Chapter 76 of 404

Drama or Mythography?

Not all literary works concerning specific characters were biographies. At the same time, all four canonical Gospels are a far cry from some other genres. Whether or not influenced by drama, clearly they were not written as Greek plays, which were composed in poetry.³⁷

Mythography could recycle oral tradition,³⁸ but involved the distant past, not recent historical individuals. Whatever one thinks of the Gospels’ accounts of healings and a smattering of other miracles, they remain a far cry from the entertaining, fanciful metamorphosis stories, fantastic creatures, divine rapes, and so forth in a compilation like Ovid’s Metamorphoses. If some writers today treat the Gospels’ reports of healings as similar to mythography, it is because of modern western cultural biases that coalesce diverse kinds of paranormal claims, not a matter of genre. Ancient historians often included reports of unusual phenomena, yet most focused on the real world that differed significantly from mythographers’ focus. Indeed, tens of thousands of people today claim eyewitness experience of supernaturally empowered recoveries, and whether or not we agree with their interpretation of their experience, the genre of their reports is not typically mythography.³⁹ Mythography in this period normally also addressed mythic topics (like Ovid’s Metamorphoses) or primeval times (e.g., Apollodorus).⁴⁰

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