The Gospels vs Ancient Biography: Class Analysis Supports the Resurrection

Pre-canonical Greco-Roman biography was written only for the elite classes; no known lower-class biography exists from that era. By scholarly consensus Jesus Christ was of the lower classes, yet four Greco-Roman biographies of Christ exist in the form of the Gospels. Based on Plutarch's Parallel Lives, Suetonius' Lives of the Caesars, sixteen other pre-canonical biographies and two Gospel groupings, we find strong quantitative evidence against the null hypothesis, H0, of no association for this biography class relationship, with Fisher's exact test p = 0.00032. We assess scenarios for and against the Resurrection using Bayesian analysis, with resulting Bayes factors of 5.08x10^7 and 0.54 respectively and address the issue of possibly lost lower-class biography using sensitivity analysis. We conclude that the biography class relationship adds to the body of evidence supporting belief in the Resurrection.