Caleb Friedeman
I’m basically looking for biographers who wrote within a century of the Gospels on either side. And I’m also looking ideally for biographers who have written more than one biography that has birth material we can look at because a sample size of only one biography for an author isn’t the most helpful. I end up going with Cornelius Nepos, and he is actually our first Roman biographer. And then I do Philo, who only has one biography, his Life of Moses. But that has been such a major player in these discussions. Because it’s our only Jewish biography at all that it’s worth dealing with, even given that we only have the one. And then I also do Plutarch. Of course, many people are going to be familiar with Plutarch’s Lives, and those are some of our most important sources for reconstructing what ancient biography was like. And then I do Suetonius as well. I spend a chapter on each of those authors.
Just a little bit of the backstory of this book too. I mentioned earlier that there are these scholars who are making these cases about ancient biographies. When I was getting into scholarship, even preparing for PhD work, I started to read this scholarly literature about gospel birth narratives. And it wasn’t just about the historical parts. I was just reading things like Raymond Brown’s Birth of the Messiah and reading a whole range of works about the gospel birth narratives. And I kept encountering this claim by various authors that this material wasn’t intended to be historical. They were citing ancient biographies
to back this up. And at some point, I just said to myself, okay, I want to go read this stuff for myself and see what’s going on.
I started reading the kinds of biographies that were cited. For example, Plutarch’s Life of Alexander or Romulus or Suetonius Biography of Augustus. I just kept noticing these features that didn’t really track with the story I’d been told about what these biographies were supposed to be doing. For example, they would do things like cite sources for the information they were giving. Well, that’s an odd thing to do if you’re just writing something that’s meant to be legendary. I don’t find a lot of source citation in fairy tales. I would see something like that, or I would find a biographer mentioning differences among their sources. There are three accounts of how this happened. Here’s how the first one goes. Here’s how the second one goes. Here’s how the third one goes. And then they might even go further and say, and I’m going to evaluate these and tell you which one I think is the most accurate or truthful. Or maybe I’ll come up with my own reconstruction of what’s going on.
And then one last thing is they would sometimes distance themselves from more miraculous or supernatural kinds of claims, or just more fantastic kinds of things. What I mean by distancing is basically putting distance between their authorial reputation and the claim that’s being made. Instead of simply asserting that, a God had intercourse with the subject’s mother and then that led to this person being born. They might say it is said that and then give the tradition. Plutarch might not want to be held accountable for that material, but it allows him to pass on this information into sources without taking responsibility for it, which again, indicates a historiographic consciousness.
Those four things that I just mentioned, I call those historiographic features, and they’re the basis of the analysis in this book. Those would be sources. And by that, I mean citation of sources in some form or indication that an author has sources. And then transparency, that’s where you note differences between accounts. Then evaluation, where you evaluate the trustworthiness of those accounts, and then distancing, where you distance your reputation from a claim. I basically use those as at least one key part of my analysis when I get to these ancient biographers, and then also when I talk about the gospel birth narratives in part two.
David Capes
You have these criteria that you’ve looked at and evaluating. Now, Plutarch writes, in his Lives, I think about 50 plus different people. But he doesn’t give birth narratives to everyone right?
Caleb Friedeman
Correct!
David Capes
So, birth narratives aren’t necessarily a given feature of every biography.
Caleb Friedeman
Yes, that’s right. I would say some people have failed to notice that, and other folks have noticed that, but failed to consider the significance. One of the things that I talk about for Cornelius Nepos, Plutarch and Suetonius, because that’s the only place where you have the opportunity to talk about absence. Because obviously Philo has got birth material, so he’s not going to have absence because he has no other biography. When I am looking at these authors that have multiple ancient biographies, one of the things I talk about is how we make sense of the absence of birth material from their biographies.
So not only do we find historiographic features in the birth material of many of these biographies, we also find that many of their biographies don’t have any birth material at all, or that the amount varies a lot. In some cases, you might have only a line or a sentence or two on somebody, or just even a very short sentence, if they’re just spinning all this out of whole cloth, and they don’t need any sources. They’re just making stuff up. Why not just have the same amount of birth material for everyone, or have the amount of birth material scale to how much they like the figure that they’re writing about. Which, again, just doesn’t seem to be the case.
You find all kinds of places where you don’t have that kind of scaling. For example, I believe Thrasybulus is one of Cornelius Nepos favorite subjects, and he doesn’t give him birth material. Why? If all this stuff is meant to be is some sort of legendary, non-historical anticipation of what this person is going to become as an adult. It just doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense. I think that the better explanation for that absence is actually that the reason we have absence, in some cases, is either because the biographer lacks sources, which is the kind of problem a historian or a historical biographer would have for sure. Or the information in their sources just wasn’t relevant or interesting enough to include. But what that really keeps out of bounds is the idea that, they’re just making this stuff up.
David Capes
Yes. I like that. I think that’s an important part of the argument. Now, what we find too, in the New Testament is that Mark begins and has no birth narrative. And same thing is said of the Gospel of John as well. There’s not really a birth narrative. There’s a theological prologue in John that talks about his pre-existence. But that seems to be of a different class than saying the things that you say in these birth narratives.
Caleb Friedeman
Yes, I would say the fact that Mark and John don’t have what we might call a birth narrative proper has actually become a lot less surprising to me the more that I’ve studied ancient biographies Because you just begin to recognize this is not a requirement or even a norm necessarily that you’re going to have these. There are too many exceptions to say that this was a universal requirement, or even something that was odd to leave out.
Just for example, as you look across those four authors that I mentioned, Nepos, Philo, Plutarch and Suetonius, I analyze 95 biographies from those authors. I can only discuss so many of those in detail in the chapters, but I give tables at the end of the book in appendices that actually give an analysis of historiographic features of things like omens and miracles if they’re there. Then something called time elapsed, which we can come back to. But I give my analysis and those tables at the back.
If you go through and look, I also talk about where the birth material actually is in each life. I think it’s 18 of the 95 that don’t have any birth material whatsoever. And then that’s even being very gracious, because I’m counting things like, if there’s a sentence that pertains to the person’s childhood or birth. I’m including that as birth material. So on that count, actually, if you were to grant that any kind of claim about someone’s childhood or birth counts as birth material, then you might say that Mark and John have a little bit because, you’ll find a mention about being the son of Mary or the son of Joseph.
David Capes
And it’d not necessarily in the first chapter or the first writing that you encounter, but you encounter in the story that he has brothers and sister and those types of things.
Caleb Friedeman
And by the way, if you want to say, let’s not count that kind of stuff, and you then had a harder line analysis for all these other ancient biographies that I deal with. Well, you might end up saying that a lot more than 18 don’t have birth material.
David Capes
Yes, exactly.
Caleb Friedeman
I just say that I think what we find as you cross the four Gospels and whether or not they have birth material is within the range of what we’d expect for ancient biographies. I don’t think that it’s particularly unusual that Mark and John don’t have a birth narrative, and then that Matthew and Luke do.
