4.5. Conclusion
What Sort of Biographies Are the Gospels?
Initial expectations for “reliability” or “flexibility” must match a work’s apparent genre. By definition, genre includes the sets of culturally conditioned expectations with which an audience in a work’s milieu would normally approach such a work. No one, for example, expects ordinary parables or (still less) psalms to be historically reliable; their genres do not imply historical claims.
Although modern biography and history evolved from their ancient namesakes, there are differences between the modern and ancient genres. What range of expectations could ancient biographic authors take for granted? Answering this question requires considering ancient expectations for reliability and flexibility, rather than anachronistic modern appeals to genre conventions that did not yet exist.
Although ancient biographies influenced their modern namesakes,1 they also differed from them. What level of historical accuracy did audiences in the period of the early empire expect from biographies? Treating the Gospels as ancient biography has little bearing on their historical reliability if we do not know what sort of historical reliability ancient audiences expected. Would the Evangelists have even had an interest in what the Jesus of history did?2
As the previous chapter suggested, comparing generally biographic material in the widest sense offers little guidance, but a more targeted approach can be more productive. Which biographic works are most analogous to the Gospels? For purposes of historical information, the most helpful comparisons should be with other full, discrete narrative works from the early empire that treat figures within living memory (samples of which I explore in greater detail in ch. 10).
Most relevant for studying the Gospels would be other first-century biographies of Jesus (which we would then likely classify as Gospels themselves); unfortunately, we do not have any. Comparing the four extant ones to each other is a basic exercise, readers’ familiarity with which I take for granted here. Since we lack other first-century biographies about Jesus, we have to fill in gaps as best we can, though in some cases that might feel like filling missing DNA sequences from cognate species. But which species are the closest cognates?
Scholars have proposed various typologies for biographies.3 Most of those that follow are modern subjective ways of dividing biographies, based on our particular interests. In most cases, therefore, it is not that some ways of classifying are right and others wrong, although some allow for readier and more consistent classification than others. Some typologies may be complementary.4
Two particularly useful schemes for dividing ancient biographies are, first of all, by subject. Biographies often addressed political figures, military figures, poets, orators, or sages. Jesus’s character overlaps between the public figure and sage dimensions of ancient biography. For the latter, some formal and literary considerations such as anecdotes about teaching, rhetorical encounters, and the like are therefore appropriate to them. I revisit this topic further below. The second classification scheme is particularly relevant to Christobiography’s focus on the potential value of the Gospels for historical reconstruction: the likelihood of substantial information.
Although additional criteria for exploring authors’ historiographic approach are important (esp. how they employ their sources), I address two of them here as more formal, a priori ways to classify biographies.5 First, as we noted in chapter 3, biographies from the early empire tend to reflect higher historiographic standards than their often more encomiastic precursors and their usually more hagiographic successors in late antiquity. Second, biographies within living memory of their subjects tend to have better sources available than those written about figures of the distant past.
First, however, I must survey some other classification schemes.
4.1a. Leo’s Lineage for Biographies: Chronological versus Topical
Scholars usually begin recounting modern attempts to classify ancient biographies with a 1901 work by F. Leo.6 Leo divided biography into two major forms: a Peripatetic form, structured chronologically, that reaches its apex in Plutarch, versus an Alexandrian, topical form that reaches its apex with Suetonius. Both approaches remained acceptable for encomia in the first century.7
As is often the case with any early work in a new area of study, Leo’s conjectures in this matter have required subsequent revision.8 Leo himself recognized that not every biography fit readily in these two categories.9 Others have pointed out that Peripatetics did not invent biography,10 and the topical form existed before the Alexandrian era.11 The differences may simply reveal that it is more economical to treat chronologically public figures whose exploits appear in historical sources, whereas it is simpler to treat more topically the sort of literary figures that also interested Alexandrian scholars.12
Yet even this division may be artificial.13 The earliest extant Roman biographer, Cornelius Nepos, follows chronology in some biographies and a topical approach in others.14 Moreover, some biographies include both chronological and topical sections.15 The large, chronologically middle section of a subject’s life usually includes many anecdotes arranged randomly.
4.1b. Talbert’s Types, Burridge on Biographies: Functions and Purposes
Looking for patterns in ancient biographies, Charles Talbert (1977) divides them into didactic and nondidactic types. He then breaks the larger didactic category, referring to sages, into five smaller categories:16
Talbert’s categories are not mutually exclusive,23 but they do provide analogies for these functions from both before and after the Gospels.24
In a more advanced and nuanced way, Richard Burridge (1992) divides ancient biography according to its “many possible purposes” but readily acknowledges that “several intentions may be combined in one particular work.”25 That is, he rightly recognizes the danger of attempting a universal classification of mutually exclusive options; purposes overlap.
He distinguishes purposes as follows:26
Burridge finds little encomium in the Synoptics, but they are certainly exemplary, informative, and didactic; also, they include some apologetic and polemic and (at least from an aesthetic perspective), in Luke’s literary parallelisms, some entertainment.28 “As with other βίοι, it is clearly difficult, if not impossible, to restrict the synoptic gospels to just one purpose.”29 Any of these may include historical interest, although perhaps particularly in the informative and commemorative purposes.
Another way to divide biographies is between an emphasis on character models, evaluated by moral norms, and an emphasis on the subject’s distinctive personality, evoking empathy (as in tragedy).30 This approach, like some others, addresses characteristics of many biographies, yet one wonders whether how organic this classification is, since many biographies did both.
4.1c. Typologies with Historical Concerns
Another approach, relevant to the historical focus of the present book, is classification by purpose or function. Thus Klaus Berger (1984) classifies biographies in four types: (1) encomium; (2) peripatetic/chronological, depicting character through deeds; (3) novelistic (e.g., Life of Aesop); and (4) Alexandrian/topical.31 Although some overlap among these categories is inevitable, this classification is more organic than many others. With reference to historical interest, the second and fourth categories are most helpful, but Tacitus’s genre-busting Agricola, which Berger places in the first category, shows that historical information can be substantive in that category as well.
In 1915 Votaw distinguished biographies in two ways. First, he distinguished historical biographies, which could also have additional agendas yet provided clear chronological and other historical details, from popular biographies, which emphasized the didactic at the expense of historical information. (Votaw did admit substantial overlap.)32 As the previous chapter should illustrate, this way of dividing material obscures too much overlap. Many biographies (e.g., Suetonius’s Caesars) used anecdotes without chronological setting not because they were popular level but because they neither needed nor wanted to invent such information. Votaw also divided biographies by subject: those about political and military leaders on the one hand and those of intellectuals (such as philosophers) on the other.33
Justin Smith (2007) divides ancient biographies along two axes, the first by reference to chronological proximity to their subject, and the second by reference to the nature of the audience. He thus arrives at the following typology:34
The nature of the audience, while relevant for other concerns, is of less interest for the purpose of this book, but chronological proximity will prove to be of great interest (see ch. 9). Writers of contemporary biographies address figures within living memory, so that “the author had access to firsthand/eyewitness accounts.”35 These include works such as Isocrates’s Euagoras, Xenophon’s Agesilaus, Porphyry’s Plotinus, and Nepos’s Atticus.36 Biographers writing about “ancient” figures, by contrast, are less able to verify “eyewitness accounts,” and these biographies “tend to be less ‘historically’ reliable.”37 Smith includes here Philo’s Life of Moses and Arrian’s Alexander.
More explicit in its interest in historiographic matters is Adela Yarbro Collins’s typology, which further adjusts some of the earlier classifications. Collins ultimately regards Mark as a historical monograph (see ch. 6), but she provides a typology that recognizes a relationship between historical biographies and historical monographs about a person.38 She offers the following categories:
Biographies in the final category “have the same aims as historiography: to give an account of an important series of events and to explain the events in terms of their causes.”39 Although the heavy didactic content of the Gospels suggests a strong affinity for didactic bioi,40 “the historical type of biography is the one that is most similar to the Gospels.”41
Although in practice many of the above categories overlap considerably—one’s interest was rarely exclusively historical information or moral models, for example—historical interest is clear in the final category, as in many biographies from Nepos through Suetonius. Collins sees Mark as a historical monograph, but in terms of historical information this genre is close to her sixth category of biography here (see discussion in ch. 6). Both proposals correctly identify the historical interest present in the Gospels.
Because Jesus was virtually indisputably a sage, one available biographic analogy for Jesus is biographies of sages, who were usually (in the gentile world) philosophers.42
It is common to divide subgenres by subject matter.43 One recently proposed approach divides biographies in terms of their subjects’ social power dynamics. These dynamics certainly vary, from kings to outsiders;44 by these standards, early accounts about Socrates and Jesus function as “subversive biography.”45
More commonly, scholars classify different sorts of biographies based on their subjects’ careers or spheres of activity, for instance, distinguishing subjects such as political figures, military figures, poets, and sages (or more narrowly, Gospels as biographies specifically about Jesus). Classification by types of figures offers an organic and natural scheme.46 Among these categories, works about sages were quite common.47
Differences among such types of biographies tend to reflect their different subjects; for example, witty aphorisms and retorts dominate more in biographies of sages than in biographies of generals. Overall, of course, a person’s acts remain important in most ancient biographies.48 Nevertheless, most sages (and here Jesus is among the exceptions) led relatively uneventful lives, so their biographies tend to focus on their words more than on their actions.49 Biographies of sages also tend to provide more information about the subjects’ education, where available, and about publications.50
Though many extant examples of biographies about sages postdate the period of the Gospels, fragments reveal that some forms of biographic works about them began flourishing long before the Gospels.51 One writer reportedly contributed 120 books on those distinguished in various fields of learning.52 Peripatetics displayed special interest in philosophers’ biography as early as the fourth century BCE.53 “Of the lost late Hellenistic authors,” Hägg notes, “most wrote varieties of philosophical biography,” fragments of which surface later in Diogenes Laertius and in Pythagorean lives.54
Such lives honored the founders of philosophic schools, recounted their teachings, and often employed anecdotes about them to illustrate their moral teaching. As Loveday Alexander emphasizes, “The Hellenistic school tradition” often includes “isolated anecdotes about famous teachers.”55 Followers of ancient teachers were often deeply interested in their lives from soon after their death, writing about them whether or not in biographic form.56
Could biographies of sages show historical interest? As early as 240 BCE, Antigonus of Carystus raised the standard of “accuracy in describing contemporary philosophers.”57 We have noted the historiographic interests of biographers in the early empire. Surviving works from the chief biographers of the early empire focus especially on political and military figures, but their works were not originally limited to these subjects. In addition to his works on statesmen, Plutarch wrote about several poets and philosophers, although these are no longer extant.58 In addition to his Lives of the Caesars, Suetonius composed series of lives of poets, orators, historians, philosophers, and finally grammarians and rhetoricians, although only the last group has survived.59 Although somewhat later, Lucian’s Demonax seems to continue this tradition and probably resembles other biographies of sages in the early empire.60
Such interest continues in the later, more widely attested lives of sophists and philosophers. In contrast to Philostratus’s Life of Apollonius, his Lives of the Sophists (βίοι σοφιστῶν, bioi sophistōn) is a series of fifty-nine biographies, including those of eight philosophers whose rhetorical effectiveness allowed them to be classed with sophists.61 He depended on publications by his biographees and on what he heard directly from sophists regarding themselves and their predecessors.62 Although some have questioned his reliability,63 Ewen Bowie notes that “controls often support his version, and Lives of the Sophists is an invaluable, albeit tendentious, Greek cultural history of the period.”64
The individual biographies in Lives of the Sophists tend to be brief, but the well-documented public lives of Polemo and Herodes are exceptions.65 In general, intellectual biographies (attested in series by Philostratus and Diogenes Laertius) are shorter than those of political figures,66 but this is because material about such thinkers was less available except in schools themselves, where teachings (as in Arrian’s treatment of Epictetus) could fill volumes. (Nevertheless, even Philostratus’s sketches of somewhat recent figures involve less guesswork than the often even briefer lives of poets addressed in ch. 2.) A disciple, by contrast, might provide a more substantial work, such as (again) Lucian’s treatment of Demonax.
Many naturally find biographies of sages the nearest available analogy for the Gospels, especially when these reflect recent memory.67 The Gospels present Jesus as more than a sage, but certainly not as less than one. So long as we allow for each of the Gospels’ distinctiveness and recognize the limited character of each analogy, such comparisons can be fruitful.
This analogy too may have implications for the information available to the Evangelists in the first century. Would members of a movement have access to much information about a teacher within living memory? Disciples had published memoirs about their teachers (or about others) centuries before this time.68 Greek disciples often took copious notes from their masters’ teachings,69 sometimes for use in such biographies.70 This practice continued in and after the NT period. Just a generation after John’s Gospel, Arrian’s notes of Epictetus’s teaching, in contrast to Arrian’s own writing in Alexander or Encheiridion, reflect even much of the teacher’s own rambling style.71 (Whether any of Jesus’s disciples would have taken notes is more open to debate; see discussion in ch. 15.)
Some scholars find unusual the possibly single-year focus of Mark’s Gospel,72 but biographies often focused on public careers, and Jesus’s was not long. Many sage biographies focus on the period of the sage’s teaching, with at most the barest introduction to the sage’s background (see ch. 6).73
Talbert has compared Luke-Acts with the succession narratives of sages in Diogenes Laertius;74 others have criticized the comparison.75 The comparison remains useful, however, so long as we view Diogenes Laertius as providing some elements of what sage biographies could include rather than as a complete analogy.76
4.3. The Reliability of Diogenes Laertius’s Biographies
Diogenes Laertius’s information is not always reliable, but this unreliability stems not from lack of dependence on sources but from dependence on often unreliable ones from outside the circle and living memory of his subjects. Unlike some other ancient scholars, Diogenes regularly names his sources, which include nearly 1,200 references, more than 200 authors, and more than 350 anonymous sources.77 That amounts to roughly three references per page in the standard edition.78 In 9.1.1–17 alone, on Heraclitus, he cites at least eighteen sources.79 When he depends on sources cited in other sources, he sometimes cites the entire chain of sources, implicitly yet transparently admitting his distance from the earliest possible witnesses.80
Diogenes draws on a range of earlier compilations, and instead of following a single source for a significant time, he regularly switches sources.81 Somewhat like Matthew’s (sometimes) editorial redaction of Mark or Q, however, Diogenes himself seems more a compiler than a composer.82 Indeed, where he can be compared with an earlier extant work dependent on the same source, he sometimes appears to follow the common source more carefully than does his predecessor.83 He depends heavily on hellenistic biographers.84
Although many of Diogenes’s sources for earlier periods were sound, some were weaker, especially his main source on Aristotle, which may be more Stoic than Aristotelian.85 His knowledge of Plato’s thought (in bk. 3) proves deficient,86 reflecting a Stoicized, “largely Antiochan form of Platonism.”87 Apart from his reliance on Plato’s Timaeus, Diogenes turns to intermediate sources, drawing selectively from earlier doxographers.88 Diogenes displays abundant information on some thinkers and little information on others; thus, for example, all or most of books 3, 7, and 10 are devoted to Plato, Zeno, and Epicurus, respectively.89 Nevertheless, he seems ready to overlook material undoubtedly available in his sources when it does not interest him.90
The diversity in size among his lives suggests two factors: first, he felt the need to include something about all the sages; and second, more information was available to him about some than about others.91 That is, he was compiling tradition, not freely filling in accounts from his imagination simply to produce literary symmetry. Sometimes accused of simply compiling his sources slavishly, Diogenes Laertius cannot easily fit a model of ancient biography that emphasizes fictionalization over dependence on prior information.
Diogenes also reveals diverse opinions about his subjects.92 Kevin Southerland, one of my PhD students, is currently working on Diogenes Laertius. His initial survey of most sections of Diogenes’s ninth book highlights its vast number of sources. Here Diogenes is so committed to recording all sides that he expressly dismisses a source only once.93 Some suggest a bias toward Skeptics and Epicureans, as revealed in his first-person usage in books 9–10,94 but if he has such a bias, it does not prevent him from compiling whatever information he found available. Most doubt that we can be certain of the school to which Diogenes adhered, if any; this conclusion could reflect his interest in traditions about philosophers’ lives at the expense of details about their philosophies.95
As James Miller notes, Diogenes includes plenty of “odd and amusing anecdotes,” but he “almost never praises or criticizes directly the characters he describes, nor does he venture any unambiguous opinion of his own” about philosophy.96 If some earlier biographies were much more directly epideictic, Diogenes’s interest reflects more the antiquarian fascination with scintillating tidbits to provoke and satisfy readers’ curiosity. One of Diogenes’s principles of selection is also the street value of his narration; sexual scandals invite repetition, even when his sources are surely unreliable.97
Diogenes compiles material without much evaluation, which is sometimes attributed to carelessness; certainly he drew from poor sources as well as strong ones, and usually secondary or tertiary collections rather than works of the philosophers themselves.98 Another factor could be the oft-proposed idea that we have only Diogenes’s unfinished notes, published posthumously.99 Nevertheless, some of his reticence to evaluate might additionally reflect at least partly his inability to offer firm conclusions.100 Biographers often remained neutral about sources more than a century before their time, since historical distance severely impairs their ability to evaluate those sources’ reliability.101 Some sources that Diogenes treats in this book are more than seven centuries before his time.
Diogenes’s impartiality and sometimes irreverence toward various philosophers differ starkly from the Evangelists’ commitment to their subject,102 but they do reflect the influence on Diogenes of certain ancient historiographic principles. Although Diogenes’s focus and conventional topics fit biography, his work is heavily influenced by contemporary historiography.103
How would the Gospels as sage biographies differ historiographically from those of Diogenes Laertius? Diogenes wrote at a more elite level and named far more sources, but he also wrote long after most of his biographees. Flourishing in the early third century CE, Diogenes Laertius collected chreiai regarding the Cynic Diogenes, who was from the fourth century BCE.104 These chreiai employ material that had accumulated over the course of more than half a millennium. In historical terms, the trustworthiness of his material thus should differ appreciably from the accounts in the first-century Gospels, most of which depict events only some forty to sixty-five years before they were written.
Naturally, biographies had to be adjusted to their subject matter, and the lives of kings and generals provided different material than did the lives of poets or philosophers.105 In the case of Jesus, the subject matter requires further adjustment of other conventional paradigms, for Jesus appears as a healer, prophet, teacher, and, perhaps, as a threat to the political establishment.
Yet biographies of a divine man,106 while resembling the subject matter of the Gospels, seem to begin appearing around the early third century CE, hence by normal standards of historiography should be judged to have been influenced by, rather than to have influenced, the content of the gospel tradition. The earlier Christian models were widely circulated and known by the third century.
Jesus was not a military or traditional political figure, but nearly all scholars concur that, whatever else he was, he was a teacher or sage. At the same time, he was a public figure as well as a sage, like Socrates, Crates, Demonax, and other figures who became publicly known in their communities.107 His public execution, like that of Socrates, further reinforces his role as a public figure.
Perhaps most strikingly, the messianic title attributed to him in our earliest sources and his execution as if he were a political threat suggest that he was a public figure, not one whose sole interest was private instruction of disciples. Some people thought of Jesus as a potential king;108 it seems highly unlikely that Jesus adopted the perspective of himself as a king merely from Pilate’s execution of him as such. The Gospels thus depict him as a somewhat “political” figure.
Their political perspective is, of course, distinctive: Mark’s “kingdom” (1:15; cf. 9:1, 47; 11:10; 15:43) climaxes in the king’s crucifixion (15:2, 9, 12, 18, 26, 32), a subversion of imperial (and, more generally, human) politics (cf. 4:11, 26–32; 10:14–15, 23–25; 14:24–25). The Gospels together do form a distinctive new subtype of biography, but one that would remain intelligible with Jesus as both a public figure and a sage.109
Although biographies of teachers remain a valuable analogy, both Jesus’s public role and the limited number of full-length sage biographies from the early empire invite us to cast the net of comparison more broadly. The difference between biographies of sages and those of emperors is one of topic, not one of overall genre. The nature of some sources, of course, differs: public records such as archives could readily supply biographers with information regarding imperial building projects, senate decrees, and the like; we cannot expect to find such matters in our Gospels.
What is analogous for biographies of emperors, sages, and Jesus alike is the heavy presence of anecdotes, dependent on reports that, putatively, are ultimately dependent on witnesses. We do not accept all anecdotes uncritically, but we give preference to those stemming from within living memory of the biographee.
Dirk Frickenschmidt’s extensive research compared the Gospels with varieties of ancient biographies. He was surprised to discover greater parallels in form with Nepos’s and Plutarch’s biographies of public figures than with typical biographies of philosophers.110 This finding may be partly because it is more common to have entire books devoted to public figures, but it is also because Jesus was, inevitably, a public figure.
Although the Gospels fit readily in the broader category of biographies, demarcating subcategories is a more subjective, less precise exercise. In terms of their subject, the Gospels are biographies of a miracle-working sage, a fairly distinctive category in their period. That he was also a public figure who drew large crowds and was executed by the state provides further distinctive elements and often different analogies.
Still, because Jesus was a sage, aspects of the Gospels resemble biographies of sages. The community that revered him would have desired to transmit his teaching. Moreover, the Gospels are also full biographies, like those of public figures in contrast to the sketchier lives of poets surveyed in chapter 2.
Insofar as our objective is to read the Gospels for historical information, the time of their composition, relative both to other biographies and to their biographee, is significant. That they were composed during the early empire, the period of greatest historiographic sensitivity among ancient biographers, reinforces the likelihood that the Evangelists had significant interest in recounting genuine historical information about their biographee. That they speak about a figure within living memory suggests that they had substantial information available.
I turn to some other characteristics of biographies (ch. 5) before returning to primarily historiographic questions. Then I will explore the historical interests of biographies (ch. 6) and what historical interests meant for ancient authors (ch. 7).
1. See, e.g., Mossman, “Plutarch and Biography”; for classical influence more generally on English literature, see esp. Copeland, History.
2. Bultmann, Jesus and Word, 13–14, wondered whether much about Jesus was preserved by their time; in Tradition, 372, he doubts “historical-biographical interest in the Gospels.”
3. For surveys, see, e.g., Smith, “Genre,” 193–203; Smith, βίος, 28–38.
4. With also Smith, “Genre,” 212.
5. Formal features by themselves are not always sufficient to classify works in terms of historical interest; cf. Adams, Genre, 75.
6. Leo, Biographie.
7. See Quintilian, Orator’s Education 3.5.15, also noted in Bird, Gospel, 236, but there cited as 3.7.17.
8. See critiques in Geiger, Nepos, 13, 25–26; Momigliano, Development, 19; Smith, “Genre,” 194–96; Smith, βίος, 30–31.
9. Noted by Smith, “Genre,” 193; Collins, Mark, 22n40.
10. Momigliano, Development, 20.
11. Burridge, Gospels, 71. It continued throughout the Hellenistic period (Momigliano, Development, 86–87).
12. Burridge, Gospels, 71–72.
13. Momigliano, Development, 87.
14. Burridge, Gospels, 73.
15. Smith, “Genre,” 195 (and Smith, βίος, 30), following, e.g., Aune, “Biography,” 108; cf. already Isocrates, Euagoras; Xenophon, Agesilaus.
16. He parallels four of these categories in lives of rulers (Talbert, Gospel, 96–97).
17. Talbert, Gospel, 94.
18. Talbert, Gospel, 94–95.
19. Talbert, Gospel, 95. One might think even of Aristoxenus’s opposition to Socrates.
20. Talbert, Gospel, 95–96. For collected biographies, see further Adams, Genre, 92–109 (noting among three general types “those that trace a succession, whether philosophers or kings” [92]).
21. See esp. Talbert, Patterns, 125–40. Beyond a simple list of successors, the pattern is not very common (Chance, “Perspectives,” 200 [more fully, 181–201]; Aune, Environment, 78–79; Pervo, Acts, 16; Balch, “Genre,” 6), but it does exist (Talbert, “Chance,” 233–34; cf. Talbert, Acts, xix–xx, xxiii; Talbert, Mediterranean Milieu, 19–50). But see esp. Sterling, Historiography, 319–20.
22. Talbert, Gospel, 96. He assigns Philo’s Moses to this category but among rulers (97).
23. Many critique the rigidity of Talbert’s types; see Aune, “Problem”; Smith, “Genre,” 200; Smith, βίος, 35.
24. Talbert, Gospel, 98.
25. Burridge, Gospels, 145.
26. Burridge, Gospels, 145–47, 180–82.
27. Shuler, Genre, regards his subject (Matthew) as primarily laudatory biography; but such a specific genre probably did not exist (Burridge, Gospels, 85–86), since encomiastic elements were common in many biographies.
28. Burridge, Gospels, 208–10.
29. Burridge, Gospels, 210.
30. Gill, “Distinction,” esp. 2–3, followed by Beck, “Demonax,” 84–85.
31. Berger, “Gattungen,” 1236; summarized in Smith, “Genre,” 195; Smith, βίος, 30; earlier, cf. Talbert, Gospel, 92–93.
32. Votaw, “Biographies,” 51; among popular biographies of sorts he includes Xenophon’s Memorabilia and Philostratus’s Life of Apollonius (55).
33. Votaw, “Biographies,” 52.
34. Smith, “Genre,” 212; Smith, βίος, 55–61, 230.
35. Smith, “Genre,” 212n128; see also 216. Regarding contemporary biography, on the analogy of contemporary historiography, see Smith, βίος, 55–57.
36. Smith, “Genre,” 212; Smith, βίος, 60–61. On the border would be Nepos’s On Great Generals 24 (Cato) and Suetonius’s Caligula, Claudius, and Nero (“Genre,” 212n129). Those with “definite” audiences often seek to use eyewitness accounts to counter charges against their subject (213, citing Isocrates, Euagoras 4–6; Xenophon, Agesilaus 3.1; 10.3; Tacitus, Agricola 4.3; 24.3; 44.5).
37. Smith, “Genre,” 213. They frequently depended on “written sources, both fictional and historical” (216).
38. Collins, Mark, 30–33.
39. Collins, Mark, 32.
40. Collins, Mark, 31, 33.
41. Collins, Mark, 33.
42. See, e.g., Culpepper, Gospel and Letters, 64–66. For the interest of cultural memory in origins and founders, cf. Galinsky, “Introduction,” 23.
43. Fowler, Kinds of Literature, 112.
44. Konstan and Walsh, “Biography,” 43, find two types of biography, but the division seems more one of biographic subjects. Even here, some compare the Gospels in different respects to some imperial figures (e.g., Cancik, “Gattung,” 104–10, on Suetonius, Nero 49.1–4; though the motif in question has also been simply labeled tragicomic, as in Via, Kerygma, 15, 56, 99–101).
45. Konstan and Walsh, “Biography,” 39–42, esp. 39 (their treatment of Ps.-Callisthenes is less convincing).
46. See, e.g., Votaw, “Biographies,” 52; Geiger, Nepos, 25–26; Wehrli, “Gnome,” 193 (in Smith, “Genre,” 194–95; Smith, βίος, 218).
47. Succinctly, note the many philosophers in the chart in Adams, Genre, 112–13.
48. E.g., Cox, Biography, 57; Ytterbrink, Gospel, 76, 85, 101; Burridge, Gospel, 71; Adams, Genre, 92; Edwards, “Introduction,” xii; Beck, “Demonax,” 93; Freyne, “Gospel,” 66. Frickenschmidt, Evangelium, 505, finds this action emphasis esp. in Roman and Jewish biographies, but it might reflect the greater number of public figures in their extant samples.
49. Votaw, “Biographies,” 52; Adams, Genre, 91–92.
50. Adams, Genre, 92.
51. Pelling, “Biography, Greek,” 241–42; Adams, Genre, 79, 86–88, 102–4. Cf. also some of Josephus’s biographic material (see Van Veldhuizen, “Moses,” 215–24).
52. Adams, Genre, 95, citing Suda K 227.
53. Laistner, Historians, 18.
54. Hägg, Biography, 187; Tieleman, “Orality,” 30; cf. also fragments of lives from the early empire (Hägg, Biography, 283).
55. Alexander, “Biography,” 56; cf. Alexander, Context, 43–68. On philosophic biography, see briefly Stadter, “Biography,” 529–30.
56. See Kennedy, “Source Criticism,” 134 (noting that Plato began writing about Socrates within a decade of Socrates’s death); cf. Tieleman, “Orality,” 30, 35. Plato exercised great freedoms, although the likely anachronism in Alcibiades II 141D is from a later work not genuinely by Plato.
57. Pelling, “Biography, Greek,” 242; cf. Walbank and Stewart, “Antigonus.”
58. Frickenschmidt, Evangelium, 168.
59. Frickenschmidt, Evangelium, 170–71.
60. Adams, Genre, 89, also treats Lucian’s Nigrinus as a positive biography and Alexander and Peregrinus as negative ones, though these designations define biography rather broadly.
61. Bowie, “Portrait,” 143, noting Philostratus, Lives of the Sophists 1.1–8.
62. Bowie, “Portrait,” 143.
63. Bowie, “Portrait,” 143, cites Jones, “Reliability.”
64. Bowie, “Portrait,” 143, noting for the controls Swain, “Reliability.”
65. Bowie, “Portrait,” 143, noting Lives of the Sophists 1.25; 2.1.
66. Geiger, Nepos, 28.
67. E.g., Votaw, “Biographies,” 54, 217–49; Culpepper, Gospel and Letters, 64–66.
68. Cf. Xenophon, Memorabilia; Polybius, Histories 12.25e.1; Kennedy, “Source Criticism,” 129–37; Laistner, Historians, 33–37. Some later examples of this form may borrow the gospel form (see Dillon and Hershbell, “Introduction,” 25).
69. E.g., Quintilian, Orator’s Education 11.2.2, 25; Seneca, To Lucilius 108.6; Epictetus, Discourses pref.2; for further discussion, see ch. 15.
70. Cf. Arrian’s Life of Epictetus, no longer extant (Votaw, “Biographies,” 56).
71. Epictetus, Discourses pref.2–3.
72. Hägg, Biography, 163.
73. Burridge, “Review,” 476–77, notes the frequency of disproportionate attention to highlighted periods in other biographies (cf. Hägg’s own comments in, e.g., Biography, 208, 293).
74. Talbert, Patterns, 125–40; see also Schneider, “Zweck.”
75. E.g., Smith, “Genre,” 198–200; Smith, βίος, 34–35; Chance, “Perspectives,” 200; Aune, Environment, 78–79; Balch, “Genre,” 6; Sterling, Historiography, 319–20.
76. Talbert, Mediterranean Milieu, 50–55, esp. 52; cf. Talbert, Acts, xix–xx; Keener, Acts, 1:712–13.
77. Fitzgerald, “Lives,” 215 (following Hope, Book, 59–60); Long and Sharples, “Diogenes Laertius,” 475; cf. Frickenschmidt, Evangelium, 182–83. For a list of about seventy biographic works that Diogenes cites, see Adams, Genre, 261–63; for an extensive list of biographic literature (defined generally), see Berger, “Gattungen,” 1232–36; in summary form, Smith, βίος, 216–17; for those from the fourth century BCE through the third century CE, distinguishing full from fragmentary and contemporary from noncontemporary biographies, see Kwon, “Reimagining,” 145–50.
78. Long, “Introduction,” xix.
79. Southerland, “Valuation,” 5, finds awareness of twenty-three sources here. In the seventy-one sections that Southerland sampled, Diogenes cites sources at least 127 times.
80. Southerland, “Valuation,” 7–8.
81. Long and Sharples, “Diogenes Laertius,” 475.
82. Diogenes’s interest in collecting material fits trends of his era, exemplified also in the Mishnah and contemporary Christian sources (Grafton, “Inspiration,” 554).
83. Janácek, “Diogenes Laertius,” on Diogenes Laertius, Lives 9.11.97–99, and Sextus Empiricus, Against the Mathematicians 9.207–17; Janácek, “Diogenes Laertius IX,” on Diogenes Laertius, Lives 9.101, and Sextus Empiricus, Against the Mathematicians 9.69–75, both as cited in Southerland, “Valuation,” 17. His internal cross-references are mostly accurate (Long, “Introduction,” xviii), and he is “basically honest,” though uncritical (xxiii).
84. Tieleman, “Orality,” 30.
85. Fitzgerald, “Lives,” 216, 219; Long and Sharples, “Diogenes Laertius,” 475; Long, “Introduction,” xxii.
86. Dillon, “Doctrines”; Long, “Introduction,” xvii.
87. Dillon, “Doctrines,” 594; cf. 597.
88. Dillon, “Doctrines,” 597. For a brief history of reception of Cynicism from Plutarch and esp. Lucian to Diogenes Laertius, see Branham, “Cynicism,” 601–2.
89. Adams, Genre, 106.
90. See Schofield, “Philosophers,” 570–71.
91. Adams, Genre, 106–7.
92. Ytterbrink, Gospel, 112, citing, e.g., Diogenes Laertius, Lives 2.44. Note also the interest in varied perspectives in Plutarch (De Pourcq and Roskam, “Virtues,” 170) and Suetonius (Edwards, “Introduction,” xxv).
93. Sotion in Diogenes Laertius, Lives 9.2.20 (Southerland, “Valuation,” 18).
94. Southerland, “Valuation,” 16, noting Diogenes Laertius, Lives 9.11.70; 10.3–12. He notes Diogenes’s generally extreme approaches to sources on Pyrrho, yet his relatively neutral framing of these. On Diogenes’s treatment of the Skeptic Pyrrho and of Epicurus, see respectively Allen, “Skeptics,” 613–14, and “Epicurus.”
95. Long, “Introduction,” xvii–xviii; Laks, “Diogenes Laertius,” 590. His only passionate passage is a defense of Epicurus at 10.3–12 (Long, “Introduction,” xviii).
96. Miller, “Introduction (Diogenes),” ix. He may reveal his opinions more in his (poetically inferior) epigrams (Gutzwiller, “Epigrams,” 561).
97. Romm, “Humor,” 569–70.
98. Long, “Introduction,” xxiv. (Diogenes in turn became a source for later compilers; cf. Dorandi, “Diogenes Laertius,” 583–84.) Still, sometimes he does seem aware of, and distinguishes between, authentic and inauthentic works (Cambiano, “Diogenes Laertius,” 576).
99. So, e.g., Most, “Diogenes Laertius and Nietzsche,” 622.
100. Southerland, “Valuation,” 20.
101. Southerland, “Valuation,” 19, following and applying Alfred, “Valuation,” 78.
102. Collins, Mark, 31; Fitzgerald, “Lives,” 220–21. For his irreverence, see, e.g., Romm, “Humor.”
103. Adams, Genre, 251. Mejer, “Diogenes Laertius,” as cited in Adams, Genre, 107, does view it as biography more than a history of philosophy.
104. Cf. Hägg, Biography, 312. Still, he tends to favor the earliest sources.
105. Momigliano, Development, 88.
106. Cf. Chitwood, Death, 20–23, 47, 114–15, 182.
107. Of these, only the biography of Demonax stems from both living memory and the historiographic apex era of ancient biography.
108. See discussion in Sanders, Jesus and Judaism, 234, 307, 321–22 (cf. eschatological viceroy on 242); Chilton, “Announcement,” 168; Brown, Death, 473–80.
109. Moses is king as well as prophet, priest, and lawgiver in Philo; see, e.g., Moses 1.60; 2.2, 66, 187, 292; for Moses as king, see also Deut 33:5; Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 4.327; LAB 9:16; 20:5; Meeks, Prophet-King, 107–17, 147–50, 177–79, 181–96, 236. Joseph is a statesman in Philo, Joseph 1; more than 40 percent of the term’s instances in the Philonic corpus appear in Joseph.
110. Frickenschmidt, Evangelium, 169.