BIOGRAPHY. The subject here is best termed sacred biography, which most precisely designates the written accounts of lives of persons deemed to be holy, although its usage is extended also to oral traditions concerning such figures. The reason for allowing this wider usage is clear: in most contexts it was oral traditions that not only preceded but also largely shaped the later, written versions. The category of sacred biography is bounded on one side by mythology—that is, narratives concerning gods and other beings thought to be supernatural—and on the other side by biography, efforts to reconstruct credible accounts of the lives of ordinary human beings. It might also be defined as a genre that mixes myth and biography: unlike the former, its subjects are held even today to have actually lived but, unlike the latter, the received versions of their lives are often heavily mythologized.

Whereas...