Pseudo-Jesus: Apollonius of Tyana

The shift from biography to hagiography is epitomized in the story of Apollonius of Tyana, a Pythagorean wonder-worker from first-century Syria whose life story shows remarkable parallels to the story of Jesus, and is allegedly based on the contemporary reminiscences of Apollonius’disciple Damis. A number of scholars have suggested that the Life of Apollonius falls into a special genre, ‘aretalogy’, which provides an alternative genre for the gospels. 40 But the existing biography of Apollonius was written in the third century CE by Philostratus; it is much longer and more elaborate than the gospels, and bears the rhetorical imprint of the Sophistic circles Philostratus moved in. Damis’reminiscences, on which it claims to be based, may be no more than an elaborate fiction; 41 and, by the third century, when Philostratus is writing, we have to reckon with the real possibility that the story of Apollonius is being consciously marketed as a pagan rival to the gospels. 42 Motifs found in the gospels can be paralleled with greater or lesser degrees of precision in pagan Greek literature, 43 but the precise literary form adopted by Mark’s performance of the Jesus story is hard to match in the Greek biographical tradition. Indeed, a recent study of biographic writing in the classical literature of the imperial period concludes that ‘the Gospels are almost unique as multiple, contemporary accounts of a single life’.


--- Cambridge Companion to Gospels