Abstract:

The lives of the philosophers and Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles spread in the same period, between the second and third century. Both types of text share several features, but each belongs to a different literary genre. Nevertheless, the similarities between the portraits of the philosophers and the apostles encouraged the choice of the biographic genre by the hagiography of the fourth century. In this paper we aim to analyse the overlaps between these two traditions and demonstrate the influence of the lives of the philosophers on the emergence of the lives of the saints.