Fallible Criteria

Michael Barber is Singing about the criteria most often used by historians, and I am finding a lot of truth in what he says. At the moment I am reading through a critique of NT Wright’s Jesus and the Victory of God. And I just finished Michael Borg’s critique of Wright, which is basically a whole different set of presuppositions about how to do history. And they are all fair.

In discussing the parable of the Vineyard and its historicity, Michael shares the most common points for which this parable is assigned to the construction by the later Church, and not Jesus:

1. That the “the son” is rejected and killed would seem to point to a post-Easter setting.
2. The implications of the parable are that Jesus is the son of the vineyard, i.e., the Son of God. This is also said to most likely reflect the theology of the early church.
3. In the parable the judgment on the tenants comes only after the “son” is killed. This highlights the unique importance of Jesus and thus also seems to point towards the early community’s view.
4. The destruction that comes as a result suggests a setting after the destruction of Jerusalem.
5. The son is depicted as the final climax, being sent only after other messengers have been killed. This is said to make little sense―why would a father send his son into such a situation? The language is only explicable if one sees Jesus as the climax of salvation history―as the one who comes after all the prophets, a view most see as more likely the product of the early church than Jesus himself.
6. The image of the vineyard being handed over to others is said to point to a period after the “parting of the ways”—i.e., to some belief that God has rejected Israel in favor of the Church.

He goes on to answer those specific points, so if you are interested in those, please jump on over there for them. However, I wanted to step back, since this is exactly what Borg’s take on the situation is. He cannot, based on the probability, assign certain things as going back to Jesus. There is an inherent problem here.

The basic logic works as Michael has described, sayings are attributed to the early Church based on their proclamation of it. However, no one disputes whether or not the early Church said Jesus was the Son of God. Therefore, whether Jesus said it or not, there is always a reason, and it is a very good reason, to expect an at best even, often a higher probability of the Church saying it. If we are making decisions based on probability we are going to have a problem. Because Jesus could never have said anything the Church did say, according to this method. It is always better to err on the side of caution saying the “The Church put that in the Scripture, it did not come from the mouth of Jesus”.

Of course I am not saying anything new here, NT Wright went on about exactly these fallible historical criteria in his book. The strange issue is that no one is talking about the validity of his own criteria, specifically the criterion of similarity and dissimilarity – which would seem to do a much better job of highlighting whether or not Jesus did, or did not say something historically. Simply put, if the words are similar to Judaism, yet suggest a difference in interpretation, while at the same time being similar to the later Church, while being either never fully carried out/implemented or simply dropped to the extent spoken of, there is a high probability it was spoken by Jesus, rather than created by the Church. It would seem to me that this method would do far better justice to the evidence. With the other method you have, at best, a coin-flip: “It really could have been either one”, and at worst “That is exactly what the Church said, therefore I have no confidence Jesus said it”. It boils down to this. One would expect some continuity between Judaism and Jesus, and Jesus and the Church. If Jesus really did not say anything the Church proclaimed he said – well you really do have a big historical problem on your hands. How in the wide-world did the Church come to be? (And there are serious people working on this problem: “How did the Church come to exist given that miracles do not occur, Jesus never claimed to be the messiah, and was not resurrected”). That historical problem, I would think, should scare historians rather than a small chance of a false-positive that Jesus did not in fact say something we think he did.