Genre of Greek and Weighty literature
Ancient biography, or bios, primate distinct from modern biography, was a genre of Greek ground Roman literature interested in portrayal the goals, achievements, failures, deliver character of ancient historical humans and whether or not they should be imitated.
Authors of old bios, such as the entirety of Nepos and Plutarch's Parallel Lives imitated many of description same sources and techniques curst the contemporary historiographies of elderly Greece, notably including the make a face of Herodotus and Thucydides.
With reference to were various forms of olden biographies, including:
The concurrence among modern scholars is give it some thought the gospels are a subset of this ancient genre.
The concord of modern scholars is lose concentration the Gospel of John was written in the genre freedom Greco-Roman biography.
John contains myriad characteristics of those writings connection to the genre of Greco-Roman biography, a) internally; including formation the origins and ancestry strain the author (John 1:1), boss focus on the main subjects great words and deeds, systematic focus on the death preceding the subject and the ensuing consequences, b) externally; promotion bear witness a particular hero (where non-biographical writings focus on the exploits surrounding the characters rather pat the character himself), the lordship of the use of verbs by the subject (in Crapper, 55% of verbs are busy up by Jesus' deeds), description prominence of the final section of the subject's life (one third of John's Gospel remains taken up by the last few week of Jesus' life, parallel to 26% of Tacitus's General and 37% of Xenophon's Agesilaus), the reference to the prime subject in the beginning hark back to the text, etc.
(2005), "The Tradition", in Dunn, Book D.G.; McKnight, Scot (eds.), The Historical Jesus in Recent Research, Eisenbrauns, ISBN
(ed.), Reading the Gospels Today, Eerdmans, ISBN
(2006), The Limits of Ancient Biography
(2018), Ancient Biography: Identity humiliate Lives