Are the Gospels ancient early-empire histories/biographies of Jesus?

Do the Gospels implicitly self-identify as information-based Greco-Roman biographies, comparable to Suetonius’ Lives of the Caesars? Are they likewise comparable to to Tacitus’ Agricola, Plutarch’s Cato Minor, Lucian’s Demonax, and Philostratus’ Apollonius of Tyana? Do the Gospels fit well within the recognized genre of Greco-Roman “bioi” (biography), or—in the case Luke-Acts—Greco-Roman historical monograph more broadly?

• Craig Keener: “Most Gospels scholars today view the Gospels as belonging to the genre of ancient biography. Both supporters and detractors now recognize this general consensus…. Arguments concerning the biographical character of the Gospels have thus come full circle: the Gospels, long viewed as biographies of some sort until the early twentieth century, now are widely viewed as biographies again.” [Christobiography (Eerdmans, 2019), 41, 43.]
• 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): ]

This all stands despite a few dissenters:

• Richard Pervo: “[The Gospels] can be understood as fictional biographies roughly analogous to the Alexander-Romance, the Life of Aesop, or Philostratus's novel about Apollonius of Tyana. The activity of shaping various independent stories about Jesus into a coherent narrative plot required compositional strategies very much like those about Jesus into a coherent narrative plot required compositional strategies very much like those of fiction. [“The Ancient Novel Becomes Christian," in The Novel in the Ancient World, ed. Schmeling (Brill, 1996), 689.]

The conclusion that the gospels are Greco-Roman biographies represents an exciting and dramatic change in more recent New Testament studies. As one scholar explains:

• Michael Licona: “In the middle of the twentieth century, most New Testament scholars regarded the Gospels as sui generis. Then in 1977, Charles Talbert proposed that the Gospels belong to the genre of Greco-Roman biography, and others made similar proposals in the years that followed.Richard Burridge believed their conclusions were mistaken and set out to refute them. To his surprise, he concluded that the Gospels indeed belong to Greco-Roman biography, and his resulting book, What Are the Gospels?, has become the definitive treatment on the subject. Today, a growing majority of scholars regard the Gospels as Greco-Roman biography. [Why are there differences in the Gospels? (Oxford, 2016), 3.]
• Craig Keener: “It was his resulting forceful Cambridge monograph that largely effected the paradigm shift in Gospels studies. He shows how both the Synoptics and John fit this genre.” [Christobiography, 43.]

Burridge listed features which must be analyzed to determine a work’s genre:

• Opening Features (Title, Opening formulae/prologue/preface)
• Subject (Analysis of the verbs' subjects, Allocation of space)
• External Features (Mode of presentation [e.g. oral, prose, drama, voice], Metre, Size and length, Structure or sequence, Scale, Literary units, Use of Sources, Methods of Characterization, Summary
• Internal Features (Setting, Topics/topoi/motifs, Style, Tone/mood/attitude/values, Quality of characterization, Social setting and occasion, Authorial intention and purpose, Summary)

He then analyzed these features in the following:

[5 Earlier Biographies:]
Isocrates (436-338bc) Evagoras
Xenophon (427-354bc) Agesilaus
Satyrus (2nd century BC) Euripides
Nepos (99bc-24bc) Atticus
Philo (30bc-45ad) Moses

[5 Later Biographies:]
Tacitus (56ad-113) Agricola
Plutarch (45ad-120ad) Cato Minor
Suetonius (69ad-122?) Lives of the Caesars
Lucian (120ad-180+) Demonax
Philostratus (170ad-250) Apollonius of Tyrana

Finally, he examined the gospels for these features and concludes:

• Richard Burridge: “Thus, there is a high degree of correlation between the generic features of Graeco-Roman Bioi and those of the synoptic gospels; in fact, they exhibit more of the features than are shown by works at the edges of the genre, such as those of Isocrates, Xenophon and Philostratus. This is surely a sufficient number of shared features for the genre of the synoptic gospels to be clear; while they may well form their own subgenre because of their shared content, the synoptic gospels belong within the overall genre of Bioi.” [What are the Gospels, 218] (Note: He concludes the same for the Gospel of John, p. 239)

The following opinion represents what most scholars will say these days on the subject:

• Charles Talbert: “This volume [Burridge’s] ought to end any legitimate denials of the canonical Gospels’ biographical character.” [Review of What Are the Gospels? by Richard A. Burridge. JBL 112 (4, 1993): 715.]