The "Quest For The Historical Criteria" Begins Now

The reader shall recall from the previous post that I promised to take a closer look -- much too close -- at the criteria of authenticity (or else historicity) -- used by the Westar Institute's pet project. And, again, I aim to do so against the backdrop of methodological skepticism for the sake of argument, though I have already offered very good reasons -- and could offer many more I believe -- for ignoring the basic approach the Seminar takes in its enterprise of choice.

Why should I want to do this? I feel that there is much profit in "counter-mischief," to present to the people of God, so that they do not get fooled by the nonsense these people just cannot resist producing, and publicizing every Christmas and Easter. This reminds me, tis the season for their crusades, fa la la la la (sing it with me). Ahem.

Okay. Let us now return to scholarly sanity. I can hit the egg nog later. The criteria they prefer, and their descriptions, I have transfered by the grand operation of cutting and pasting (which seems to be the habit of choice concerning the group of which I am about to write). Here is the abbreviated list from the law of Beelzebub, for putting the Lord to the test. Whoa, too much truth too fast. Here they are anyway.

1. The Criterion of Dissimilarity: sayings or deeds reportedly performed by Jesus which set him apart from others are to be considered historical or authentic, since no traditions existed according to which one might have created such information about him. These are the countercultural features of Jesus's life and sayings.

2. Multiple Attestation. When two or more independent sources present similar or consistent accounts, it is at least certain that the tradition upon which the sayings depend predates the sources. Most consider such accounts likely to be authentic or historical, especially if confirmed by other criteria.

3. Palestinian Environment. Linguistic features ascribed to Jesus and others (or from narrators) -- especially as incidental details in the narratives -- which were known to be native to early first-century Palestine are to be considered early, and likely historical or authentic.

These features reflect the early (Aramaic-speaking) Church which originated in Jerusalem, which and became progressively more "Greek" or "Gentile" only over time as it grew. This provides a kind of linguistic "clock" whereby one can work backwards to see earlier authentic or historical elements in the text. [I must admit, I find this particular linguistic criterion "brilliant."] Someone has been doing his homework.

4. Coherence. Any account (or literary unit) consistent with the results of the other criteriological standards is to be considered historical or authentic. This simply admits that A. people tend to act in characteristic, or habitual, ways (a historical truism), and B. that logic should apply to the study of history, since the world is in fact rational (law-governed).

5. Counterproductive Literary Features.

According to this criterion, when a story or pericope contains features or sayings likely to prove counterproductive in some way to the authors intended goal for writing, it should be considered authentic or historical. Since the author has every reason to omit this material, his motive for including it is likely simply an interest in reporting what actually transpired.

First, as one of the above criteria suggests, let us cross-reference Seminar's criteriological claims about the Bible with each other to check for coherence. Please notice that the criterion of dissimilarity favors countercultural features about Jesus to isolate traits unlikely to have arisen from the "cultural conventions" and values rejected in the isolated material itself. Here, a Christian community favoring circumcision will not likely add material showing that Jesus denied the importance of circumcision.

On the other hand, the criterion of Palestinian environment confusedly does precisely the opposite when it comes to the linguistic environment of Jesus' day. It favors instead what was native to the culture, and likely originating from it. Examples are Hebraisms and Aramaisms -- unique Herbew or Aramaic words or sayings of Jesus and others -- uttered by the actors of the NT narratives. For instance, Jesus says to a 12 year-old girl whom he raises from the dead, "Talitha Koumi," which is "Little girl, arise!" in Aramaic. This is in the imperative mood, uttered as a command.

Second, the almost universal presence of Gentile "God-fearers" (like Cornelius) at synagogues throughout the Roman Empire complicates matters far beyond what the CPE allows. These were semi-converts to the Jewish faith that remained uncircumcised. These Gentiles attending synagogues were learning Hebrew and Aramaic to learn the Bible (Some parts of Daniel -- chaps 2-7 -- appear in Aramaic originally), while the rest is Hebrew. They heard the Hebrew texts every Shabbat, and would have later asked for explanations. This is why Paul could bid the Corinthians farewell in the Aramaic "Marana Tha!"

The Seminar insists that Jesus and the apostles were basically illiterate, making the mistake of assuming that one could not learn to speak, read and write Hebrew or Aramaic in synagogues (which was one of their primary tasks among converts), or to speak foreign langauge as a result of business necessities. This too is clearly unhistorical. How many nations do we find today where the natives who interact with American business do not speak some English? When profit comes more easily by learning the langauge which makes it possible, people find a way. This has not changed in 6,000 years. People like money and stuff.

It is also unlikely that a later Greek-speaking Church would later add anything Aramaic to a NT narrative. They would have simply translated the term into Greek and left it that way. Some points in the Gospels (especially Matthew's) self-consciously translate Hebrew or Aramaic for their audience, which assumes that most have a background in Hebrew or Aramaic, but not all.

The Seminar's unwarranted extrapolation of ancient statistics (the illiteracy thesis), adduces data from the pagan worlds, and applies to the Jewish culture of the first-century, a thesis which fails to recognize important cultural differences that existed between them.

Just Who is Looking Illiterate Now?

Matthew 1:23 quotes the Septuagint regarding Isaiah's prophecy, "Behold, the virgin will conceive and give birth to a son" [ιδου η παρθενος εν γαστρι εξει και τεξεται υιον] It adds: και καλεσουσιν το ονομα αυτου εμμανουηλ ο εστιν μεθερμηνευομενον μεθ ημων ο θεος [And his name shall be called "Immanuel," which with translation means "[The] God is with us."]

First, "Immanuel" is a Hebrew word, which shows up here in Greek [Matthew has followed the Septuagint translation of Hebrew-into-Greek. But then he reverses this process. The very long participle "μεθερμηνευομενον" [transliterated as "methermeneuomenon"] is fairly interesting. It combines the Greek for "with" [here "meth" and "the thing being interpreted"] -- for "ermeneuo" means "I interpret" -- to say "Which when it is translated, is [estin] ..."

Why would Matthew need to translate "Emmanuel" (A Hebrew term from Isaiah, written in Greek) into its meaning "God [is] with us" or literally "God with us" for a Jewish audience? This brings some very interesting possibilities.

Short version: This is the covenantal formula, where God speaks, "And I will be with them." This is fulfilled in Jesus. Matthew is pointing to the fact that God's presence and Christ's are one and the same. This, in effect, makes Jesus the Temple of God (which is the heart of Judaism). The conceptually opposite term in Hebrew for "Immanuel," is "Ichabod." The first specifies God's immediate presence to bless (visit) His people. Matthew here helps the God-fearers so that they do not miss a critical point about prophecy and Jesus. He is the Lord of the Temple glory. So Matthew feels he must translate the Septuagint (which some 70 Jews wrote) for them.

Matthew wrote for both Jew and Gentile, which is consistent with one of his major themes, that the Gentiles come to Christ ahead of the Jews, who do not recognize their own Messiah.

Matthew's Greek easily reverts to Aramaic. This has lead many to postulate that the original Gospels may have been written in Aramaic (which is very doubtful). This shows that Matthew's Gospel originates in a mostly-Hebrew literate (natively Aramaic-speaking) area, where Gentiles are coming into the Church for which he writes. This best described "Syrian Antioch," a location not too far from Jerusalem, where one would encounter many Greek-speaking Gentiles.

The CPE simply does not take proper account of the actual linguistic and historical situation in which the Gospels arose, a fact which casts sufficient doubt on its ability to derive a pool of "historical data" from which to generate a "historical Jesus." In other words, the CPE presupposes an unhistorically simple linguistic situation as the basis for determining what was historical.

It overlooks the developing "Semitizing" of the God-fearer populations, and it falsely assumes that the early dominical disciples were illiterate, when Jesus refers to them as "scribes" and "wise men." The Seminar also simply assumes that the testimony of the Early Church fathers can simply and safely be ignored, when they had both the temporal proximity and the strong desire to know who wrote just which accounts.

And then the criterion of dissimilarity disallows it anyway in principle. The CPE uses the linguistic development scenario as the basis for saying we can make this an exception to the "dissimilarity rule." But the historical situation disallows the excuse. And 1 Corinthians 16, with many other parts of the Bible, tells us this.

Conclusion: this men-de "criteriological problem" here looks very arbitrary at the least, and perhaps unhistorically-minded, and directly contradictory, at most.

Third, it has been observed that employing the criterion of dissimilarity, far from producing a "historical Jesus," yields only information about him that is entirely unique and separate from his culture. And while this is very interesting from the standpoint of the deity of the Lord Jesus (it shows how unlike others He was), yet using such information to develop a composite picture of Him results in an extraordinarily lopsided view, which is anything but historical. If someone were to profile any one of us using such a criterion, we would appear extremely eccentric at best.

In the case of the Lord Jesus, such a portrayal renders Him into an entirely countercultural person, who never ate what first-century Jews ate, had a job like other Jewish carpenters did, etc. A heavy reliance on this criterion therefore tends to yield views of Christ as some sort of revolutionary figure, completely and only at odds with his culture.

It is therefore not surprising to find -- as with John D. Crossan -- a portrait of Jesus as a revolutionary peasant, whose biographic sketch arises more from the particular weight Crossan gives this or that criterion rather than from a more balanced, historically-anchored picture of who Jesus really was (and is).

Note that although many scholars use these same criteria, yet they still produce vastly different pictures of what the historical Jesus was actually like -- so much so that the opening line in Crossan's Historical Jesus, recounts that "Historical Jesus scholarship has today become something of a scholarly bad joke." This needs no comment.

Dispelling the Funk

So Fourth, We have the evidentiary "weighting" and "integration" problems of the Seminar, which need only a little exposition.

The basic problem I can describe this way: using an overlapping pool of criteria (I list five but seven actually function in the larger world of what I call radical scholarship of the NT, which is characterized by methodological skepticism as the backdrop to all their portraits, does nothing to tell you HOW MUCH WEIGHT to yield to each particular criterion, or how to integrate its results with the other ones used.

These two aspects of "reconstructing the historical Jesus" remain completely unaided and unregulated by the criteria themselves, showing that for all its "scientific appearance," there is in fact no real objective control over its interpretations. There is nothing objective about the cut and paste method of integrating the "approved and sanctified" pieces of apostolic tradition blessed as "veridical" by the untested and untestable criteriology they favor.

Here we have a jigsaw puzzle where all the pieces are outlawed at the outset (methodological skepticism). Then some are grandfathered in the back door. But just which ones you recover depends on which criteria you use, and how much importance you give to each. What decides this? Artistic intuition, or the whim of the one doing the reconstructing, gets to decide (assuming the publisher is okay with it).

So you have a chopped up picture of Jesus, with maybe 1/3 the original pieces. You fit some of these together by forcing their unwilling edges, and when you are done pairing them up, you fill in the created blanks with evidence you gather from outside the Bible - from sociological statistics about the ancient world, from archaeology, from some new insight about sources already known, from the Gospel of Thomas (perhaps a saying alleged to have come from Jesus in THAT document which passes one of more of the above criteria), or from a previous book written by guess who.

Resistance is not futile after all, which is more than we can say for a vast multitude of very conflicted portraits of Jesus all claiming to be "historical," which are propped up by an equally flimsy set of unbiblical criteria, which turn out to have quite unhistorical moorings, and which have zero objective control over the way in which the criteria are weighted and applied.

The multiple attestation criterion, as we have seen, depends upon the existence of Q, an unhistorical document, and the dubious notion of Marcan priority (and dependence), both of which assume a naive view of literary dependence. We know from the plain statements of Luke's gospel that the Gospel chroniclers took their tasks as scribes and prophets far more seriously than this, checking prior approved Gospels, interviewing eyewitnesses, and checking with those under apostolic oath to retain the full counsel of God, and to permit nothing more than this to enter the sacred deposit of oral and written [dominical] tradition.

The notion of literary dependence applied by most scholars today (including the Seminar) simply ignores what could be known by anyone who can read Luke's Gospel. Without this unhistorical view of Gospel development, the MA criterion does not make much sense. The 3 synoptic gospels already provide this, since they are from three separate eyewitnesses, which establish the matter in light of deuteronomy and 2 Corinthians 13:1 (Cf. also Matthew 18 regarding church discipline, two or three witnesses).

Then the final portrait drawn by Seminar members (from their many non-"rule governed" choices of evidence) looks nothing like the other scholars' with whom they work. Each is "original." Congratulations. Marcion's was original too. As I recall the Church of the Lord Jesus did not give Marcion the Nobel laureate's award. Thus, we must leave room for the "scholarly bad joke" reference from Crossan.

Who said the "Jesus Seminar" and Evangelicals don't agree on anything?

Next in this brief series, I will respectively turn to two very pivotal questions, which will turn out decisive for the matter, and which are not often asked. These are:

1. Was the apostolic band really illiterate?

2. What would happen if -- against all good historical sensibility and biblical evidence -- we just go ahead and apply the criteria offered by the Seminar? How much of the Gospel message would they in fact confirm?

As a brief postscript, I should wish to add that I plan an ongoing investigation aimed at answering the question, "Who was the "Theophilus" of Luke's Gospel?" The proper answer will put a latest-possible date on the composition of the Gospel. I am fairly persuaded after some research, that the Theophilus of Luke was in fact Theophilus Ben Ananus.

But the evidence left behind for this in the NT is sketchy and circumstantial at best. It needs patience and care in assessing the topic. Most likely, this was that high priest who ordered the men standing near Paul to strike him, at which Paul threatened the man with divine retribution, not knowing it was the high priest he addressed, since presumably Theophilus was not wearing the distinctive priestly garments, and Paul had been gone from Jerusalem for some time. He probably did not know who the high priest was, or if so, only knew him by name.

This would mean that Theophilus, after this encounter began to take an increasing interest in the Christian community and message, eventually converting (like many pharisees before) to the Christian faith. And after he ceased from the high priesthood (long afterward) Luke wrote the second installment of his "former treatise," which we now call "Acts." But the provable and the plausible are two different things. What I do know is that there is no better candidate for Luke's introduction to the Gospel bearing his name than Theophilus Ben Ananus.