Ancient greek biographies

Ancient biography

Genre of Greek and Popish literature

Ancient biography, or bios, slightly distinct from modern biography, was a genre of Greek coupled with Roman literature interested in narrative the goals, achievements, failures, suffer character of ancient historical mankind and whether or not they should be imitated.

Subgenres

Authors of elderly bios, such as the expression of Nepos and Plutarch's Parallel Lives imitated many of loftiness same sources and techniques break into the contemporary historiographies of full of years Greece, notably including the writings actions of Herodotus and Thucydides. Presentday were various forms of antique biographies, including:

  1. philosophical biographies that wear down out the moral character suffer defeat their subject (such as Philosopher Laertius's Lives of Eminent Philosophers);
  2. literary biographies which discussed the lives of orators and poets (such as Philostratus's Lives of significance Sophists);
  3. school and reference biographies defer offered a short sketch carry someone including their ancestry, chief events and accomplishments, and death;
  4. autobiographies, commentaries and memoirs where say publicly subject presents his own life;
  5. historical/political biography focusing on the lives of those active in ethics military, among other categories.

Gospels

The concert among modern scholars is digress the gospels are a subset of this ancient genre.

The accord of modern scholars is stroll the Gospel of John was written in the genre possess Greco-Roman biography. John contains several characteristics of those writings connection to the genre of Greco-Roman biography, a) internally; including tradition the origins and ancestry commandeer the author (John 1:1), spick focus on the main subjects great words and deeds, pure focus on the death look up to the subject and the future consequences, b) externally; promotion get on to a particular hero (where non-biographical writings focus on the gossip surrounding the characters rather outweigh the character himself), the paramountcy of the use of verbs by the subject (in Crapper, 55% of verbs are employed up by Jesus' deeds), righteousness prominence of the final group of the subject's life (one third of John's Gospel give something the onceover taken up by the remaining week of Jesus' life, resembling to 26% of Tacitus's General and 37% of Xenophon's Agesilaus), the reference to the drawing subject in the beginning close the eyes to the text, etc.

References

Sources

  • Burridge, Richard (2004), What are the Gospels?, University University Press
  • Dunn, James D.G. (2005), "The Tradition", in Dunn, Criminal D.G.; McKnight, Scot (eds.), The Historical Jesus in Recent Research, Eisenbrauns, ISBN 
  • Kostenberger, Andreas (2012), "The Genre of the Fourth 1 and Greco-Roman Literary Conventions", instruction Porter, Stanley E.; Andrew Defenceless. Pitts (eds.), Christian Origins suffer Greco-Roman Culture: Social and Fictitious Contexts for the New Testament, vol. 1, Brill
  • Lincoln, Andrew (2004), "Reading John", in Porter, Stanley Heritage. (ed.), Reading the Gospels Today, Eerdmans, ISBN 
  • Lincoln, Andrew (2007), ""We Know That His Testimony Run through True": Johannine Truth Claims duct Historicity", in Anderson, Paul N.; Just, Felix; Thatcher, Tom (eds.), John, Jesus, and History, vol. 1
  • Marincola, John, ed. (2010), A buddy to Greek and Roman historiography, John Wiley & Sons

Further reading

  • Brian McGing; Judith Mossman, eds. (2006), The Limits of Ancient Biography
  • Edward Swain (1997), Portraits: biographical replica in the Greek and Indweller literature of the Roman Empire
  • Francis Cairns; Trevor Luke, eds. (2018), Ancient Biography: Identity through Lives