I'm fascinated by the idea of multiple journal articles addressing a single person's life from different angles.

The "book anthology of chapters" about the life/works/influence of a single figure is quite common. Sometimes it's the result of a conference; sometimes it's a coordinated CFP. The Cambridge Companion series has volumes on e.g. Bob Dylan, Charles Darwin, and Herodotus. As a grad student RA, I've helped proofread/edit articles destined for volumes dedicated to 13th century theologian Bonaventure, which as a whole was more focused on his works; on the holy women of Liege, which was more about their lives and reception of the hagiographies about them (since we have no surviving texts by them, if they wrote); and on 13th/14th century mystic Marguerite Porete, whom I discussed in the recent Floating Feature thread on badass women. :)

In medieval, at least, we also have entire journals dedicated to a person/life/work, and I can't imagine this is unique to us especially in religion. Some of them, like the Gutenberg Jahrbuch, have articles only tangentially and occasionally linked to their namesake. But then there's something like the International Piers Plowman Society, centered around a single 14th-century text whose author (William Langland, by scholarly consensus) remains elusive, and their annual Yearbook of Langland Studies is article after article about PP.