Here I continue the thread on how scholars go about establishing which traditions in the Gospels appear to reflect what actually happened in the life of Jesus.   Of all the things I’ve said so far, this is the most controversial.   But after thinking about it for some forty years, I still think it makes good sense, for reasons I try to explain.   ***********************************************************   What An Odd Thing to Say!  The Criterion of Dissimilarity. The most controversial criterion that historians use, and often misuse, to establish authentic tradition from the life of Jesus is sometimes called the "criterion of dissimilarity."  The criterion is not so difficult to explain, given what we have already seen about the Gospels. Any witness in a court of law will naturally tell things the way he or she sees them.  Thus, the perspective of the witness has to be taken into account when trying to evaluate the merits of a case.  Moreover, sometimes a witness has a vested interested in the outcome of the trial.  A question that perennially [...]

I am in the midst of a threat talking about how historians can use sources such as the Gospels to know what actually happened in Jesus’ life.  These books were not *meant* to provide disinterested historical information about the past, but were quite intentinally slanted accounts meant to encourage and shape faith in Jesus.  They nonetheless do contain important historical information.  How does the historian determine what his historical and what is legendary in them? Yesterday I gave some of the basics – a few “rules of thumb” that historians use.  Now I get to the harder question of how to reconstruct the life of Jesus based on these kinds of sources.  Again, this is taken from my book on the historical Jesus, from 1999.  I haven’t changed my views of these matters in all these years!   ***************************************************************** Specific Criteria and Their Rationale Over the course of the past fifty years, historians have worked hard to develop methods for uncovering historically reliable information about the life of Jesus.  I need to say up front [...]

In yesterday’s post I laid out the “wish list” historians have when it comes to sources of information about persons and events of the past, and evaluated how well the Gospels stack up against the list.  Now I want to move into the kinds of criteria biblical scholars use when trying to extract historical information from the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ life, criteria made necessary by the fact that the Gospel writers were not trying to write objective historical narratives of what really happened, so much as trying to “proclaim the good news” of the salvation brought by Jesus.  These Gospels were not meant to be providing history lessons per se.  But nonetheless, they do contain historical information.  If we want to learn that information, how do we proceed? Here is how I explain the beginning point in my book Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet.   *******************************************************   Using Our Sources: Some of the Basic Rules of Thumb Before elaborating on some specific criteria that scholars have devised, let me say something about a few very basic [...]

While writing the posts in my thread on the contradictions in the New Testament, I had the impression that some readers thought I considered it virtually impossible to use the New Testament for historical purposes.   That’s actually not the case at all.   I’m going to discuss this issue over a number of posts, focusing on the Gospels.  Oddly enough, it appears I’ve never devoted a sustained thread to this precise end, of explaining how historians go about their business of reconstructing the past when all they have are highly problematic sources. My general view is that when trying to determine what actually happened in Jesus’ life – to figure out what he said, did, and experienced – it is important to avoid two extremes.  On one hand, it simply won’t work to claim that if something is narrated in the Gospels, it is necessarily historical.  There are lots and lots of things that can’t be historical in the Gospels.  Just on the most basic level, if one Gospel really does appear to contradict another about, [...]

I will not be going through the entirety of the four Gospels to point out how contradictions between one account and another make these texts difficult to use for historical purposes.  My previous post briefly summarized the situation with respect to the birth narratives, and similar statements could be made for numerous events of Jesus’ life as narrated in the Gospels.  In this post I’ll instead make an overall point about the kinds of problems one finds throughout these books. Recall: the reason I’m dealing with this matter is that some readers have thought that the only reason biblical scholars identify contradictions in the New Testament is in order to show that these books aren’t inspired.  That’s not true at all.  My points so far are that New Testament *could* be inspired by God even if it has contradictions (I personally don’t think so, but that’s mainly because I’m an agnostic and so don’t think *anything* is inspired by God; but if I were a believer still I probably would think it is in some [...]

Realizing that there are contradictions in our surviving New Testament texts matters a good deal when it comes to trying to reconstruct the history behind them.  I’ll devote several posts to this question, a couple of dealing with the life of Jesus and at least one other involving the life of Paul. The basic issue, of course, is that if you have two contradictory witnesses to an event, then they both can’t be right: they contradict one another!   At the point of the contradiction, either one of them is wrong, or they are both wrong, but they both can’t be right – unless the contradiction can be reconciled in some way (in which case it is not really a contradiction). And so the first step is to look carefully at the sources and see if they line up with one another or if there are places where they are at odds.  If they appear to be at odds, then the next step is to be see if it is only an *apparent* contradiction or an [...]