Browsing through holiday-season blogs from previous eras, I came across my first small thread on Christmas from exactly six years ago.  I had forgotten about this.  Some of the material has shown up occasionally in the intervening years, but maybe it's a good time to repost a bit of it.  Here is the first: an account of what we can, and cannot, know about Jesus' birth.  Bethlehem?  Virgin?  Date?   Or even... year? ************************************************************************** I have decided to provide a series of posts related to the stories of Christmas in the New Testament. This first post more or less states some of the basic information that most readers know, but that it’s worth while stressing as a kind of ground clearing exercise. To begin with, we are extremely limited in our sources when it comes to knowing anything at all about the birth of Jesus. In fact, at the end of the day, I think we can’t really know much at all. Just to cut to the chase, I think that it is most probable that [...]

I have been talking about the stories of Jesus' miracles, and am raising the question of whether they necessarily go all the way back to Jesus' lifetime, as tales told while he was still living.  I pick up where I left off last time, after showing that Jesus' miracle-working abilities increased with the passing of time. ***************************************************************   Not only does Jesus become increasingly miraculous with the passing of time, these miracles are all told in order to make a point.   The stories about Jesus as the miraculous Wunderkind reveal that he really was the Son of God endowed with supernatural power straight from the womb; as a five-year old he was already the Lord of life and death; as the resurrected savior he was manifestly a superhuman being of giant proportions.   In more general terms, the miracles in our later accounts repeatedly show that Jesus was the spectacular Son of God.  He was far superior to all his enemies (even if these were only the aggravating kids down the street).  He was more powerful [...]

I have been arguing that there are ways to extract historical information about Jesus from the Gospels – even if they were not written to provide disinterested accounts of what he really said and did but were meant to promote faith in him. So far I have discussed two positive criteria: independent attestation (if a tradition is found in multiple independent sources then that increases the likelihood that it goes back to the life of Jesus, since none of the sources themselves could have made it up) and dissimilarity (if a tradition contains information that the followers of Jesus would decidedly not have wanted to make up, then it more likely is something that actually happened). Now I move to a negative criterion, one that eliminates possible traditions from consideration as unlikely to be historical (rather than a positive criterion that shows which ones are more likely).  It is called the criterion of contextual credibility.   Again, this is from my book Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet. ************************************************************ If The Shoe Fits.... The Criterion of Contextual Credibility. You’re [...]

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 [...]