They were. Every author is. The question of genre, however, allows one to restrict the range a bit. Not as much as today, certainly (where we have historical fiction, sci-fi, fantasy, novels, historical novels, etc.). But what we think of as classic "myths" (stories about Herakles, Troy, Odysseus, and so forth) were types of genre to the Greeks and Romans (and in other cultures as well). Some were poetic (which again means set in meter), others drama/plays (also in meter). But they shared certain features other than including the miraculous, magic, demi-gods, gods, and the things we tend to associate with myth.
A good analogy is the opening "once upon a time". When someone familiar with fairy tales told/written in English hears/reads this line, and it is followed by a story, that opening line tells us what to expect. We expect things like carriages turning into pumpkins, little german children being left to die out in the woods repeatedly until breadcrumbs are eaten and the kids get caught by a witch, and all the other elements of fairy tales. We don't expect "once upon a time, the authors used mahalanobis distance as a dissimilarity metric in their cluster analysis of ordinal variables on a likert scale prior to reducing set dimensionality by..." etc.
Likewise with "To whom it may concern" or "Dear Sir", which tend to be followed by a letter. Luke may be the only gospel that opens with a statement of purpose, but it's so blatantly obvious that all of the gospels are different than myth (or would be obvious to a reader/hearer in the first few centuries) that this is no more necessary then signifying that one is going to be reciting some epic myth by asking the muse for help. The meter alone would, but if that weren't enough, phrases like "shining Achilles" (dios Achilleus) or kouresi...Okeanou bathukolpois (deep-breasted maidens/daughters of Ocean) and similar epithets would make it clear.
History became "history" (the study of the past rather than mere story-telling) because a particular story-teller (Herodotus) used it in the opening of his work, which differed from most stories in the amount of detail and balance his "inquiries" had relative to rumour or stories in general. But he and other historians still talked about myths, and especially when it came to biographies. The point was to tell as story about the person. It was supposed to be real, yes, but that doesn't mean believable by any modern standard. More importantly, in more straightforward history (rather than proto-biographies), time was much more important in the narrative. From Mark to John to Plutarch, events/deeds were much more important than the actual order of these. Even more so for e.g., Xenophon's depiction of Socrates in his memorabilia.
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