Criteria of Authenticity in Jesus Research

Can we get behind the Gospels?

A historian at Oxford once described the modern study of Jesus as a historical figure behind Paul and the Gospels as “perhaps the most thorough and sophisticated analysis of any set of texts in the history of human thought.”¹

For over two centuries, scholars have tried to extricate the ‘real’ or ‘authentic’ Jesus from beneath our earliest sources. Like an archaeologist with a tooth-comb, they have poured delicately over every jot and tittle of our ancient manuscripts, devising scrupulous methods to get back to Jesus himself.

In this project’s most recent iteration – the ‘Third Quest’ for the historical Jesus –scholars became more careful and concerted than ever in their efforts to get behind the gospels. From the mid 1950s onwards, they debated and developed a range of historical criteria – the so-called criteria of authenticity – which promised to sift the wheat of history from the chaff of early Christian invention. These criteria sought to take us back to the authentic Jesus – the man as he really was.

Some of these criteria you may be already be familiar with. They have names like the criterion of embarrassment, the criterion of (double) dissimilarity, and the criterion of multiple independent attestation, to take but the most common. The criterion of embarrassment, for example, states that events which go against the grain of the author’s own interests are ‘embarrassing’ and less likely to be made up.

Applying this criterion to the gospels, we might suppose that an event such as Jesus’ baptism meets the criterion of embarrassment – and is therefore historical – because it is highly unlikely that Mark would invent Jesus’ baptism of John. Not only was John’s baptism for ‘the forgiveness of sins’, implying that Jesus required forgiveness of sins, but the later evangelists (Matthew and Luke) make some attempt to justify the event, and John removes it altogether. It thus seems an unlikely invention of Mark.

For almost half a century, many historical Jesus scholars have made appeal to these criteria of authenticity as the modus operandi for good scholarship. While individual criteria have received criticism and revision, few scholars doubted that there should be some criteria, or that these criteria were how the game was played.

In the twenty-first century, however, Jesus research has begun to cast a suspicious eye of the ‘criteria of authenticity’. Fifty years on from their proposed use, they have not been seen to deliver the objectivity they promised; the logic of individual criteria have faced heavy criticism; and the model of the Jesus tradition which they once assumed has been called into question. The methodological edifice of the ‘third quest’ has started to topple – and a new or ‘next quest’ is beginning to take its place.²

It is the critique of this criteria-based project which I want to focus on this piece. What are some reasons why scholars are abandoning the criteria of authenticity? How have they not been successful? And what, if anything, might take their place?

1. The Results of the Criteria

If the proof of the pudding is in the eating, then the proof of the criteria are in their results. With a name like the ‘criteria of authenticity’, one might expect that this methodology brought a level of objectivity to the field of Jesus research. Before the criteria, scholars had produced a baffling range of portraits of Jesus. With the criteria, one might expect that the range of permissible reconstructions became fewer.

Yet half a century passed, and disagreements still ruled. Employing the same criteria, some scholars arrive at a non-apocalyptic teacher of wisdom; others at a millenarian expecting the end of the world; still others at a figure resembling more orthodox belief. To be sure, the criteria were never going to rule out disagreement in research – as if such a thing was desirable. The point is that they have done little to generate scholarly consensus.

One Jesus scholar puts the problem in this way, likening the criteria to language:

“All our methodological erudition, our repeated attempts to refine and heed criteria, have failed to impose order on our discipline: the Jesus of one book often does not look much like the Jesus of another book, even when those books employ more or less the same method….

Doing history, which is an art requiring imagination and conjecture, cannot be identified with the mechanical observance of directives. The rules of chemistry mean that, if you follow the instructions, you will get the same result as everybody else. The criteria of authenticity are more like the rules of language: you can use them to say just about anything.”³

2. Problems with the Criteria

The criteria have not built the consensus some may have liked, but it might be objected that this is simply due to the inconsistent way they were employed. Yet this explanation falters on a more pressing problem: the criteria themselves. Here I take a closer look at three of the most important criteria and examine some of their flaws.

a. Dissimilarity

In its simplest form, the criterion of dissimilarity states that material that is dissimilar from Jesus’ Jewish context is not derived from that context, and thus goes back to Jesus himself. For example, we may be sure that Jesus said, ‘let the dead bury their own dead’, for it runs contrary to Jesus’ Jewish context, in which burial was an important custom.

The problems with this criterion are readily apparent: since Jesus was a Jewish man, we should expect that he said and did a great many things which were the sorts of things ancient Jewish men would do and say. The criterion may of dissimilarity may help us get at what was distinctive about Jesus, but not what was characteristic about him.

If this criterion is privileged, it reveals a figure who is isolated from his Jewish context. A Jewish Jesus who was not really a Jew – or only a ‘marginal’ Jew. This relies upon a ‘great man’ view of history, in which Jesus stands above his peers, and depicts Jesus a universal and orthodox figure beyond history, untethered from his time.

Yet it is unclear whether this criterion can even deliver what was distinctive about Jesus. As Dagmar Winter suggests, to say that something is dissimilar is to assume that we have a reliably complete set of Jewish ideas and praxis from which the Jesus tradition can be said to aver. But we don’t. The vast majority of our sources are lost. This means that at best dissimilarity is an estimate; it cannot guarantee ‘authenticity.’

b. Embarrassment

Similar concerns plague a closely-related criterion: the criterion of embarrassment. To say that something is embarrassing is to suggest that it goes against the grain of a text. The problem is that what constitutes an ‘embarrassment’ is more subjective than it may first appear.

Consider again the baptism of Jesus. We assume that this is historical, because it is unlikely that Mark would fabricate a baptism for the forgiveness of sins. As evidence of this, we can point to the justification and removal of the event in later authors. But what about Mark’s Christology necessitates that Jesus would not have received such a baptism? And what about the theology of those earlier than Mark in the movement?

An event in Jesus’ life may be embarrassing to later authors, at a particular stage in the development of Christology, which would not have been embarrassing earlier on. This means that embarrassment does not guarantee an event’s historicity. At most, it suggests that a tradition was stable enough that it became important to engage.

Another example may help to see the subjectivity of this criterion. For some scholars, the fact that women found Jesus’ tomb empty would have been embarrassing at a time when the testimony of women meant less than a man’s. Some support for this can be supplied in the misogyny expressed by the contemporary Jewish historian, Flavius Josephus, or the scorn poured on the women by the later sceptic, Celsus.⁴