Further considerations about the criteria of authenticity and their uses and misuses in Historical Jesus studies

 Before discussing the main topic of this post, I want to do a preliminary (and off-topic) comment:

One problem that one often encounters on the internet is that many people are superficial, biased and utltimately incompetent readers. They interpret a post or article based upon their own prejudices, instead of accurately grasping the author's own purpose, meaning or intention. (Sometimes the author's style of writing is guilty of it and I'm sure I'm not an exception, but often are the readers themselves who misrepresent the article, due to their own prejudices or strong emotions about the matter). 

Moreover, they tend to like a website mainly when the author says things that the readers want to hear, which is telling not just of their prejudices and unability to think "outside the box", but of the largely emotional driving of their "feels good approach": Instead of searching for the truth (whatever it is and wherever it can lead us), they are searching mainly an emotional validation and confirmation of their worldview and belief-system, or a relief of their cognitive dissonance.

Based upon some e-mail correspondence that I've received, I've gotten the impression that the topic of Historical Jesus studies is very often misundertood, specially by people who has absolutely not idea about this field. The most common egregious example of this is when some readers conflate historical reflections or arguments about the Jesus with theological claims or conclusions about him.

For example, one reader asked me (about one of my posts on Antonio Piñero) "Are you saying that the criteria of authenticity made Jesus the Son of God?". Another one argued: "Even if Jesus said he was the Son of God, it doesn't mean he was something like that".

These comments reveal the confusion mentioned above and I'm shocked that so many people seem to be victim of such egregious confusion.

The discussion about the criteria of authenticity and their application about Jesus traditions is a HISTORICAL and METHODOLOGICAL problem, e.g. a problem of trying to figure out whether the traditions about Jesus pass positively the criteria of authenticity and hence warrant our conclusions about their historicity. By themselves, they have nothing to do with theology, religion or metaphysics. (Obviosuly, metaphysical, religious and theological reflections about Jesus have to take into account such historical data; otherwise, they're mere fantasies or unfounded speculations).

For example, in one of my post on Piñero, my main and underlying argument was that some liberal historical Jesus scholars misuse the criteria of authenticity in order to create a portrait of Jesus which is at variance with the Christian one. In order to provide hard and irrefutable evidence for this important claim, I use a prestigious New Testament scholar like Piñero as a concrete, specific example of the misuses of such criteria. Note that I'm doing a factual judgment about the historical methodology of Piñero, not a theological argument about Jesus' actual nature. I'm doing mainly an exercise on historical analysis and criticism of the New Testament material in the light of the scholarly work of an author whom I respect.

The purpose of such post was not to argue that Jesus was or was not the Son of God (that would be a theological argument), and my blog is not mainly interested in theology (although I sometimes discuss purely theological matters, like my post on divine simplicity). 

Also (and this could be a motive of confusion), I tend to use conditional arguments (e.g. arguments of the form "If X, then Y...") as a way to explore the implications of a given position and for purposes of critical evaluation of it..., for example arguing that If the resurrection happened, THEN the Christian view about Jesus (and Jesus's claims about his divine sonship and exclusivism, some of which pass positively the criteria of authenticity) are likely to be true. For example, on the post on the Old Testament concept of Savior and its possible connection with Jesus, I wrote: "If Jesus' resurrection was historical and the basic facts of his life mentioned above are veridical, I think the Christian interpretation of Jesus' death having an atoning function in terms of Isaiah 53 is very likely to be correct. Jesus' life was as God predicted in the Old Testament prophecies, and God's will and overall plan was actualized by Jesus' ministry and life"

Note the conditional structure of the argument. IF (Jesus' resurrection plues certain New Testament claims about his life are historical) THEN (the Christian interpretation of Jesus' death having an atoning function in terms of Isaiah 53 makes sense and is likely to be correct). This is not a categorical claim but a conditional one.

I use often such conditional claims assuming that my readers are intelligent enough to understand the logical and conceptual difference between a conditional and categorical claim.

 

But some people, due to their strong negative feelings and emotional wounds (specially feelings of fear, guilty, hatred) connected with their experiences or interpretations of Christianity, are so obsessed to deny the theological view that Jesus was the Son of God (or God's ultimate revelation to humankind and the religious exclusivism implied), that they even cannot understand historical arguments about the historical Jesus, nor discern them from theological reflections or considerations about him. 

But let's return to the main topic of this post:

Considerations about the criteria of authenticity in Historical Jesus studies

1-The criteria of authenticity are positive criteria which help us to establish what is historical about Jesus' traditions. They are NOT criteria for establishing what is non-historical (i.e. they are not criteria of non-historicity). 

In fact, it is hard to see what would count as a criteria of non-historicity: How the hell would you establish directly what DIDN'T happened in the past? At most, you can establish what happened and from there to infer indirectly what didn't happened (e.g. when a given claim is incompatible with what has been positively established as historical... for example, you can argue that Socretes wasn't a student of Aristotle, since the positive evidence shows that Socrates was the master of Plato and Plato the master of Aristotle...).

The implication of this is that if a tradition about Jesus doesn't pass any criteria at all, it doesn't make such tradition a false or unhistorical one, nor a product of "mythmaking". It simply means that such a tradition is one that we cannot establish positively as historical in the light of such criteria. But it still could be a veridical tradition.

2-Given point one, being "criteria FOR authenticity...", they say nothing about what is non-authentic or product of a fabrication.

3-Therefore, in order to reach conclusions about non-historicity, some scholars are forced to MISUSE such criteria. It is absolutely crucial to understand exactly how such misuse is done.

I've have detected several ways in which the criteria are misused, but the most common one is this:

Using the criteria as necessary conditions for historicity: 

This is the most common misuse of such criteria.

According for this misuse,  in order to a Jesus tradition to be historical, it HAS to pass one or several of such criteria. The most egregious and extreme examples of this can be found in the works of the Jesus Seminar and also in the works of scholars like John Dominic Crossan (who misuses the criterion of multiple attestation in order to deny important Christian-supporting traditions about Jesus), Bart Ehrman and many others. 

For example, Q scholar Burton Mack misuses the criterion of date (the criterion according to which, all conditions being the same, a tradition about Jesus which is early is more likely to be historical than the same tradition if it were later). 

For example, in his book The Lost Gospel: The Book of Q and the Christian origins, Mack writes:

The first followeres of Jesus did not known about or imagine any of the dramatic events upon which the narrative gospels hinge. These includes the baptism of Jesus; his conflict with Jewish authorities and their plot to kill him; Jesus' instruction to the disciples; Jesus' transfiguration, march to Jerusalem, last supper, trial, and crucifixion as the King of Jews; and finally, his resurrection from the dead and the stories of the empty tomb. All of these events must and can be accounted for mythmaking in the Jesus movements, with a little of help from the martyrology of Christ, in the period adter the Roman-Jewish war. Thus the story of Q demostrates that the narrative gospels have no claim as historical accounts" (p.247)

Please, note very carefully that Mack infers the non-historicity of events like Jesus' baptism or the empty tomb simply because they don't pass the criterion of date posited by the Q material. In other words, Mack is using the criterion of date provided by the Q material as a necessary condition for historicity.

But this is obviously a flawed historical methodology, because in addition to the criterion of date, we have many other criteria (like mutiple attestation, dissimilarity or embarassment) which events like Jesus' baptism and the empty tomb pass positively.

Moreover, Jesus surely said and did many things which are not recorded in the Q material (for example, the events in the life of Jesus when  he was 18 years old were not recorded in Q nor in any other historical document). Does it mean that they didn't happened? It would absurd and false to claim that, since the Q material is not an exhaustive collection of the events in the life of Jesus, and for sure many events in the life of Jesus are historical even when they weren't recorded in Q (nor in any other historical document, for that matter).

If you (mis) apply (as Mack does) the criterion of date for other historical figures, you would destroy history as a rational study and would have an extremely limited caricature of the actual, complex, living figures who lived and acted in the past.

But Mack NEEDS to misuse the criteria in order to deny the historicity of the distinctive aspects of the Christian interpretation of the historical Jesus.

Moreover, Jesus' self-understanding as the Son of God and the exclusive intermediary between God and humankind pass (among others) the criteria of date provided by Q, as I've shown here. 

But obviously such evidence is unacceptable for liberal scholars (even if the evidence meets their own, flawedly applied, criteria), because they have decided long before, in advance, that it cannot be accepted. Their personal ideology, theological preferences and personal desires determine in advance the results of their methodology.

The criterion of date is an important one, because early sources are temporally closer to the events in comparison with later ones. But this criterion is not the only one. The Gospel of John, for example, is considered as the latest one among canonical Gospels, and by the criterion of date alone, other Gospels would be more reliable. But the traditions of John can pass other criteria which would make them historically reliable. (Note by the way that some people skeptically laugh and dismiss and condescendenly reject as unreliable John's Gospel because it is the latest one among the first century's canonical Gospels, but simultaneously and sympathetically accept extremely late, 20th century "sources" of information about Jesus like The Uratian Book, A Course in Miracles, The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus and so forth, an approach which is not only inconsistent, pseudoscientific and unscholarly but mad from the point of view of serious historical Jesus  methodology).

When studying the evidence for the historical Jesus, we need to have a deep, accurate understanding of the criteria of authenticity and their uses and misuses, fully aware of the fact that many things about Jesus (or any other historical figure) are historical even whether we cannot prove them in the light of such criteria (because such events were not recorded at all).

Beware of using the criteria improperly, in order to reach conclusions congenial with your prejudices about Jesus.