Gospels, 128. On biography and philosophy in Philo, cf. Termini, “Part.” For comparison of this work with a Gospel, deeming both “encomiastic biography,” see Shuler, “Moses.”
135. E.g., Goodenough, “Exposition”; Robbins, Study; Granata, “Introduzione”; Feldman, Portrayal; for cosmological theology here, see Steyn, “Elemente”; for mediation in this work, see Parker, “Swiftly Runs the Word.” On other particulars, see, e.g., McKnight, “Lion Proselytes”; Riaud, “Réflexions”; Berchmann, “Arcana Mundi.” Damgaard, Recasting Moses, places this life in the larger framework of accounts of Moses from the LXX to later Christian works; on patristic use of this work, see, e.g., Geljon, Exegesis; cf. Malherbe and Ferguson, Gregory of Nyssa.
136. Ytterbrink, Gospel, 103; McGing, “Adaptation,” 119. Burridge, “Review,” 477, suggests, probably rightly, that Moses is modeled on Xenophon’s Agesilaus; unlike the more typical single-volume biographies, these two works each present their protagonist as king and then elaborate his virtues.
137. McGing, “Adaptation,” 119 (noting the digression in 1.148–62); Hidalgo, “Study,” 281–86, esp. 286.
138. McGing, “Adaptation,” 119; Feldman, Portrayal, 361.
139. Adams, Negotiating Genre, ch. 8. Adams views Life of Moses as straddling the (potentially overlapping) categories of rewritten Scripture and biography. He also sees Philo’s Abraham as part of a collected biography (the essays on Isaac and Jacob being lost), albeit with more spiritual exposition than in Moses and in typical biographies. Joseph also adapts biographic conventions, with less allegory than Abraham.
140. McGing, “Adaptation,” 125–26, noting esp. 1.33, 40–47.
141. Fitting Greek expectations; Feldman, “Birth”; Feldman, Portrayal; earlier, Meeks, Prophet-King, 115; for Moses as philosopher-sage, see Clifford, “Moses”; as prophet, Meeks, Prophet-King, 125–29; as prophet-king, Meeks, Prophet-King, 107–17; as a wise political leader (vs. the rabble), cf. Feldman, “Korah.” Moses is never king in Josephus (Meeks, Prophet-King, 134–36; not surprising, given his apologetic).
142. On Moses as a military leader, see also Canevet, “Remarques”; Feldman, “Spies.” Josephus also depicts him as a commander (Meeks, Prophet-King, 133–34).
143. Remus, “Thaumaturges” (emphasizing the distinguishing of Moses from magic). Balaam is contrasted with Moses not only in Philo (Feldman, “Balaam,” on Moses 1.263–99) but in some later Jewish sources; see, e.g., Sipre Deut. 357.18.1–2; b. B. Bat. 15b; Exod. Rab. 32:3; Num. Rab. 14:20; Eccl. Rab. 2:15, §2; see further discussion in Bowman, “Prophets,” 108–14.
144. Feldman, Portrayal; cf. Scott, “Divine Man” (agreeing with Carl Holladay). Still, for connection with divinity, cf. Philo, Moses 1.157–58.
145. See Hidalgo, “Study” (esp. 278–86), frequently following Feldman, Portrayal (cf., e.g., 62).
146. McGing, “Adaptation,” 120, 123–25.
147. McGing, “Adaptation,” 127–30, 133. For apologetic in Moses, see further, e.g., Feldman, Portrayal, 12.
148. McGing, “Adaptation,” 130–31.
149. McGing, “Adaptation,” 121–23, giving the example of Num 23:7–10 in Moses 1.278–79.
150. McGing, “Adaptation,” 128, on his treatment of Exod 7:14–12:36 in Moses 1.96–139.
151. See, e.g., Feldman, “Calf”; Feldman, “Interpretation of Joshua.”
152. See, e.g., Begg, “Moves”; cf. expansion in Begg, “Rephidim Episode”; expansion in Philo but more omissions in Josephus, in Begg, “Retelling.” For additional details about, e.g., the thornbush, see Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 2.266; Philo, Moses 1.65–66. On regular haggadic and other early Jewish elaboration, see sources and discussion in Keener, John, 1:27–28; Keener, Acts, 1:145. Rabbis developed biblical stories more expansively than Philo or Josephus; see, e.g., Shinan, “Wyhlm.”
153. Cf. Bloch, “Alexandria.”
154. See, e.g., Feldman, “Interpretation of Joshua”; Feldman, “General” (on the same Num 31 ch. as Feldman, “General,” cf. Begg, “Retelling”).
155. Cf. Feldman, “Birth”; Petitfils, “Tale,” 162–63; Philo, Moses 1.20–23; Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 2.232–37; Acts 7:22. For Philo and Greek education, see Piccione, “Παιδεία”; cf. McGing, “Adaptation,” 134.
156. Cf., e.g., Ezekiel the Tragedian’s Exagoge as a source in Lanfranchi, “Reminiscences.”
157. E.g., Begg, “Marah Incident”; Begg, “Retelling.” Josephus may have known this work of Philo; see Robertson, “Account,” ch. 2.
158. E.g., Josephus uses conventional forms in his suicide accounts (Newell, “Forms”), though historians could employ conventional forms for authentic events, and suicide was common enough (cf. Keener, Acts, 3:2498–2507). In any case, Josephus does use tragic pathos like other rhetorical historians. Given his own experience, it is not surprising that he digresses to lament (e.g., Jewish War 5.19), though quickly returning to the subject with the notice that the rules of history prohibit such lamentation (5.20).
159. Hengel, Acts and History, 7; cf. Vermes, Jesus and Judaism, 139.
160. Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 20.156–57, 260, 262, 266. He condemns a rival historian for lack of accuracy (Life 336) and even compares him to a forger of contracts (337–39).
161. Though reporting various perspectives as a rhetorical technique, ancient critics rarely reckoned with the multivalence of perspectives the way we would today. Josephus sometimes legitimates his own historical work (vis-à-vis that of other historians) by citing tradition (Gillet-Didier, “Paradosis”).
162. Josephus, like Herodotus, fared much better on narrative than speeches by our standards (cf. Mosley, “Reporting,” 11–22); he is heavily influenced by rhetoric (see Botha, “Rhetoric and Josephus”). See Keener, Acts, 1:301–4.
163. See discussion in Keener, Acts, 1:258–319.
164. Safrai, “Description in Works,” esp. 320–21. On population estimates, see further Keener, “Plausibility.”
165. Cf., e.g., Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 18.206, which, at least, in the text as we have it, misconstrues Germanicus’s relationship to Tiberius.
166. Sometimes there is considerable debate, e.g., surrounding Felix’s full name; against Josephus, see tentatively Hemer, “Name of Felix,” 47–48; in favor, Bruce, “Name of Felix”; Kokkinos, “Gentilicium”; Keener, Acts, 3:3329–31.
167. For proposed problems in Josephus’s summaries, see, e.g., McLaren, “Josephus’ Summary Statements”; for problematic summary statements by others, see, e.g., Justin, Epitome of the “Philippic History” of Pompeius Trogus [henceforth Epitome] 3.2.3.
168. Cf., e.g., Begg, “Amaziah,” “Nahum,” and “Uzziah”; Feldman, “Asa,” “Joseph,” “Manasseh,” “Pharaohs,” and “Ezra”; cf. also the transformation of Ahasuerus into a fully positive character in Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 11 (Feldman, “Ahasuerus”). Begg, “Gedaliah,” suggests that some of Josephus’s reports may also reflect influence from his experience.
169. Although some think that he emphasizes the Pharisaic connection because of the changed political landscape. Williams, “Josephus on Pharisees,” attributes to Josephus the full force of his anti-Pharisaic passages (by denying them to Nicolaus of Damascus); he may have followed much of Pharisaism without having officially joined (Mason, “Pharisee”).
170. See, e.g., Harrington, “Bible,” 245; Sanders, Judaism, 6; on the autobiography, Mason, Josephus and New Testament, 41–42, 73–76. The narrower autobiographic genre of confessions, of baring one’s soul and revealing significant personal weaknesses, might not predate Augustine.
171. With, e.g., Ferguson, Backgrounds, 387.
172. As widely noted, e.g., Neusner, Politics to Piety, 2; Crossan, Jesus, 93.
173. Nearly three centuries before this time an Italian city used the same excuse of being forced by a few troublemakers (in that case, their leaders) and escaped punishment (Livy, History 24.47.6). My experiences and observations in northern Nigeria have given me more respect for the possibility of a few extremists ultimately provoking wider conflict.
174. Crossan, Historical Jesus, 93. Sometimes Romans apparently accepted the excuse that a small band had forced others to resist Rome—but Judea’s revolt was massive.
175. Cf., e.g., Pastor, “Strata.” Although Josephus exaggerated his own prominence, it is less clear that (with Krieger, “Verwandter”) he did not belong to the priestly aristocracy.
176. Ferguson, Backgrounds, 387.
177. Cf. probably Kokkinos, “Gentilicium.”
178. Fischer and Stein, “Marble.”
179. See, e.g., Syon, “Gamla”; Cotton and Geiger, “Yyn”; Mazar, “Josephus and Excavations”; Safrai, “Education,” 995; Feldman, “Introduction,” 45–46; Thackeray, Josephus, 49; Riesner, “Gate”; Pixner, “Gate”; Pixner, Chen, and Margalit, “Zion.”
180. Safrai, “Description in Works,” esp. 320–21.
181. Feldman, “Introduction,” 45–46; Mazar, “Josephus and Excavations,” 325–29; McRay, Archaeology, 117–18; Charlesworth, Jesus within Judaism, 118–19.
182. McRay, Archaeology, 140, 144.
183. Y. Yadin in Shanks, “BAR Interviews Yadin,” 19.
184. Thackeray, Josephus, 49; Mosley, “Reporting,” 23–24.
185. Mosley, “Reporting,” 23–24, noting that Josephus composed speeches freely, but he has many firsthand sources (e.g., Jewish Antiquities 14.144–45, 189, 219, 224, 228).
186. In Jewish Antiquities 1.17; 20.154–57, 260–62; Jewish War pref.9–12, 30; 7.454–55; Against Apion 1.47; Life, 65.
187. Josephus, Against Apion 1.50–51. Just as, we may note, Luke could not have easily gotten away with fabricating new events contradicting those known to Theophilus (Luke 1:4); cf. also Xenophon, Agesilaus 3.1 in Woldemariam, “Comparison,” 218. On appeals to common knowledge, see, e.g., Xenophon, Agesilaus 3.1; Dionysius of Halicarnassus, On Literary Composition 22; Cicero, Against Verres 2.3.30.71; Josephus, Against Apion 2.107; Keener, Acts, 4:3497–98, 3542; this one is a higher order appeal than some, since it encompasses a range of data.
188. Sanders, Judaism, 6. Many claims against his reliability are overstated; see, e.g., Rajak, Josephus, 9–10.
189. Cohn, Distinction, 30–37 (cited in De Temmerman, “Formalities,” 4n4). Geiger, Nepos, 79–80, allows for Greek memoirs but not autobiographies.
190. Geiger, Nepos, 79; Momigliano, Development, 14, 95; Stadter, “Biography,” 530.
191. Simpson, Literature, 401–27.
192. Momigliano, Development, 14–15, 18, 62, 89–90.
193. Momigliano, Development, 57.
194. See Laistner, Historians, 35–37; Momigliano, Development, 86.
195. Burgersdijk, “Implications,” 255 (Historia Augusta 16.1).
196. Rodgers, “Justice,” 169.
197. Rodgers, “Justice,” 169–70, noting Josephus, Life 28–413.
198. See Smith and Kostopoulos, “Biography,” 404–5, noting esp. Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 20.266; Life 430; Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 3.10.8.
199. Momigliano, Development, 86.
200. See, e.g., Prov 27:2; Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 4.3.36, 1125a; Thucydides, History 3.61.1; Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities 1.1.1; Publilius Syrus, Sentences 597; Cicero, In Defense of Caecina 11.36; Letters to Friends 5.12.8; Quintilian, Orator’s Education 11.1.15–19, 22; Josephus, Against Apion 2.135–36; Dio Chrysostom, Orations 45.2; 57.3–9; Pliny, Letters 1.8.4–6, 13; 7.4.10; 9.15; Plutarch, Cicero 24.1; Marcus Cato 14.2; 19.5; Praising Oneself Inoffensively Moralia 539A–547F (esp. 15, Moralia 544D; 19, Moralia 546F); Symmachus, Letters 1.1.6; 1.16.2; Forbes, “Self-Praise”; Marshall, Enmity, 353–57; Watson, “Boasting,” 78–81; Aune, Dictionary, 81–84; Wojciechowski, “Boasting”; though cf. Cicero, Against Piso 1.2; Fronto, To Antoninus 1.2.9; Judge, First Christians, 66–70; Smit, “Practice,” 347–52.
201. Momigliano, Development, 15; cf. Lyons, Autobiography, 53–59.
202. Rodgers, “Justice,” 170; Mason, Life, 213–22; Henderson, “Life and War”; Henderson, “Comparison.”
203. Rodgers, “Justice,” 170, 175, noting Life 41; cf. 36, 65, 88, 175–78, 186, 346, 390–93, 410.
204. Cf. Rodgers, “Justice,” 182, noting Life 40, 338; cf. 336, 340, 367.
205. Photius, Bibliotheca 33. The preference may stem partly from apologetic interests; see Henderson, “Comparison,” 264.
206. Rodgers, “Justice,” 183, citing Photius.
207. Rodgers, “Justice,” 185, citing Jewish Antiquities 20.189–91, 145–46, 211–12, 214, 216–18.
208. Rodgers, “Justice,” 185.
209. Against Apion 1.45–49.
210. E.g., Against Apion 1.48–49.
211. Against Apion 1.49. On ancient note-taking, see comment in ch. 15.
212. Against Apion 1.50. Josephus probably functioned as a translator and would be used to interrogate and interpret for fugitives concerning conditions inside the city.
213. See Downing, “Redaction Criticism 1,” 49–55.
214. Downing, “Redaction Criticism 1,” 55–56 (finding no new events in the section studied); Downing, “Redaction Criticism 2,” 33.
215. On Plutarch, see De Pourcq and Roskam, “Virtues,” 177, following Pelling, Plutarch and History, 143–70; on Josephus reflecting wider convention, see Downing, “Redaction Criticism 2,” 30.
216. See, e.g., Laistner, Historians, 121, 129; Mosley, “Reporting,” 20–22; Hadas, “Introduction,” xviii; Syme, “Tacitus”; Pelling, “Historiography,” 716; cf. Marincola, “Tacitus’ Prefaces.” Modern readers often trust historical works that summarize information rather than those that elaborate rhetorically, such as Tacitus (Woodman, Rhetoric, 204, preferring Velleius Paterculus on this point); yet comparing Tacitus with other extant sources suggests that he followed the story line of his sources for recent history, or at least that his contemporaries who might have drawn on him believed that he did (see Keener, “Otho”).
217. Moore, “Introduction,” xiii; Hadas, “Introduction,” xvii–xix; Laistner, Historians, 113–14; see, e.g., Tacitus, Agricola 1; Annals 3.65.
218. Tacitus, Annals 4.11.
219. Whitmarsh, “Book,” 307; cf. Frickenschmidt, Evangelium, 171–73; Collins, Mark, 26n73; Wright, “Reliability,” ch. 4.
220. Whitmarsh, “Book,” 309, citing esp. Tacitus, Agricola 2.1; 3.3; 42.5; 46.2.
221. Hägg, Biography, 204–14, esp. 213 (following esp. Martin, “Tacitus on Agricola,” 12; Hanson, “Agricola”).
222. Geiger, Nepos, 117.
223. Plutarch, Dion 1.1.
224. Frickenschmidt, Evangelium, 168.
225. Frickenschmidt, Evangelium, 168; cf. Geiger, Nepos, 93.
226. Frickenschmidt, Evangelium, 169, highlighting their comparability with the Gospels.
227. Geiger, Nepos, 118–19.
228. In greater detail, see Licona, Differences, 23–111. Although we cannot always be certain, many of Plutarch’s adaptations appear to be deliberate; see, e.g., Pelling, Plutarch and History, 52, 77, 80, 87, 107, 155.
229. De Pourcq and Roskam, “Virtues,” 177; Hägg, Biography, 254, both following Pelling, Plutarch and History, 143–70, 301–38.
230. With, e.g., Ytterbrink, Gospel, 108.
231. See, e.g., Pelling, “Adaptation,” 128–29; Licona, Differences, 47, 50–51, 67, 72, 108, 110; Licona, “Viewing,” 326.
232. For one bibliography, see Benediktson, “Survey.”
233. Cf. Geiger, Nepos, 27.
234. Frickenschmidt, Evangelium, 171.
235. Cary and Haarhoff, Life, 272.
236. See, e.g., Suetonius, Augustus 68.
237. Nelson, “Value,” brought to my attention in a student paper by Christopher Chandler. The explanations fit a historical argument from “undesigned coincidence.”
238. Collins, Mark, 33.
239. Cf. Benediktson, “Survey,” 388, brought to my attention by Christopher Chandler. Suetonius patterns his biographies, but flexibly, given the material he had to cover (cf. Hurley, “Rubric Sandwich”).
240. Cf. Adams, Genre, 89.
241. Clay, “Lucian”; Adams, Genre, 89. For Peregrinus manipulating biographic and autobiographic expectations, see König, “Lives,” 227, who contrasts (237) the motivation of Peregrinus and Demonax.
242. See Beck, “Demonax,” 80.
243. Lucian, Demonax 2.1–8 (with Moeser, Anecdote, 247).
244. See Lucian, Demonax 1.
245. Beck, “Demonax,” 93, 95–96. Some of his other autobiographical claims might reflect Old Comedy (Humble and Sidwell, “Dreams,” 214) or be questionable (Sidwell, “Dreams,” 222), but Demonax 1 exudes admiration rather than satire.
246. See Beck, “Demonax,” 82.
247. Beck, “Demonax,” 92–93; he cites as Xenophon’s illustrations Agesilaus 4.6, 5.5, 7.5, 7.6, 8.3.
248. Widely recognized, e.g., Ytterbrink, Gospel, 110; Beck, “Demonax,” 83.
249. Moeser, Anecdote, 247–48; Beck, “Demonax,” 84, citing Demonax 67 and Branham, Eloquence, 58.
250. Frickenschmidt, Evangelium, 182, following Cancik.
251. With Beck, “Demonax,” 87.
252. Lucian, Demonax 6–7, 11. Cf. more hostile responses in 12–13, 16. This was also a favored feature in much of the philosophic biography tradition; see Long, “Introduction,” xxiii; Romm, “Humor,” 567; Branham, “Cynicism,” 602–3; Long, “Zeno,” 609–10.
253. Lucian, Demonax 35, 66.
254. Lucian, Demonax 63, 67.
255. Beck, “Demonax,” 89–91.
256. See Lucian, Demonax 62.
257. Lucian, Demonax 5; cf. Beck, “Demonax,” 86, 95.
258. Lucian, Demonax 5.
259. Cf., e.g., Edwards, “Introduction,” xvi.
260. Beck, “Demonax,” 86, 89–90. Epics often worked hard to depict round characters (cf., e.g., Grillo, “Reflections”; Homer, Odyssey 18.119–56, 412–21; though contrast Lucan), though of course some biographees could be round as well.
261. Cf. Beck, “Demonax,” 91.
262. Adams, Genre, 100, highlighing esp. Lives of the Sophists 516–17, 610.
263. Adams, Genre, 100; cf. 101, citing Eunapius, Lives 482, 485, 493–94, 500, 502.
264. Diogenes’s failure to address Neoplatonism or anyone born in the third century leads a majority of scholars to date his work to the early third century (Miller, “Introduction [Diogenes],” x).
265. Long and Sharples, “Diogenes Laertius,” 475.
266. Cf. Burridge, Gospels, 75.
267. Votaw, “Biographies,” 53; Fitzgerald, “Lives,” 215.
268. Adams, Genre, 105.
269. Frickenschmidt, Evangelium, 183; Long, “Introduction,” xxiii; Miller, “Introduction (Diogenes),” xiii–xiv.
270. Ytterbrink, Gospel, 112.
271. Frickenschmidt, Evangelium, 184.
272. Frickenschmidt, Evangelium, 504.
273. See also Frickenschmidt, Evangelium, 182.
274. Burgersdijk, “Implications,” 244.
275. Burgersdijk, “Implications,” 254.
276. Burgersdijk, “Implications,” 242, 254. Some suggest deliberate, playful parody (Knoppers, “Problem,” 26).
277. Momigliano, Development, 9; cf. 10.
278. Konstan and Walsh, “Biography,” 41.
279. Burridge, Gospels, 76, albeit referring to a still later period.
280. Gray, “Monk,” 117; cf. Chance, “Fiction,” 135.
281. Later hagiography often even recycles the plot lines of earlier hagiography (Gray, “Monk,” 131–32).
282. Cf. Dillon, “Interpretation,” 159–60.
283. Sulpicius Severus’s Life of Martin plainly includes many anecdotes, though Praet, “Cloak,” 137–39, 159, regards it as early Western hagiography.
284. Cox, Biography, xi, xii; see further 65, 134.
285. Cox, Biography, xiii.
286. Cox, Biography, 19.
287. Cox, Biography, 17, 65.
288. Cox, Biography, 17–19; cf. Frickenschmidt, Evangelium, 263–66.
289. Cox, Biography, 21, 34–36, 134, comparing, e.g., Philostratus, Life of Apollonius 1.5–6; Porphyry, Life of Pythagoras 1–2; Life of Plotinus 23.
290. Cox, Biography, 65; see further 139, 142.
291. See fuller discussion in Keener, Acts, 1782–86, 1962–64.
292. See fuller discussion in Keener, Mind, 128–30.
293. Cox, Biography, 48; cf. Edwards, “Genre,” 59.
294. Cox, Biography, 142. Consider, e.g., Athanasius’s hagiographic portrait of Anthony.
295. Cf. Ytterbrink, Gospel, 83n89, 87.
296. Dillon, “Interpretation,” 155–56.
297. Dillon, “Interpretation,” 157, on Eunapius, Lives 457–61 (esp. 459–60).
298. Dillon, “Interpretation,” 157–58, esp. 157, citing Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 6.2.1; for oral reports, see 6.1.1; 6.2.11; 6.3.12.
299. Dillon, “Interpretation,” 158, noting Porphyry, Life of Plotinus 1.
300. Dillon, “Interpretation,” 158–59.
301. Dillon, “Interpretation,” 160–65.
302. E.g., Chance, “Fiction,” 136; Moles, “Influence,” 99.
303. Cf. McGing, “Adaptation,” 119, who does use the religious element to link this work with later biographies.
304. Hare, “Introduction,” 380.
305. Cf. Robert Kraft, personal correspondence, August 30, 2017.
306. Hare, “Introduction,” 381; Frickenschmidt, Evangelium, 173–76, esp. 173. On 175–76 Frickenschmidt notes their development from a more basic form to conform to the wider three-part biography with a more detailed middle section.
307. Robert Kraft, personal correspondence, August 30, 2017; see also Satran, Prophets, e.g., 6–7, 33, 73, 75, 79, 91, 118.
308. Cf. Satran, Prophets, 100, 105, 110–11.
309. Also Aune, Environment, 41–42.
310. Four prophets have two paragraphs (Isaiah, Habakkuk, Elijah, and Elisha); sixteen prophets have only one (Hosea, Micah, Amos, Joel, Obadiah, Jonah, Nahum, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi, Nathan, Ahijah, Joad, Azariah, and Zechariah son of Jehoida).
311. Two sentences are for Haggai and Azariah; three for Zephaniah and Joad.
312. See Frickenschmidt, Evangelium, 118–35. For the relevance of OT historiography for the Gospels, see also Collins, Mark, 29–30, 33, 41 (citing further Zahn, “Geschichtsschreiber”); Marcus, Mark, 1:65–66; esp. extensively now Rouvinez, “Mark.”
313. Frickenschmidt, Evangelium, 120–22.
314. Frickenschmidt, Evangelium, 127–28; Collins, Mark, 29; Ytterbrink, Gospel, 39, 227–28; Edwards, “Genre,” 59.
315. Frickenschmidt, Evangelium, 148–51, 178–79.
316. Frickenschmidt, Evangelium, 146–48.
317. On which cf., e.g., Fisk, “Bible”; Harrington, “Bible.”
318. Cf. Keener, Acts, 1:146.
319. See ch. 9; also Keener, Acts, 1:145.
320. See much fuller discussion in Keener, John, 25–29.
321. With, e.g., Neusner, Legend, 8; Neusner, “Idea of History.”
322. Burridge, Gospels, 301, following Alexander, “Rabbinic Biography,” 42. Neusner, Biography, is skeptical even of the attributed sayings in rabbinic sources.
323. Burridge, Gospels, 301–2, following Alexander, “Rabbinic Biography,” 40; Neusner, Gospels, 33–38; Neusner, Incarnation, 213; Goshen Gottstein, “Jesus and Hillel,” 34–35.
324. Burridge, Gospels, 303, following Neusner, Gospels, 52–53; Alexander, “Rabbinic Biography,” 41.
325. Cf. Matt 12:40–41//Luke 11:30–32; Matt 1:5; 24:15; perhaps Mark 4:11//Matt 13:11//Luke 8:10 (evoking Dan 2:28–30, 44, 47); Mark 6:23 (evoking Esth 5:3, 6; 7:2); Mark 13:14 (evoking Dan 9:27; 11:31; 12:11); and, evoking Dan 7:13–14, Mark 2:10; 13:26; 14:62; Matt 28:18.
326. Stanton, Preaching, 126; Aune, Environment, 37. The suggestion that ancient Near Eastern models provided the later Greek emphasis on individual characters (cf. Dihle, “Biography,” 366–67) seems overstated.
327. Some do see OT and rabbinic biographic material as primary background for the Gospels; see, e.g., Baum, “Biographien.” For focus on OT background, Hägg, Biography, 155n28, cites Hartman, “Reflections”; Reiser, Sprache, 102–5 (distinctively regarding Jeremiah as a chief model, pp. 17–20).
328. These may appear to a small extent already in the OT; e.g., cf. 2 Kgs 9:27 with 2 Chr 22:9, discussed in Keener, Hermeneutics, 196–97.
329. With Allison, Constructing Jesus, 444; cf., e.g., Philo, Creation 1–2; Rosner, “Biblical History,” 81.
330. Cf. here Knoppers, “Problem.”
331. At least some of the Gospel writers apparently saw themselves as continuing the earlier biblical salvation history; see Smith, “Gospels.”
332. Fitzgerald, “Lives,” 211 (following Aune, “Hellenistic Biography,” 9); Baum, “Biographien,” noted and qualified by Aletti, Birth, 28–30, 108.
333. See, e.g., Begg, “Elisha’s Deeds”; Begg, “Jotham”; and Begg’s sample sources in the bibliography.
334. See, e.g., Van Veldhuizen, “Moses,” 215–24; Höffken, “Hiskija”; Feldman, “Aqedah”; Feldman, “Jacob”; and the multiple articles by Feldman and Begg sampled in the bibliography; cf. Keener, John, 2:1262, 1298–99; Keener, Acts, 4:3807–8, 3866–67. Some particular adaptations are debated (e.g., Roncace, “Portraits”; Feldman, “Roncace’s Portraits”; Roncace, “Samson”).
335. Cf. Rajak, “Justus of Tiberias,” 92; Cohen, Maccabees, 194; cf. in general Attridge, “Historiography,” 326; cf. Eisman, “Dio and Josephus.”