Christian Biography

This chapter addresses Christian biography. The Christian biographical tradition is simultaneously fundamental to the early Church and also fundamentally different from Graeco-Roman biographical traditions. This difference emerges from the distinctive discourse of the canonical gospels. These foundational texts were not sui generis across the board in terms of form and genre, but their distinctive discourse and their devotion to narrative as a standard of orthodoxy, combined with their role as historical and theological authorities in the Church, gave them a paradigmatic status never held by Graeco-Roman—or even most Jewish—biographies in their own reception histories. The chapter traces this influence by means of comparison with various genres that arose subsequent to the canonical gospels and with direct reference to them: apocryphal literature, saints’ Lives, and miracle collections, among others.