Originally Posted by aa5874

Biographies are of a REAL person's life.

Originally Posted by Ben C Smith

This has been proven to be false, and in terms that a 12-year-old could understand, and yet you go on. Why am I not surprised?

Ben.

Originally Posted by dog-on

So, I take it that you have no example. You should have just said so.

Originally Posted by dog-on

But doesn't Herodotus actually claim to be writing history, ie, 'The Histories'?

Originally Posted by Ben C Smith

I think you are confusing several different issues (and in several different ways). You seem to be looking for a single text that (A) offers fantastical events, (B) contains no claims of any kind to be writing history, and (C) contains no references to sources.

There are several things to sort out in this search, and the very way in which you frame the search implies to me that you need to do more research on the ancient distinctions. There are ancient biographies, for example, that contain fantastical events, and there are ancient biographies that contain no claims to be writing history (more on that below), and there are ancient biographies that offer no sources. Is there a single text (besides Mark and Matthew) that does all three things at once? Offhand, I am not certain. And, offhand, I do not see how it matters for the genre classification (though it may certainly matter for how seriously we take the work within that genre; not all poems are great poems, not all history is great history, and not all biography is great biography), for the simple reason that nobody supposes that any one of those three things is the sine qua non for any genre.

Let us take the Life of Alexander by Plutarch as an example. (A) Does it contain fantastical events? Indeed it does. In fact, the very first thing said about Alexander is that he was descended from Hercules through his father, who had spied on his wife lying with the god Ammon, who had taken the form of a serpent. (B) Does it lack a claim to be writing history? Yes; better yet, Plutarch explicitly tells us in the prologue that he is not writing history; he is writing biography. This is what leads me to suspect that you have not fully thought out the implications of these ancient genres; you keep talking about history instead of biography. (C) Does it contain references to sources? Yes, it does. Often these sources are anonymous (it is said, we are told, agreed by all). Sometimes particular sources are mentioned (Callisthenes and Cleitarchus, for example).

So is the Life of Alexander a perfect match for, say, the gospel of Mark? Of course not. There are no perfect matches for any of these texts. Each has to be taken on its own merits. And Mark, taken on its own merits, as has been argued before, would have to be classified as biography (or as nothing at all, sui generis, which I think has been aptly deflated). That does not mean it has to be a good biography or an accurate biography; it may be no more historical than the Life of Romulus.

What this means, however, is that your approach is too simplistic. You point to Jesus seeing a vision of the holy spirit and being tempted by Satan in the desert, note how early this vision comes in the text, and then proclaim:

By these criteria (fantastical event, early in the text) the Life of Alexander is a work of fiction. (You must have added the criteria of historical claim and source material later on in the conversation; nothing of those appears yet at this stage.) Obviously fantastical events early in the text do not make the text a work of fiction.

And notice that you are the one making the claim here. Only later in the debate with Amaleq13 did you start asking him to prove that Mark claimed to be writing history (which is in itself a category mistake, as I have shown). Originally your claim was that (A) fantastical events which (B) come early in the narrative are an indication of fiction. The burden is on you to show that this is so. You need to compare Mark to ancient works written in some genre implying fiction (the novel, perhaps) in order to establish that Mark was buying into that genre by placing a fantastical event early in his narrative.

Ben.

Originally Posted by dog-on

Ben, I have no issue with what you have posted and basically agree, but that isn't what I was debating Amaleq about.

Originally Posted by Clivedurdle

Not sure if this might help the discussion:

Heroes and Gods: Spiritual Biographies in Antiquity (Religious Perspectives - Volume Thirteen) (Hardcover) by Moses and Smith, Morton Hadas (Author) (or via: amazon.co.uk)