Ancient biography, or bios, as distinct from modern biography, was a genreofGreek and Roman literature interested in describing the goals, achievements, failures, and character of ancient historical persons and whether or not they should be imitated.[1]
Authors of ancient bios, such as the works of Nepos and Plutarch's Parallel Lives imitated many of the same sources and techniques of the contemporary historiographies of ancient Greece, notably including the works of Herodotus and Thucydides. There were various forms of ancient biographies, including:[1]
The consensus among modern scholars is that the gospels are a subset of this ancient genre.[2]
The consensus of modern scholars is that the Gospel of John was written in the genre of Greco-Roman biography.[3][4] John contains many characteristics of those writings belonging to the genre of Greco-Roman biography, a) internally; including establishing the origins and ancestry of the author (John 1:1), a focus on the main subjects great words and deeds, a focus on the death of the subject and the subsequent consequences, b) externally; promotion of a particular hero (where non-biographical writings focus on the events surrounding the characters rather than the character himself), the domination of the use of verbs by the subject (in John, 55% of verbs are taken up by Jesus' deeds), the prominence of the final portion of the subject's life (one third of John's Gospel is taken up by the last week of Jesus' life, comparable to 26% of Tacitus's Agricola and 37% of Xenophon's Agesilaus), the reference to the main subject in the beginning of the text, etc.[5]
