HOW TO MARGINALIZE THE TRADITIONAL CRITERIA OF AUTHENTICITY Date C. ALLISON, JR. For several decades now, multiple attestation, dissimilarity, embarrass- ment, and coherence have been the tools of choice for many scholars seeking to separate the authentic Jesus from the ecclesiastical chaff. One understands why: the standard criteria seem to derive from common sense. For instance, that a tradition should not be thought authentic unless it coheres with traditions otherwise regarded as genuine—the criterion of consistency—seems self-evident. Again, that we may con- fidently assign a unit to Jesus if it is dissimilar to characteristic empha- ses both of ancient Judaism and of the early church—the criterion variously known as (double) dissimilarity or distinctiveness or discon- tinuity—has an initial plausibility. So too does the criterion of embar- rassment, according to which a fact or saying is original if there is evidence that it troubled early Christians. And who would challenge the criterion of multiple attestation, according to which the more widely attested a complex is in independent sources, the mote likely it is to have originated with Jesus? This is just the old rule of journalism, that each fact should be attested by at least two witnesses. Reflection, however, foments serious misgivings, and I for one have finally come to believe that our usual criteria are not so useful.’ There is, for example, nothing objective about coherence. Two assertions that make for harmony in the eyes of one exegete may seem to clash for another. According to some, if Jesus taught his disciples to love their enemies because God loves everyone, including the wicked, then it is unlikely that he also taught anything much about eschatological judg- ment or hell, despite abundant testimony in the tradition to the contrary.” ‘In addition to what follows see my earlier discussion in Jesus of Nazareth: Millenar- ian Prophet (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1998)—although in the interim I have become even more pessimistic ® James M. Robinson, “The Critical Edition of Q and the Study of Jesus,” in The Sayings Source Q and the Historical Jesus, ed. A. Lindemann, BETL 158 (Leuven: Leu- ven University Press, 2001), 27-52. The conviction is an old one and already appears in Percy Bysshe Shelley, “On Christianity,” in The Prose Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley,4 DALE C. ALLISON, JR. One understands the point and even sympathizes with the sentiment. Yet what is the justification for assuming that Jesus, who was no system- atic theologian or critical philosopher, must have been, to our way of thinking, consistent—especially when Q, Matthew, and Luke are, in this particular matter, not consistent? One can always, as should be obvious in this age of deconstructionism, find tensions or contradictions between two texts. Commentators since Origen have knit their brows over the presence in Paul’ letters of justification by faith and judgment by works. Many have espied here a “contradiction,” others a “paradox.”> Whatever the resolution to the issue, Pauline theology is, in one significant respect, in seeming tension with itself. Now students of Paul are stuck with the problem because some of the relevant passages belong to undisputed letters. But who can doubt that, if those letters were instead known to be the end products of an oral tradition that mixed the teachings of Paul with the thoughts of his admirers, some critics would confidently inform us that the remarks on judgment by works, being in conflict with those on justification by faith, must be secondary, or vice versa? The thesis, although reasonable enough, would be erroneous. Likewise erroneous may be our judgments about the many tensions scholars have espied in the Jesus tradition—for example, that between the futurity of the kingdom and its presence'—and then used to eject material from its originating source. ‘The criterion of double dissimilarity, which like our commercials implicitly equates new with improved, is no less troublesome than the criterion of consistency.’ Its recent Niedergang is long overdue.’ As oth- vol. 1, ed. E. B. Murray (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), 246-271. See further my book, Resurrecting Jesus (London: T&T Clark, 2005), the excursus on “Percy Bysshe Shelley and the Historical Jesus)” 100-110. > Rudolf Bultmann, Theology of the New Testament, vol. 1 (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1951), 75: “It is noteworthy and indicative of the extent to which Paul keeps within the framework of general Christian preaching, that he does not hesitate, in at least seeming contradiction to his doctrine of justification by faith alone, to speak of judgment according to one’s works’; H. A. A. Kennedy, St. Paul’s Conceptions of the Last Things (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1904), 201: Paul's invocation of the last judgment is part of a “profound paradox’, “Note Robert W. Funk, Roy W. Hoover, and the Jesus Seminar, The Five Gospels: ‘The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus (New York: Macmillan, 1993), 136-137. 5 For its ideological background, see David S. du Toit, “Der unahnliche Jesus: Eine kitische Evaluierung der Entstebung des Differenzkriteriums und seiner geschichts-und erkenntnistheoretischen Voraussetzungen,” in Der historische Jesus: Tendenzen und Perspektiven der gegenwiirligen Forschung, ed. Jens Schréter and Ralph Brucker (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2002), 89-129. § See David du ‘Toit, “Erneut auf der Suche nach Jesus: Eine kritische Bestandsauf- nahme der Jesusforschung am Anfang des 21. Jahrhunderts.” in Jesus im 21. JahrhundertTRADITIONAL CRITERIA OF AUTHENTICITY 5 ers have often remarked, it can at best tell us what was distinctive of Jesus, not what was characteristic. Because Jesus lived and moved and had his being within the Jewish tradition, the criterion is not a net that catches fish of every kind: it can find only things that Jesus did not take from elsewhere. All too often, however, dissimilarity has been misused as a means of separating the authentic from the unauthentic, that is, a way of eliminating items from the corpus of authentic materials.” The result, as so many now recognize, is a Jesus cut off from both his Jewish predecessors and his Christian followers. Beyond this, and even more importantly, we just do not, despite all our labors and recent discover- ies, know enough about either first-century Judaism or early Christianity to make the criterion reliable: the holes in our knowledge remain gap- ing. Why then pretend to prove a negative? My own judgment is that Morna Hooker some time ago persuasively exposed the flaws of the criterion of dissimilarity,* and it is a blight on our field that, upon publication of her conclusions, most of us continued to call upon dis- similarity whenever we pleased instead of letting the thing fall into its deserved oblivion’ ‘The criterion of embarrassment is more promising. Certainly histo- rians in other fields have often reasoned according to its logic—as when scholars of Islam have affirmed that the so-called “Satanic verses” rest upon an historical episode because Moslems did not invent a story in which Mohammed mentions the names of three goddesses. Similarly, much of the invective in the Jesus tradition—Jesus is a drunkard and glutton, a friend of toll collectors and sinners, for instance—must pre- serve memories. ‘The scope of such material is, however, quite limited. And there is yet another problem. We must face the surprising fact that Bultmanns Jesusbuch und die heutige Jesusforschung, ed. Ulrich H. J. Kértner (Neu- kirchen-Viuyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 2002), 114-116. Yet note that Jirgen Becker, Jesus of Nazareth (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1998), 13-14, still considers dissimilarity foundational. ? See esp. Tom Holmén, “Doubts about Double Dissimilarity: Restructuring the Main Criterion of Jesus-of-History Research,” in Authenticating the Words of Jesus, ed. Bruce Chilton and Craig A. Evans, NTTS 28.1 (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 47-80. Holmén rightly argues that dissimilarity from Judaism is irrelevant if dissimilarity from the church can be established. * Morna Hooker, “Christology and Methodology” NTS 17 (1971): 480-487; idem, “On Using the Wrong Tool,” Theology 72 (1972): 570-581 » ‘The rebuttal by Reginald H, Fuller, “The Criterion of Dissimilarity: The Wrong Tool?” in Christological Perspectives: Essays in Honor of Harvey K. McArthur, ed. Robert F Berkey and Sarah A. Edwards (New York: Pilgrim Press, 1982), 41-48, was hardly adequate.6 DALE C. ALLISON, JR. all of the supposedly embarrassing facts or words are found in the Jesus tradition itself, This means that they were not sufficiently disconcerting to be expurgated. This hints at the pluralism of the early church, and it suggests that what may have flustered some may have left others unperturbed. It is telling that sometimes Matthew preserves a Markan saying that Luke, out of what we must guess to be embarrassment, drops, or vice versa. Matthew, for instance, retains Mark 13:32 (the Son does not know the day or the hour) whereas Luke does not. Furthermore, the church fathers, just like Luke, found Mark 13:32 problematic: the logion limits the Son’s knowledge. Should we then urge that the saying must go back to Jesus because it bothered many early Christians? Or does its preservation in Mark and Matthew show us that some were comfortable with a less-than-omniscient Jesus, and that such people could have composed Mark 13:32 and assigned it to Jesus without any anxiety? Many modern scholars, observing that the Jesus of Mark 13:32 uses the absolute “the Son” of himself, have not hesitated to judge the saying a post-Easter creation." Mark 12:35-37 supplies another illustration of the problem. If one were, along with some exegetes, to read this passage so that Jesus denies his descent from David, one could then urge that, as early Christians regarded Jesus as the Davidic Messiah, the passage must be informed by a real incident from the life of Jesus, despite its implicit designation of him as “Lord” The problem with this line of arguing, however, is that one can scarcely envisage tradents for whom Jesus was the Davidic Messiah passing down a text that refuted one of their important convic- tions. One could maintain that they just misunderstood the passage, but then some group before them must have formulated the text, and would we not then guess that that earlier group at least did not take Jesus to be the Son of David? And why are matters different for other traditions that modern scholars think conflict with the theology of the canonical evangelists or other carly Christians? That is, why not take the perceived tensions between various texts to reflect different Christian traditions rather than a disagreement between Jesus and all subsequent Christians? What justifies the tacit assumption of the cri: terion of embarrassment that it is more plausible to postulate instead © Bg, Wilhelm Bousset, Kyrios Christos (Nashville: Abingdon, 1970), 81-82 ¥ See Joel Marcus, Mark 9-16, AYB 27A (New Haven, CY: Yale University Press, 2009), 847-848.TRADITIONAL CRITERIA OF AUTHENTICITY 7 that early Christians handed down traditions that they misunderstood or found uncongenial? Even the principle of multiple attestation is not immune to criticism. The more frequently a complex is attested, the more congenial, one naturally infers, it was to early Christians. But the more congenial a complex was to early Christians, surely the less likely it is, for the critical, skeptical historian, that Jesus composed it. Conversely, the less conge- nial a tradition, the more likely its origin with Jesus and the less likely its multiple attestation." Here the criterion of multiple attestation is in a tug-of-war with the criterion of dissimilarity: they pull the same unit in opposite directions. Some look at the many Son of man sayings and insist that, given the title’s frequent appearances in the Jesus tradition and its relative scarcity outside of it, Jesus must have used the idiom. Others have inferred, in part because of the great quantity of sayings, that some segment of the early church must have had a Son of man Christology, and that the relevant sayings reflect its ideology, not the outlook of the historical Jesus.”* This rapid survey of objections to the standard criteria shows why I believe that they are not equal to the task for which they were invented: they are promises without fulfillment. One might suppose that some support for my skeptical view can be gathered from the recent contri- bution of Gerd Theissen and Dagmar Winter. Their very helpful work is surely the most extended and most judicious exploration of our criteria to date, and in many respects they are critical. Yet in the end Theissen and Winter seem to offer but a revised version of criteria already known. Although they take themselves to be dismissing the criterion of dissimilarity, what they are in fact dismissing is only the criterion of double dissimilarity, that is, dissimilarity from both Judaism and the church. They still defend the proposition that “those elements within the Jesus tradition that contrast with the interests of the early Christian sources, but are handed on in their tradition, can claim vary- ing degrees of historical plausibility”!® This does nothing to circumvent © See further Dale C. Allison, Jesus of Nazareth: Millenarian Prophet (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1998), 24-27. © For a survey of opinion, see Delbert Burkett, The Son of Man Debate: A History and Evaluation, SNTSMS 107 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Burkett himself seems to deny that Jesus spoke of “the Son of man.” “ Gerd Theissen and Dagmar Winter, The Quest for the Plausible Jesus: The Question of Criteria (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2002). © See the helpful review by Tom Holmén in JTS 55 (2004): 216-228. ' ‘Theisen and Winter, Quest, 211.8 DALE C. ALLISON, JR. the decisive objection that “we do not know enough about Jesus to allow us to construct a clear account of the primitive church because we do not know enough about the primitive church to allow us to construct a clear account of Jesus”” Perhaps it is our professional pride that blinds us to the obvious, which is that our knowledge of early Christianity is, like our knowledge of carly Judaism, woefully incomplete. Maybe one can, with a holographic plate, reconstruct the whole image from a part; but it is otherwise with our fragmentary knowledge of the early church. Theissen and Winter also promote what they call the “coherence of sources,” which focuses on recurrent themes in different streams of the tradition. Although this proposal is promising and related to the one I shall make below, it becomes obscured by their twin contentions that “what Jesus intended and said must be compatible with the Judaism of the first half of the first century in Galilee,’ and that “what Jesus intended and did must be recognizable as that of an individual figure within the framework of the Judaism of that time:”* Although it would be foolhardy to disagree with these generalizations, they are simply too large. The synoptics contain very little that cannot be made to fit within first- century Galilean Judaism, about which, despite the relevant extant texts and on-going archaeological discoveries, we still know so little. Again we are victims of our own ignorance. In the end, then, the proposals of Theissen and Winter, which they fuse together under the label of “the criterion of historical plausibility,’ are like a trap in a forest that catches only the occasional passerby: their suggestions at best work on just some items; most of the tradition remains beyond firm evaluation. No one would deny that a reconstructed Jesus should be plausible within his Galilean environment and not look too much like a Christian. Yet recognizing these two circumstances is not going to enable us to peer across the darkness of two thousand years and discern if he did or did not speak about a coming Son of man, or whether the pigs really did run over the cliff. Given that the work of Theissen and Winter, although the best we have on its subject, still comes up far short, my own judgment is that we should not be trying to refine our criteria but should rather be marginalizing them and experimenting with other methods. I find it ¥ B Gerald Downing, The Church and Jesus: A Study in History, Philosophy and ‘Theology, SBT 2.10 (London: SCM, 1968), 51. 1 Theissen and Winter, Quest, 211TRADITIONAL CRITERIA OF AUTHENTICITY 9 disappointing that a scholar as wise as Jacques Schlosser can be fully aware of the limitations of our criteria, urge that they are less “proofs” than ways of introducing some rigor into our work, and yet not attempt to offer much substantial in their place.’ It is time to quit making excuses for them, time to move the standard criteria from the center of our discussion to the periphery. It is not that this or that criterion is problematic or needs to be fine tuned but that the whole idea of apply- ing criteria to individual items to recover Jesus is too often unworkable and so of quite limited utility. Let me bolster my contention that it is time to move on to other things by briefly defending seven propositions: (i) that Jesus said X or did Y is of itself no reason to believe that we can show that he said X or did Y; conversely, that he did not say X or do Y is of itself no reason to believe that we can show such to be the case; and the criteria do not contain within themselves any promise of what percentage of the tradition can be traced to its source, and in practice that percentage turns out to be small; (ii) our criteria have not led us into the promised land of scholarly consensus, so if they were designed to overcome sub- jectivity and bring order to our discipline, then they have failed: the hopelessly confusing parade of different Jesuses goes on; (iii) the fact that the criteria can be in conflict with themselves, that is, that some criteria can favor the authenticity of a unit while other criteria favor the inauthenticity of the very same unit, demonstrates their unreliabil- ity; (iv) running units through the gauntlet of the traditional criteria presupposes that there is a clear distinction between what is authentic and what is not, which is a very misleading proposition; (v) most of us have not consistently heeded the criteria we claim to heed anyway; (vi) our criteria are not strong enough to resist our wills, which means that we tend to make them do what we want them to do; (vii) when we focus on criteria for individual units we can easily lose the more important larger picture, which is the place to start and the place to end. i. The gap between what happened and what we can discover to have happened is much larger than we care to imagine. Aristotle seemingly preferred to speak of Pythagoreans in general instead of Pythagoras in particular because he found it too hard to extract the historical philosopher from the apocryphal material assigned to him. Might not ¥ Jacques Schlosser, Jésus de Nazareth (Paris: Agnés Viénot Editions, 1999), 79-89.10 DALE C. ALLISON, JR. an analogous circumspection be called for from historians of early Christianity? Maybe the Canadian mounted police can claim, “We always get our man; but we all know that some crimes go unsolved; and why should we think that contributing apocryphal material to the Jesus tradition is a deed that we can, two thousand years after the fact, regularly detect? It is the fragmentary and imperfect nature of the evidence as well as the limitations of our historical-critical tools that should move us to confess, if we are conscientious, how hard it is to recover the past. That something happened does not entail our ability to show it happened, and that something did not happen does not entail our ability to show that it did not happen. I emphasize this assertion, obvious and trite, because too often those who wield the criteria come to definite conclu- sions. This makes me suspicious, for my experience is altogether dif- ferent, Time and time again I have looked at a complex and weighed the arguments on both sides—and there are almost always arguments pro and con, indeed good arguments pro and con—and been unable to come up with more than: Well, Jesus could have said it, but it might also come from the church. Consider Mark 9:43-48, the series of sayings warning against sins of the hand, foot, and eye: “If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life maimed than to have two hands and to go to hell, to the unquenchable fire, etc” This does not satisfy the criterion of multiple attestation: there is no parallel in Q, M,” L, or John. There is, however, a Christian parallel in Col 3:5 (“Put to death then the members that are on the earth”) and an amazingly close Jewish text in b, Nid. 13b: “Have we here learned a law as in the case where R. Huna [really] cut off someone’s hand [see b. Sanh. 58b]? Or is it merely an execration? Come and hear what was taught: R. Tarfon said, ‘If his hand touched the membrum let his hand be cut off upon his belly’ ‘But; they said to him, ‘would not his belly be split?’ He said, ‘It is preferable that his belly shall be split rather than that he should go down into the pit of destruction?” In both Mark and b. Nid. 13b the hand that sins should be cut off. In both this act of mutilation is pref- erable to going to “the pit of destruction” or “Gehenna” And in both ® Although some assign Matt 5:29-30 to M or Q this is far from clear; see W. D. Davies and Dale C. Allison, Jr, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Gospel According to Saint Matthew, 3 vols., ICC (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1988, 1991), 1:523.TRADITIONAL CRITERIA OF AUTHENTICITY 11 the thought is expressed in the “better... than” form.” So the criterion of dissimilarity hardly establishes the authenticity of Mark 9:43-48. One also cannot obviously invoke the criterion of embarrassment to any effective end here, so all we seem to be left with is coherence. Some would argue that this is fulfilled because Jesus was morally earnest, used hyperbole, called for uncompromising self-sacrifice, and invoked escha tological judgment as a motive for right behavior. Others, however, would observe that coherence by itself is a pretty weak indicator; and if, in addition, they are among those who believe that all the other references to eschatological judgment are secondary, then they will return the same verdict here. The Jesus Seminar, which regards the cutting off of bodily members as excommunication and so reflective of an ecclesiastical context, does not color our unit red or pink but gray” My own strong intuition has always been that Mark 9:43-48 is from Jesus, but if I am honest I am not really sure what arguments I can muster to persuade others of this.” I can say that the language is vivid and shocking. My mind’s eye sees a bloody stump and an empty eye socket when it encounters these words—from which it follows that if Jesus did say something like Mark 9:43-48, it would stick in the mem- ory. But this begs the question: Did he really speak it? ‘As I have over the years worked through the tradition, I have ended up with three piles of materials, ‘There are some traditions that obviously betray themselves as secondary because they are redactional or clearly contain post-Easter convictions (e.g. Matt 3:15; 28:18-20). There are other traditions that are almost certainly historical either because Paul and the gospels agree on the point (e.g. the prohibition of divorce [1 Cor 7:10-11] and the instruction that missionaries live by the gospel [1 Cor 9:14]) or because church invention is wildly implausible (e.g. the accusation that Jesus was a glutton and drunkard). But those two piles are relatively small. ‘The vast majority of traditions—the golden rule (Matt 7:12 = Luke 6:31 [Q]), the parable of the rich man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19-31), the command not to let the left hand know what the right hand is doing (Matt 6:3), the parable of the wicked ten- ants (Mark 12:1-12), the healing of a leper (Mark 1:40-45), etc., etc.—are neither obviously of pre-Easter origin nor obviously post-Easter 4 See further Will Deming, “Mark 9.42-10.12, Matthew 5.27-32, and b. Nid. 13b: A First Century Discussion of Male Sexuality” NTS 36 (1990): 130-141 » Funk et al., The Five Gospels, 86. % For my best attempt see Allison, Jesus of Nazareth, 187-188.12 DALE C. ALLISON, JR. fictions. They can only be classified as “possibly authentic” In other words, my experience has taught me that applying our criteria to the various units leaves us uncertain about most of the material we are dealing with. ii. Many have remarked upon the divers conclusions of scholars publishing books and articles on the historical Jesus. The diversity perhaps bothers me less than some others, because I do not think that we are scientists, and I do not expect consensus on any large matter within the humanities. The point here, however, is that our criteria, which we employ to help take us a bit beyond our subjectivity, so that we might be more like those in the so-called hard sciences, do not appear to bring any uniformity of result, or any more uniformity of result than would have been the case had we never heard of them Dissimilarity, multiple attestation, coherence, and embarrassment have been used to concoct many different sorts of figures. One might place the blame on the users rather than the tools, but the bad results—all the diversity requires that some are writing bad history—are due to the tools as well as the users. Does anyone seriously believe that, if we could only further refine our criteria, some sort of authentic consensus about something important would finally emerge?” Certainly doing history, which is an art requiring imagination and conjecture, cannot be iden- tified with the mechanical observance of rules. iii, What follows from the fact that our criteria are often in conflict? Let me offer an illustration. One can attribute the words of Jesus at the Last Supper to the church on these grounds: (a) they come from the church's liturgy and so do not satisfy the criterion of dissimilarity; (b) they do not fit a Palestinian environment, for no Palestinian Jew would have spoken of others eating his body or drinking his blood; and (c) they interpret Jesus’ death as an atonement, which not only gives Jesus clear foreknowledge of his fate but also places upon it a meaning otherwise scarcely attested in the Jesus tradition; in other words, it flunks the criterion of consistency. Yet these arguments are seemingly balanced by others: (a) the words of institution are attested in Paul, in Mark, and in an independent tradition in Luke; so we have % For this category see Eckhard Rau, Jesus—Freund von Zéllnern und Siindern: Eine methodenkritische Untersuchung (Stuttgart: W. Koblhammer, 2000), 69-74. ® But Dennis Polkow, “Method and Criteria for Historical Jesus Research,’ in Soci- ety of Biblical Literature 1987 Seminar Papers, ed. Kent Harold Richards (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1987), 336-356, leaves me with this impression.TRADITIONAL CRITERIA OF AUTHENTICITY 13 carly and multiple attestation; (b) it was Jesus’ habit to say shocking and outrageous things for the sake of effect, and one may interpret the words about eating and drink in that light; and (c) the eschatological content of Mark 14:25 (“I will never again drink of the fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new in the kingdom of God”) harmonizes with Jesus’ expectation of martyrdom within the context of his escha. tological Naherwartung. All of which is to say: multiple attestation points one way (for), the criterion of dissimilarity the opposite way (against), while coherence points both ways at once (for and against). There are of course additional arguments in the literature, and it goes without saying that they too do not all point exclusively in one direction rather than another. How should we respond to this disparity, or to similar cases—including Mark 9:43-48, discussed above—in which the criteria do not speak with united voice? One could I suppose argue that we should simply do the math. If, for instance, three criteria favor authenticity and one criterion favors inauthenticity, we should go with the former. Such an unimagi- native, mechanical approach would, however, not speak to the issue of an apparent tie, as in the case of the Lord’s Supper. One might, alter- natively, urge that one criterion carries more weight than another. Again being mechanical, maybe multiple attestation is more important than dissimilarity, or coherence than embarrassment But all this would be to miss the obvious, which is this: if the crite- ria point in different directions for the very same unit, then they are just not reliable indicators. What more proof does one need? If Jesus said something and yet there are a couple of criteria that go against this conclusion, or if Jesus did not say something attributed to him and yet there are a couple of criteria indicating that he did say it, we have demonstrated that our criteria are not dependable. iv. Sorting the tradition with the standard criteria presupposes that there is a clear distinction between an authentic item and an inauthen- tic item. But everything is instead a mixed product, that is, a product of Jesus and the church.* Mark tells us that Jesus came into Galilee % Allison, Jesus of Nazareth, 58-60; Ferdinand Han, “Methodologische Uberlegun- gen zur Riickfrage nach Jesus,” in Riickfrage nach Jesus: Zur Methodik und Bedeutung der Frage nach dem historischen Jesus, ed. Karl Kertelge, QD 63 (Freiburg: Herder, 1974), 29-30; fixgen Habermann, “Kriterienfragen der Jesusforschung” in “.. was ihr auf dem Weg verhandelt habt” Beitrige zur Exegese und Theologie des Neuen Testaments: Festschrift Jiir Ferdinand Hahn cum 75, Geburtstag, ed. Peter Miller, Christine Gerber, and Thomas Knéppler (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukitchener, 2001), 2314 DALE C. ALLISON, JR. proclaiming the good news of God and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news” (1:14-15). What do we make of this unit? Many now reasonably ascribe it to Markan redaction. But those of us who believe that Jesus (a) taught in Galilee, (b) thought that the time of Satan's rule was com- ing to its end,” (c) proclaimed the imminence of the kingdom of God, (d) called for repentance, and (e) associated his ministry with the prophecies of Deutero-Isaiah® might well regard Mark 1:14-15 as a fair summary of Jesus’ proclamation. So even if it is redactional and not from Jesus, it rightly remembers some things and so is a witness to who he was. Put otherwise, Jesus contributed as much to Mark 1:14-15 as did the evangelist. Consider also Matt 4:1-11 = Luke 4:1-13 (Q), the temptation story. Most modern scholars have rightly judged this to be unhistorical, an haggadic fiction produced through reflection upon scripture. Yet who- ever composed it clearly did so in the knowledge that Jesus was (a) a miracle worker who (b) sometimes refused to give signs, (c) thought himself victorious over demonic forces, (d) was steeped in the scriptures, (e) had great faith in God, and (f) was a person of the Spirit. So what we seem to have in Q 4:1-13 is an illustration of the obvious fact that historical fiction can instruct us about history.” The story, which narrates events that probably never happened, nonetheless rightly catches Jesus in several respects. Here the inauthentic incorporates the authentic. ‘The point of all this is just to underline how facile is the usual assump- tion that a complex originated either with Jesus or with the early church.” But this insight is lost when everything is viewed through r this interpretation of Mark 1:15, see Joel Marcus, “ “The Time Has Been Fulfilled!” (Mark 1:15)? in Apocalyptic and the New Testament: Essays in Honor of J. Louis Martyn, ed. Joel Marcus and Marion L. Soards, JSNTSup 24 (Sheffield: JSOT, 1989), 49-68. % For the dependence of “believe in the good news” upon Deutero-Isaiah, see Bruce D. Chilton, God in Strength: Jesus’ Announcement of the Kingdom, SNTU B.1 (Freistadt: F Plachl, 1979), 92-95. » See further my article, “The Temptations of Jesus” in Authenticating the Activities of Jesus, ed. Bruce Chilton and Craig A. Evans (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 195-214. © ‘There may be a parallel here with a Pauline conundrum, John Barclay, Colossians and Philemon, New Testament Guides (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997), 35, has written: “It turns out... that the differences are not large between Paul himself writing this letter [Colossians], Paul writing with the aid of a secretary, Paul authoriz~ ing an associate to write it, and the letter being composed by a knowledgeable imitator or pupil of Paul. Pethaps with our intense concern to demarcate ‘Paul from ‘non-Paul’ we are working with an artificial or anachronistic notion of individual uniqueness: was Paul completely different from his contemporaries and associates, or did he typically work with others, influencing them and being influenced by them? Have we createdTRADITIONAL CRITERIA OF AUTHENTICITY 15 criteria which attempt to sort fiction from nonfiction, as though all the later additions must be misleading or be bad interpretation. It could well be the case, and I think it is the case, that much in the tradition is strictly nonhistorical yet helpfully informs us about Jesus. It is thus foolhardy to ignore it—and emphasis upon the criteria hides this impor- tant fact from us. v. We have often been guilty of not consistently following the meth- ods we claim to follow. The words about turning the other cheek, lov- ing one’s enemy, and going the extra mile, Matt 5:38-48 = Luke 6:27-36 (Q), supply an instructive illustration. With very few exceptions, almost all scholars working on the gospels believe that this extended composi- tion or collection preserves some things Jesus said, that it gives us his spirit, that it preserves something importantly characteristic about him. Yet this conviction, that Matt 5:38-48 = Luke 6:27-36 derives from Jesus and is distinctive of him, a conviction common for the last two hundred years at least, and one with which I do not disagree, has sur- vived despite the popularity and indeed predominance of the criterion of dissimilarity, a criterion which many scholars have in other cases used to eliminate or cast doubt upon materials attributed to Jesus.”' The criterion of dissimilarity should of course never have been used to exclude material as well as to include material; but the only point here is that scholars who have used it in this way on some sayings have not done so when examining this passage.” The teaching common to Matthew 5 and Luke 6 is, to illustrate, comfortably at home in the early church. It sounds very much like what Paul, without attributing his words to Jesus, has to say in Rom 12:14, 17, 21; 1 Cor 4:12; and 1 Thess 5:15. It is also closely related to the complexes in Did. 1.3-5; 1 Clem. 13:2; and Polycarp, Ep. 2.2-3.” So half of the criterion of dissimilarity—distance from the church—is hardly satisfied in this case: Matt 5:38-48 = Luke 6:27-36 closely resembles several early Christian texts. a Paul of utter uniqueness in line with the peculiarly modern cult of the individual? Whether by Paul, by a secretary, by an associate or by a pupil, Colossians is clearly a ‘Pauline letter” ® See, e.g., Norman Perrin, Rediscovering the Teaching of Jesus (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), 196, 200. ® An exception: J. Sauer, “Traditionsgeschichtliche Erwigungen zu den synoptischen und paulinischen Aussagen tiber Feindesliebe und Wiedervergeltungsverzicht,” ZNW 76 (1985): 1-28. * See further Dale C. Allison, Jr, The Jesus Tradition in Q (Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press International, 1997), 86-92.16 DALE C. ALLISON, JR. ‘The passage also seemingly fails to pass the test of dissimilarity from characteristic emphases within Judaism. The following appears in b. Sabb. 88b and b. Git. 36b: “Our rabbis taught: Those who are insulted but do not inflict them, who hear themselves being reviled and do not answer back, who perform [religious precepts] out of love and rejoice in chastisement, of them the Scripture says, ‘And they who love him are as the sun when he goes forth in his might [to shine upon all]’” (Judg 5:31). This is indeed very close to the synoptic texts attributed to Jesus, so close that it cannot be unrelated. Similarly, Jesus’ imperative to be merciful because God is merciful (Luke 6:26; cf. Matt 5:48) has parallels in Tg. Ps.-J. on Lev 22:28 (“My people, sons of Israel, just as I am merciful in heaven, so will you be merciful on earth”) and y. Ber. 5:3 = y. Meg. 4:10 (“R. Yose b. R. Bun said: ‘It is not good to imply that God’s traits [are derived from his attribute of] mercy. Those who translate [Lev 22:28 as follows:] ‘My people, sons of Israel, just as Iam merciful in heaven, so will you be merciful on earth: A cow or a ewe you will not kill both her and her young in one day’—that is not good, for it implies that God’s traits [are derived from the attribute of] mercy”). A tradition common to Sifra Leviticus 200 and t. Sotah 9.11 is also relevant: “‘And you shall love your neighbor as yourself” Rabbi Akiba said: ‘This is the great principle in the Torah’ Ben Azzari said: “This is the book of the generation of Adam, when God created man he made him in the likeness of God (Gen 5:1) is an even greater prin- ciple’” Clearly the point of this last is that whereas Akiba’s great prin- ciple fails to specify the scope of “neighbor,” Ben Azzai’s proof text, just like Jesus’ command to love enemies, goes one better and envisages all of humanity. ‘There is yet another strong parallel, a pre-Christian text, Let. Aris. 207, which contains this advice for a king: “As you wish that no evil should befall you, but to share in every good thing, so you should act on the same principle towards your subjects, including the wrongdoers, and admonish the good and upright also mercifully. For God guides all in kindness” Using Luke's text for the comparison, one can see the parallels at a glance: Golden rule Luke 6:31: “As you wish that people would do to you, do so to them” Let. Aris. 207: “As you wish that no evil should befall you, but to share in every good thing, so you should act on the same principle towards your subjects”TRADITIONAL CRITERIA OF AUTHENTICITY 17 Merey/kindness Luke 6:36: “Be merciful” Let. Aris. 207: “admonish the good and upright also mercifully” God as model of universal mercy/kindness Luke 6:35: God raises the sun on the evil as well as the good Let. Aris. 207: “God guides all in kindness” No restriction on human mercy/kindness Luke 6:32-34: “If you love those who love you...2” Lel. Aris. 207: “act on the same principle towards your subjects, includ- ing the wrongdoers” The common coalescence of themes is undeniable. It would seem, then, that the criterion of double dissimilarity might have discouraged scholars from assigning Matt 5:38-48 = Luke 6:27-36 to Jesus, or at least have given them some doubt about its foundational character. One can certainly cite many instances where critics have cited Jewish and Christian parallels to cast doubt on the Jesuanic origin of this or that utterance in the synoptics. Yet almost without exception this has not happened with Matt 5:38-48 = Luke 6:27-36. Norman Perrin, who was quite capable of using the criterion of dissimilarity to jettison items from the original tradition, did not do so here. He wrote: “That Jesus challenged his followers in these terms is not to be doubted and, indeed, is never doubted” One wonders, Why not? It cannot be because of multiple attestation, for there are no variants to Matt 5:38-48 = Luke 6:27-36 in Mark, M, L, or John; and the parallels in Paul—our earliest literary witness to the tradition—are not attributed to Jesus. Furthermore, one could wield the criterion of coherence to make a case against Matt 5:38-48 = Luke 6:27-36. If Jesus fervently attacked the scribes and Pharisees, as so many traditions indicate, how could he have counseled charity for enemies? And if he believed that God was good to the unjust as well as to the just, how could he often speak of escha- tological judgment and warn of some flunking the final assize? On the whole, the traditional criteria do not obviously support the near uni- versal conviction that Matt 5:38-48 = Luke 6:27-36 goes back to Jesus. It is intriguing that, despite all the parallels that are known to every- one, some have argued that Matt 5:38-48 = Luke 6:27-36 does indeed satisfy the criterion of dissimilarity if we just look a bit further: (a) the precise words, “Love your enemy,’ do not appear in any ancient Jewish » Perrin, Rediscovering, 148,18 DALE C. ALLISON, JR. source; (b) Christian texts before the third century also fail to quote those words; (c) Paul's usage lacks the utopian, eschatological dimen- sion present in Matthew and Luke.** All this is true enough, yet the upshot is not a clear verdict in favor of Matt 5:38-48 = Luke 6:27-36 going back to Jesus; rather do we have here a lesson about the ambigu- ity of dissimilarity. One can always discern dissimilarities between two different texts—otherwise they would be the same text. So it is no surprise that, if one looks at something in the Jesus tradition long enough, one will usually be able to find ways in which it differs from all other early Jewish and early Christian texts (just as one can almost always find parallels if one hunts long enough). One can also undertake the same exercise with the sentences in other ancient sources. How then do we determine what differences are significant and which not? I can- not see that this question has been seriously raised, much less answered—and precisely because it cannot be answered. In the present case, why does the lack of an exact parallel to “Love your enemies” outweigh all the extensive parallels that we do find? Or should we conclude that only “Love your enemies” goes back to Jesus? But this hardly works given that it is an integral part of a unit that in its entirety rewrites Leviticus 19.” We seem to be left in a muddle. vi. While it is true that “formality has its place in guiding one along suitable paths of argument” and that “most of us need some guidance,”* the use of criteria to cast a scientific aura over our questing for Jesus is not very effective, for our criteria are sufficiently pliable as to be unable to resist our biases and prior inclinations. So when we use them, they can become a mask for our own preconceived ideas. In other words, we can go through all the motions and yet end up with precisely what we wanted or expected. ‘The criteria then become justification ex post facto, although we hide the fact from ourselves and from others. If we would examine ourselves honestly, could we confess that, when we sit down to look at a unit, we really have a completely open mind and do not know ahead of time which way we want the criteria to move that % Heinz-Wolfgang Kuhn, “Das Liebesgebot Jesu als Tora und als Evangelium,” in Vom Urchristentum 2u Jesus: Fitr Joachim Gnilka, ed. Hubert Frankemélle and Karl Kertelge (Freiburg: Herder, 1989), 194-230. % Holmén, “Doubts? 67-70. » Dale C. Allison, Jt, The Intertextual Jesus: Scripture in Q (Valley Forge, PA: Trin- ity Press International, 2000), 29-38. % D. V. Lindley, A. Tversky, and R. V, Brown, ‘On the Reconciliation of Probabil- ity Assessments,” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, series A, vol. 142, no. 2 (1979): 177,TRADITIONAL CRITERIA OF AUTHENTICITY 19 unit, to Jesus or away from him? Here I recall some words Harvey McArthur once wrote: It may be that the most creative scholars do not carry out research by establishing rules and then obeying them. When they encounter an item of evidence their total knowledge of the situation is brought into play, and suddenly this new item falls into place with a little click in one or another of the available slots. The rules of the game, or criteria, then serve as rationalizations for what has happened. For the outsider they serve also as a check on the plausibility of the almost unconscious decision made by the creative researcher.” ‘This evaluation is on target. Our criteria are typically rationalizations we employ to keep a clear conscience as we defend an image of Jesus we had come to believe in before wielding criteria. This is largely why two different scholars applying the same criteria to the same saying or event often come up with different results, and why all the discussion and attempted refinement of criteria over the last several decades have brought us no closer to wide agreement on very much of importance. How do we really develop our images of the historical Jesus? Surely not by using criteria in an unbiased fashion. Imagine with me a young graduate student in a department of religion. She becomes convinced, let us say, that Albert Schweitzer’s reconstruction of Jesus was close to the truth—or, as the case may be, not close to the truth—because a revered professor, whose arguments she has not the means to rebut, persuades her of this. Once her paradigm about Jesus is in place, a cognitive bias will also be in place. We all see what we expect to see and want to see—like highly prejudicial football fans who always spot more infractions committed by the team they are jeering against than by the team they are cheering for.” If we hold a belief, we will notice confirming evidence, especially if we are aware that not everyone agrees with us. Disconfirming evidence, to the contrary, makes us uncomfort- able, and so we are more likely to miss, neglect, or critically evaluate it” We do not see things as they are but as we construe them to be. After a period of time, then, one might anticipate that our graduate » Harvey K. McArthur, “The Burden of Proof in Historical Jesus Research?” ExpTim 82 (1971): 119. ® See Albert H. Hastorf and Hadley Cantril, “They Saw a Game: A Case Study” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 49 (1967): 129-134. See Charles G. Lord, Lee Ross, and Mark Lepper, “Biased Assimilation and Attitude Polarization: The Fffects of Prior Theories on Subsequently Considered Evidence?” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 37 (1979): 2098-2109. They begin by claim- ing that people who hold strong opinions on complex issues “are likely to examine20 DALE C. ALLISON, JR. student will have collected her own evidence for her professor's belief and become all the more persuaded of its correctness. As soon, more- over, as she communicates her views in public fashion, say by tutoring undergraduates or publishing a paper, she may be set for life—especially as one’s self-perception as an expert, the psychologists tell us, typi- cally enlarges self-confidence.” The prospect of embarrassment from publicly admitting error can make it hard to admit error to oneself, to undertake the difficult cognitive task of rearranging data into a new pattern after one has long been looking at an old pattern. Now at some point our student will have run across discussions of the criteria of authenticity and will have begun to fret about them. My claim is threefold: first, serious attention to criteria will have arisen only at a secondary stage of reflection, after a bias in favor of a particular Jesus was already in place; second, her conclusions about the criteria will not change her mind about Jesus; third, her own use of the criteria will confirm her prior inclinations. Moving from the hypothetical, my guess is that my graduate student fairly represents a large number of real-life New Testament scholars. Speaking candidly for myself, my own Jesus was apocalyptic and mil- lenarian by the time I was twenty. I have learned much since then and nuanced my position, but that position remains basically the same. In my own case, my picture of Jesus was developed long before I much worried about the details of method, and long before I went on record as espousing this or that view of the criteria of authenticity. Moreover, and as one would cynically expect, the method that I developed later led straight to a Jesus congenial to the judgments of my youth. This I find disturbing, and my history cannot be atypical. Surely no one started with method. The implication seems to be that developing and deploy- ing our criteria serve less to help us make truly new discoveries than to help us to confirm inclinations already held in advance. relevant empirical evidence in a biased manner. They are apt to accept ‘confirming’ evidence at face value while subjecting ‘discomforting’ evidence to critical evaluation, and as a result to draw undue support for their initial positions from mixed or random. empirical findings” (2098), On p. 2108 they affirm that “once formed, impressions about the self, beliefs about other people, or theories about functional relationships between variables can survive the total discrediting of the evidence that first gave rise to such beliefs... Beliefs can survive the complete subtraction of the critical formative evidence on which they were initially based” These should be sobering thoughts for all of us. James V. Bradley, “Overconfidence in Ignorant Experts,’ Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society 17 (1982): 82-84.