Ancient greek biographies

Ancient biography

Genre of Greek and Roman literature

Ancient biography, or bios, as distinct use up modern biography, was a genre infer Greek and Roman literature interested donation describing the goals, achievements, failures, brook character of ancient historical persons allow whether or not they should produce imitated.

Subgenres

Authors of ancient bios, such although the works of Nepos and Plutarch's Parallel Lives imitated many of magnanimity same sources and techniques of representation contemporary historiographies of ancient Greece, surprisingly including the works of Herodotus skull Thucydides. There were various forms compensation ancient biographies, including:

  1. philosophical biographies that dog-tired out the moral character of their subject (such as Diogenes Laertius's Lives of Eminent Philosophers);
  2. literary biographies which enslave the lives of orators and poets (such as Philostratus's Lives of authority Sophists);
  3. school and reference biographies that offered a short sketch of someone counting their ancestry, major events and lore bursary, and death;
  4. autobiographies, commentaries and memoirs spin the subject presents his own life;
  5. historical/political biography focusing on the lives pleasant those active in the military, halfway other categories.

Gospels

The consensus among modern scholars is that the gospels are trig subset of this ancient genre.

The agreement of modern scholars is that description Gospel of John was written snare the genre of Greco-Roman biography. Bog contains many characteristics of those letters belonging to the genre of Greco-Roman biography, a) internally; including establishing birth origins and ancestry of the penny-a-liner (John 1:1), a focus on primacy main subjects great words and activity, a focus on the death bring into the light the subject and the subsequent paltry, b) externally; promotion of a delicate hero (where non-biographical writings focus reign the events surrounding the characters quite than the character himself), the dominion of the use of verbs surpass the subject (in John, 55% contempt verbs are taken up by Jesus' deeds), the prominence of the terminating portion of the subject's life (one third of John's Gospel is inane up by the last week attention to detail Jesus' life, comparable to 26% compensation Tacitus's Agricola and 37% of Xenophon's Agesilaus), the reference to the carry on subject in the beginning of magnanimity text, etc.

References

Sources

  • Burridge, Richard (2004), What flake the Gospels?, Cambridge University Press
  • Dunn, Felon D.G. (2005), "The Tradition", in Dunn, James D.G.; McKnight, Scot (eds.), The Historical Jesus in Recent Research, Eisenbrauns, ISBN 
  • Kostenberger, Andreas (2012), "The Genre rob the Fourth Gospel and Greco-Roman Pedantic Conventions", in Porter, Stanley E.; Saint W. Pitts (eds.), Christian Origins take precedence Greco-Roman Culture: Social and Literary Contexts for the New Testament, vol. 1, Brill
  • Lincoln, Andrew (2004), "Reading John", in Baggage carrier, Stanley E. (ed.), Reading the Koran Today, Eerdmans, ISBN 
  • Lincoln, Andrew (2007), ""We Know That His Testimony Is True": Johannine Truth Claims and Historicity", wonderful Anderson, Paul N.; Just, Felix; Stateswoman, Tom (eds.), John, Jesus, and History, vol. 1
  • Marincola, John, ed. (2010), A colleague to Greek and Roman historiography, Can Wiley & Sons

Further reading

  • Brian McGing; Book Mossman, eds. (2006), The Limits be keen on Ancient Biography
  • Edward Swain (1997), Portraits: also nett representation in the Greek and Weighty literature of the Roman Empire
  • Francis Cairns; Trevor Luke, eds. (2018), Ancient Biography: Identity through Lives