The Gospels are Greco-Roman historical biographies

Are the gospels and Acts comparable to Suetonius’ Lives of the Caesars, Tacitus’ Agricola, Plutarch’s Cato Minor, Lucian’s Demonax, and Philostratus’ Apollonius of Tyana? Here is what the experts say:

• Philip Stadter: “Philosophical biography brought out the moral character of its subjects and the relation of their teachings to their lives. Aristoxenus, a pupil of Aristotle, wrote on Pythagoras, Archytas, Socrates, and Plato; Hermippus in the third century wrote Lives of many philosophers, as well as lawgivers and other figures. Diogenes Laertius’ extant Lives of the Philosophers continues the tradition. Since such lives are usually heavy in sayings, as in Lucian’s Demonax, they may be difficult to distinguish from apophthegm collections. The Gospels also belong to this category, as does Philostratus’ novelistic Life of Apollonius of Tyana.” [“Biography and History” in A Companion to Greek and Roman Historiography vol. 2 (), 528, 530.]
• David Aune: “Craig Keener argues convincingly that ancient readers of Greek and Latin biographies from the period of the early Roman Empire (e.g., Cornelius Nepos, Plutarch, Suetonius, and Tacitus) had the same expectation as those who read the Gospels, expecting them to preserve the gist of what their subjects had actually said and done.” [Christobiography (Eerdmans, 2019), 3.]
• Vernon Robbins: “[There is c]omprehensive information showing the relation of New Testament Gospels to early Roman Empire biography” [Christobiography (Eerdmans, 2019), 2.]
• John Moles (Classicist): “[It was] always the obvious reading” [“Cynic Influence upon First-Century Judaism and Early Christianity?” in The Limits of Ancient Biography. Eds McGing & Mossman (Classical Press of Wales, 2006), 99.]
• Graham Stanton: “…the gospels are now widely considered to be a sub-set of the broad ancient literary genre of biographies.” [Jesus and Gospel (Cambridge, 2004), 192.]
• R.T. France: “[f]ifty years ago we were drilled in the critical orthodoxy of the form-critical school which insisted that the gospels were not to be seen as biographies, but since then there has been a massive swing in scholarly opinion on this point, and increasingly sophisticated study of the nature of biographical writing in the ancient world has led to a general recognition that, for all the distinctiveness of its Christian content and orientation, in terms of literary form Mark’s book (and those of Matthew, Luke and John) would have seemed to an educated reader in the first century to fall into roughly the same category as the lives of famous men pioneered by Cornelius Nepos and soon to reach their most famous expression in the ‘Parallel Lives’ of Plutarch’.” [The Gospel of Mark (Eerdmans, 2002), 5.]
• Pheme Perkins: “Comparing the Synoptic Gospels with other ancient ‘lives’ makes a plausible case for regarding them as biographical rather than fictional in intent.” [Introduction to the Synoptic Gospels (Eerdmans, 2009), 2.]
• Richard Burridge: “[t]his biographical understanding of the gospel genre has been subsequently confirmed in similarly detailed work by Frickenschmidt (1997) and has now become the accepted scholarly consensus.” [“Gospel as Genre,” in Encyclopedia of the Historical Jesus, ed. Evans (Routledge, 2008), 234.]
• Richard Bauckham: “Lemcio’s work coheres strongly with the general, though quite recent, acceptance in Gospels scholarship that, generically, the Gospels are biography — or, more precisely, they are biographies (bioi) in the sense of ancient Greco-Roman biography.” [Jesus and the Eyewitnesses (Eerdmans, 2006), 276.]
• Grant Osborne: “The evangelists were anchoring their faith in the events of Jesus’ life, and so ‘the contemporary believer must go back to history.’ [“History and theology in the synoptic gospels” in TrinJ 24NS (2003): ]