From Joseph Smith to Jesus: A Historical Reckoning
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Sifting the Scriptural Sediment
The New Testament is a library, not a univocal monolith. And biblical scholarship has developed considerable tools and methods to decipher these sources. When read carefully, these complex layers reveal much more than a casual reading allows.
I.
Begin With a Library
II. Paul Comes First
III. Genre and Expectation: Reading the Gospels as Ancient Bioi
IV. The Manuscript Evidence: Copies of Copies
V. Anonymous Authors, Attributed Authority
VI. The Synoptic Problem and the Question of Q
VII. The Gospel of John
VIII. The Rest of the New Testament
IX.
The Five Standard Criteria
X. The Sixth Criterion: Contextual Plausibility
XI. The Memory Studies Challenge
XII. Non-Christian Documentary Sources
XIII. What the Documentary Picture Gives Us
I. Begin With a Library
The New Testament is a library containing twenty-seven documents of varying genres written by multiple authors across a span of roughly fifty to seventy years. These documents are addressed to different communities in different cities, reflecting different theological concerns. And in some cases, they arrive at disparate conclusions about Jesus and the meaning of his life, death, and resurrection. Occasionally, different authors will echo another’s framework, but often there is genuine tension. These twenty-seven documents were selected, gradually and contentiously, through a process of institutional decision-making that extended primarily from the second through the fourth centuries. Some widely revered texts like the Shepherd of Hermas and the letters of Clement were eventually excluded; others that made the cut were disputed for generations. Revelation, Hebrews, and 2 Peter, for example. The question of how and why this particular library was curated is a story we will take up in Part Six. For now, we need to understand what the collection contains and what it tells us.
This is the starting point of any serious engagement with these texts. For devotional readers, learning this perspective can be disorienting. The tradition of reading the New Testament as a single, harmonious, internally consistent whole is deeply embedded in modern lay Christian culture. We often come to the Gospels having already been told that they are four accounts of the same events by four witnesses who are in fundamental agreement. But we do damage to the authorial voices of the ancient persons and/or communities who produced them when we attempt homogeny. If I read Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and pretend they are all saying essentially the same thing about Jesus, I’m not doing justice to any of these authors. What I’m really doing is creating a fifth gospel – the gospel according to Kolby. We lose their uniqueness when we assume they are all trying to communicate the same message. And the experience of reading them carefully with that assumption suspended is illuminating.
Since the thrust of this series is the recovery of the historical man Jesus, we will first focus on what the New Testament library contains, the relationships between some of these documents, and in what order its contents were produced. This matters because the sequence, once understood in general terms, tells its own story. The trajectory of the escalating tradition will be a recurring theme going forward, and it is visible in the documents themselves. Deposited like geological strata, each layer reflects the pressures and concerns of the community that produced it. Students of Mormonism's founding era will find broad parallels here.
We will do so armed with the foundational toolkit that biblical scholars bring to this library. Three interrelated methods of analysis have been developed over the past two centuries and they do most of the heavy lifting in understanding how these texts relate to each other and what they can tell us about the history beneath them:
· Source criticism asks which written sources an author drew upon and how they used them. We will demonstrate in a later section that Matthew and Luke both used Mark as a source text. That is an exercise in source criticism. When we examine whether they also shared access to a lost sayings collection, that too is source criticism. This method treats the texts as a web of literary relationships rather than as independent accounts.
· Form criticism takes this a step further, attempting to get beneath the written sources to the oral traditions they preserve. As we shall see, much of the material in the Gospels circulated for decades as individual, self-contained units before any evangelist set them into a continuous narrative. Form criticism classifies these units by type (miracle story, parable, pronouncement, controversy dialogue) and attempts to trace them back through its transmission history to its earliest recoverable form. Many of the criteria of historical authenticity that scholars developed for distinguishing earlier tradition from later elaboration grew directly out of this discipline.
· Redaction criticism asks what each author did with the sources and traditions available to them. We will observe Matthew softening Mark's statement that Jesus 'could do no mighty work' in Nazareth to 'he did not do many mighty works there.' This is redaction at work. The method treats each Gospel writer as a purposeful editor and theologian rather than a passive compiler. Their choices about what to include, exclude, rearrange, and rewrite reveal the distinctive concerns of their community and a freeze-frame in the tradition's development.
These three methods work in sequence: source criticism establishes who was copying whom > form criticism examines the oral tradition those sources preserve > and redaction criticism reveals how each author edited and reshaped that tradition for their own purposes. They are the instruments the rest of this post relies upon for its conclusions.
After the overview of source documents, we review the specific criteria of historical authenticity that scholars have developed within these critical categories to distinguish the authorial voice from the historical memory these texts might preserve, including an accounting of some of the challenges that have been mounted against those criteria. Finally, we step outside the Christian tradition entirely and examine what non-Christian sources independently confirm about Jesus and the movement he generated. The post will close by synthesizing what the full documentary picture gives us: the foundation on which the reconstruction of the historical Jesus, in the posts that follow, will be built.
II. Paul Comes First
The first thing to establish is chronology.
When most people picture the New Testament, they picture the Gospels first. Matthew, Mark, Luke, John. This is natural because the Gospels appear first in the canon, and because the Gospels tell the story of Jesus's life, ministry, death, and resurrection. At a cursory glance, it makes sense to assume that the story was written before the elaborated theology built around it. In fact, the reverse is true. The earliest documents in the New Testament are Paul's letters.
There are a total of 13 letters attributed to Paul in the canon. Scholars generally identify seven as being his authentic letters with high confidence: Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, and Philemon. The rest of his letters are assessed as being either Deutero-Pauline (meaning secondary/disputed) or pseudepigraphic (meaning written by later followers in Paul’s name). I won’t distract our project here by enumerating the specific reasons for that scholarly judgment, but suffice it to say, there is a consistent voice, grammar, theology, and ecclesiastical concern that permeates the authentic letters which is missing from the others.
Scholars date the authentic letters to the late 40s and 50s CE, roughly twenty to twenty-five years after the crucifixion (traditionally dated ~30 CE). They predate the earliest Gospel by more than a decade, and they predate the latest Gospel by more than forty years. They are the oldest surviving Christian literature we have. And here is the thing that should give any careful reader significant pause: Paul, in all of those letters, shows almost no interest in the ministry, sayings, or miracles of Jesus in his lifetime.
It's a surprising realization. Read Paul's letters and count the references to Jesus's earthly life – to his teachings, his exorcisms, his specific encounters, his parables, his healings. You will find very little. Paul knows that Jesus was born of a woman (Galatians 4:4), that he was a descendant of David (Romans 1:3), that he was betrayed, that he shared a final meal with his disciples (1 Corinthians 11:23-25), that he was crucified, and that he was raised. He mentions in passing a saying of Jesus about divorce without quotation. There are one or two other examples that suggest awareness of other sayings. That is, essentially, the full inventory of what Paul's letters tell us about the Jesus who walked and taught and ate with people in Galilee and Jerusalem.
Instead, what dominates Paul's letters is the cosmic, risen Christ. A pre-existent divine figure whose death accomplishes a theological purpose, whose resurrection inaugurates a new age, and whose imminent return will transform the world. Paul certainly does not dispute Jesus’s lived humanity, but his Jesus is primarily a theological category. He is the Lord of the cosmos, the second Adam, the agent through whom God is reconciling the world to himself. This is a sophisticated and thoroughly developed early theological portrait – and it was produced before any of the Gospels had been written.
The significance of this chronological fact cannot be overstated. We tend to assume that, in the literature at least, the theological interpretation of Jesus developed after his story had been articulated. That the earliest generation of post-Easter converts first learned who Jesus was through the Gospel narratives, and then built their theology on top of that foundation. But the evidence suggests otherwise. The theological interpretation arrived first in its surviving literary form. The Gospel narratives, with their detailed accounts of Jesus's teaching and his earthly ministry, came later. And they came into a tradition that had already been theologically iterating raw oral material for thirty years.
III. Genre and Expectation: Reading the Gospels as Ancient Bioi
In Part One, we traced the German scholarly tradition that gave rise to the historical-critical study of the Bible, from Strauss to Schweitzer. Here let me foreground the intellectual context in which those scholars developed one of their foundational assumptions: that the Gospels are essentially repositories of oral community tradition, and that the historian's task is to identify the individual units of that tradition for extraction from the literary framework the evangelists placed around them.
As scholar Robyn Walsh observed in her 2021 work The Origins of Early Christian Literature, this assumption was shaped by the broader culture of German Romanticism in the early 19th century, in which scholars and intellectuals were engaged in a parallel project of recovering a unified national heritage for Germany from oral folklore. They were invested in recovering the “spirit” of a people through oral traditions like folklore, epics, and communal storytelling. Compare the Brothers Grimm collecting fairy tales as the authentic voice of the pre-nationalist German people and biblical scholars reading the Gospels as transparent windows onto early Christian oral tradition. Both are inheriting the same project. Those same intellectual instincts birthed the assumption that a historian could peel back the literary surface of a text and recover the underlying oral tradition. That impulse drove the development of form criticism and the early quests for the historical Jesus, which proceeded on the confidence that the Gospels transmit oral traditions that careful analysis could recover more or less directly.
Subsequent scholarship has complicated that picture somewhat. The idea that Gospel authors were stenographers of community memory is outdated. Instead, we should take seriously the notion that they were intentional literary craftsmen working within a recognized tradition of Greco-Roman composition, and that the texts they produced bear the marks of deliberate authorial shaping. And so, before turning to the Gospels themselves, it is worth pausing to ask a fundamental question: what kind of texts are these? What is their form, their genre? The question is important because the answer determines what we should expect and not expect from them.
The work that has done the most to reframe this question is Richard Burridge’s What Are the Gospels? (1992). There he argued, persuasively enough to shift the scholarly consensus, that the canonical gospels belong to a recognized Greco-Roman literary genre: the bios, or “life.” A bios was not modern biography. It was a literary portrait of a significant figure that was chiefly organized by theme rather than strict chronology or reportage. It was composed not to record events with journalistic fidelity but to reveal the character, significance, and meaning of its subject for the community that produced and received the text. Plutarch wrote bioi. Suetonius wrote bioi. The philosophical schools produced bioi of their founders. The genre was widespread, well understood, and governed by conventions that ancient audiences would have recognized even if modern readers do not.
We should explore those conventions in brief because they establish the interpretive ground rules for how we interpret the Gospel accounts as literature. Authors of bioi routinely rearranged narrative episodes to serve the purposes of establishing overriding theme or quality of character for its subject. Far from transcriptions of what was actually said, they composed speeches and dialogues representing what the subject plausibly would have said in a given situation from their perspective.
The most revealing testimony on this point comes from Thucydides, who is widely regarded as the most rigorous and methodologically self-conscious historian of the ancient world. In Book 1, Chapter 22 of his History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides openly acknowledges that the speeches in his history are not verbatim records. He explains that it was difficult to remember the exact words spoken, both for himself and for his informants, and that he therefore composed the speeches to convey what he thought the speakers would have needed to say given the circumstances – while staying as close as possible to the general sense of what the tradition held. This is a statement of method, and it comes from the historian whom the ancient world considered the gold standard of accuracy and intellectual honesty. If even Thucydides composed speeches rather than transcribed them, and admitted so openly, then the practice was not so much a deficiency as a recognized convention of serious historical writing at the time. Nevertheless, it is still plausible they preserved sources in these fabricated speeches.
The gospel authors, working within the same broad literary culture a few centuries later, would have been doing nothing unusual by placing constructed speeches on Jesus’s lips. The Sermon on the Mount, the Olivet Discourse, the farewell discourses of John – these should be read not as stenographic records but rather as literary compositions representing what the authors believed Jesus would have said, supplemented by inherited oral traditions about Jesus’s sayings, shaped by the theological and communal concerns of the communities that transmitted and received them decades after his death. This convention was standard across the genre. Miraculous or extraordinary events were expected in the bioi of significant figures: divine men, philosophers, and emperors all attracted miracle stories as a conventional marker of their importance. Authors working in the genre would have understood these as part of its standard vocabulary.
This does not mean, however, that all audiences who encountered the gospels, most of them non-elite, hearing the texts read aloud to them in community settings, would have received them with the same literary awareness. Probably most of them would have understood the miracle stories as literal accounts of what had occurred, and the texts do nothing to discourage that reading. The point is not that ancient audiences were too sophisticated to take miracles literally. It is that the genre in which the gospel authors were working did not require historical factuality as its organizing principle, whatever individual audiences may have believed about any given episode.
Let me state the implications for reading the gospels simply. We should expect that the gospel authors preserved genuine historical memory. The broad outlines of Jesus’ activity, his association with John the Baptist, his Galilean base, his reputation as a healer and teacher, his execution under Pontius Pilate. We should also expect that this memory has been thoroughly shaped by decades of oral transmission, liturgical use, and theological development before any of it reached written form. Think of it as a long-form, agenda-influenced version of the telephone game.
Much of this material traveled from community to community as individual, self-contained units with minimal interpretive framework before they were woven into a bios. A healing story, a parable, a pronouncement, a conflict episode. These units are what scholars call pericope (from the Greek for “a cutting out”), each one with a memorable core, capable of being told, retold, and adapted independently before any evangelist set it into a continuous narrative. We should also expect that the authors themselves further shaped this material in accordance with their own literary, theological, and community-specific purposes. The question to bring to any given episode is what layers of tradition, interpretation, and authorial intention are visible in the text, and what, if anything, can be recovered of the historical event beneath them.
This is the framework that historical-critical study of the genre demands. If the gospels are bioi, and the scholarly consensus since Burridge is that they are, then reading them as though they were modern journalism or courtroom testimony or custodial handoff is not a mark of reverence. It is a category error, and one that ultimately obscures rather than elucidates what the authors were actually saying and doing.
IV. The Manuscript Evidence: Copies of Copies
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The manuscript evidence compounds the challenge of recovery. We possess no original copies of any New Testament text. What survives are copies of copies of copies. Handwritten reproductions made decades or centuries after the originals were composed. As textual critic Bart Ehrman emphasizes, the earliest Greek manuscript fragment of any Gospel is a credit-card-sized scrap of John’s Gospel known as Rylands Library Papyrus P52 (pictured). It is dated to roughly 125–175 CE, preserving only a few verses from chapter 18. Other early papyri from the second and third centuries are similarly fragmentary: partial columns, isolated leaves, small portions of a single Gospel. No partially complete Gospel manuscript survives from before the third century, and the first fully intact copies of all four Gospels (Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus) date to the mid-fourth century, some three hundred years after the events they narrate.
None of these manuscripts bear authorial signatures. The familiar attributions “According to Matthew,” “According to Mark,” etc. are later scribal additions, absent from the earliest fragments. The Gospels circulated anonymously before church tradition assigned them to apostles or apostolic associates, a point on which mainstream scholarship is virtually unanimous. Ehrman has noted that we have more manuscripts of the New Testament than of any other ancient text, but that this abundance is itself a measure of how much copying, and therefore how much alteration, has occurred. Over 5,700 Greek copies. No two manuscripts are identical, and scholars estimate the number of textual variants across the manuscript tradition exceeds the number of words in the New Testament itself. Most variants are minor: spelling differences, word-order shifts. But some affect passages of theological significance.
What modern translators and historians work with, then, is not “the Gospel of Mark” as its author penned it, but a scholarly reconstruction — an eclectic critical text assembled by comparing thousands of manuscripts, none of them originals, many of them disagreeing with one another. This is the textual foundation beneath every red-letter Bible and every historical Jesus study: not an unbroken chain of transmission, but a painstakingly reconstructed approximation of documents that were themselves theological interpretations of decades of oral tradition.
V. Anonymous Authors, Attributed Authority
Thus, the names attached to the four Gospels – Matthew, Mark, Luke, John – are certainly second-century attributions. The documents are anonymous. None of the Gospels identifies its author within the text. Christian communities and scribes sought to establish the authority of the documents by tracing them back to apostolic sources. By the time church father Irenaeus, writing around 180 CE, is citing all four Gospels by the names we now use for them, those attributions had already become traditional. But they were secondary tradition, not original signature.
This is significant for a reason that should be familiar to readers of this blog. One of the central rhetorical moves in any tradition's management of its founding documents is the claim of eyewitness authority. If Matthew was written by a disciple who sat at table with Jesus, and John was written by the beloved disciple himself, then the Gospels carry a very different evidentiary weight than if they are anonymous community documents produced decades after the events they describe, by authors who never met Jesus and were working from oral tradition and earlier written sources. Because multiple versions started to emerge, the gospels needed to be named in order to differentiate them, and the choice of apostolic attribution is a legitimating claim.
The Gospels were written, according to the scholarly consensus that has held for well over a century, in the following approximate order: Mark, around 70 CE; Matthew and Luke, both in the 80s CE; John, around 90 to 100 CE. Taken together, that means the earliest Gospel was written approximately forty years after the crucifixion, and the latest approximately sixty to seventy years after. That is no trivial gap. Forty years is the distance between 1986 and today — a span within which living memory fades, oral tradition drifts, community interests reshape narratives, and theological elaboration accretes around the core of what was originally transmitted.
In the interest of brevity, we won’t explore the rationale scholars have for dating all of the gospels here. As a general rule in the escalating tradition, scholars have observed that Christian communities tend to add to material they embrace, rather than slash large portions of it. Since Mark is by far the shortest gospel, it stands to reason that Mark came first. To further establish this claim, in the next section we will demonstrate in detail that Matthew and Luke used Mark as a source text, and so necessarily follow after Mark. John is dated later for different reasons that we will briefly touch on later in this post. As such, I will focus the question of why scholars date the gospels so late on Mark’s gospel as first written. It was almost certainly composed after the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple by the Romans in 70 CE. The Temple’s destruction was a catastrophic event for first-century Judaism and Jesus followers alike, so the references in Mark 13 to the Temple’s fall read as far more naturally explicable as a community processing a recent trauma than as a prediction of something yet to come.
The case for post-70 dating rests not on a single proof-text but on a convergence of evidence gathered by scholars over the last century – a cumulative argument whose force lies in the sheer number of narrative details in Mark that only cohere in a post-war context. The Olivet Discourse of Mark 13 is the most commonly cited exhibit, but it is only the beginning. The description of the Temple’s destruction in Mark 13:1–2 is far more specific than the generic prophetic warnings about the Temple’s fall that appear elsewhere in Jewish literature. In 1 Kings 9:8, in 1 Enoch 90:28–30 for example, or in the oracular traditions Josephus records. The specificity reads as hindsight, not foresight.
The “abomination of desolation” in Mark 13:14 parallels Josephus’s own citation of Daniel’s prophecy of the Temple’s fall in Antiquities 10.276. It is most likely meant to refer to Vespasian, though some occasionally argue for the Zealot leader Eleazar or the Emperor Gaius. The various portents enumerated in Mark 13 are explicitly prompted by the question of when the Temple buildings will fall. Mark encourages the reader to understand everything that follows in light of that destruction. In the trial narrative, Mark 14:57–58 and 15:29 attribute to Jesus the slanderous claim that he would destroy the Temple and raise it again in three days. What is striking is that the controversy there is over Jesus’s role in bringing about the destruction, not whether the Temple will actually fall. The destruction itself is not a matter of debate. It is assumed as background knowledge, which only makes sense if Mark’s audience already knew it had happened.
The argument extends beyond the Olivet Discourse into the fabric of the narrative itself. New Testament scholar Eric Stewart has argued that Mark systematically relocates the language of sacred Jewish space – the vocabulary of gathering, ritualized activity, and communal assembly that would normally be associated with the Temple and synagogues – onto the person of Jesus, thereby configuring a literary geography in which Jesus himself replaces the institutions that the war had destroyed or rendered inaccessible. The parable of the Wicked Tenants in Mark 12 is weaponized by the author as an obvious allegory of punishment for the rejection of Jesus. However, the comparison with the parallel pericope in the Gospel of Thomas (saying 65) is telling. Regarded by many scholars as preserving a more primitive version, it reveals that the punitive element is absent from the earlier form of this parable. The allegorization and the punishment are Markan redaction. The cursing of the fig tree links the image of an unproductive tree and its destruction to an unproductive Temple and its eventual destruction. The tearing of the Temple veil, which none of Jesus’ disciples were in a position to witness or correlate to the moment of Jesus’s death, assumes a divine causality that portends the entire Temple’s fate in hindsight.
There are also outright historical anachronisms that only make sense after the Jewish War. The language of “Legion” in the Gerasene demoniac story of Mark 5:1–20, which this series will interpret at length in the next post, likely works as political symbolism only after the war. Prior to the war the military presence in Palestine and the Decapolis was not legionary. As Markan scholar Christopher Zeichmann has put it, the analogy would be a story in which a demon named “Spetsnaz” is exorcized from a Crimean resident depicted as living in 2010. The reader would immediately recognize that the story had been composed after the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014, when those special forces were active. Similarly, the question of taxation in Mark 12:13–17 contains anachronisms that point to a post-71 CE composition: no capitation taxes were collected by coin in Judea before 71, and the depiction of Jesus, a Galilean, as an authority on Judean taxation is historically odd before 44 CE, when Galilee and Judea were separate administrative regions, but natural after they were merged into a single province.
There is cumulative weight behind this evidence. The specificity of the destruction language, the narrative assumption that the Temple’s fall is settled background knowledge, the systematic relocation of sacred space onto Jesus, the allegorization of punishment absent from more primitive parallels, and outright military and fiscal anachronisms that betray a post-war compositional context. Although some of this could be framed as apocalyptic expectation rather than retrospection, the convergence of evidence places Mark’s composition after 70 CE with a confidence that approaches near-consensus among critical scholars. This is a point where the dating means something not just chronologically but culturally. Mark is writing for a community that has observed the center of Jewish religious life burn to the ground, and that context shapes everything about the urgency and the apocalyptic register of the narrative he produces. And naturally, this benchmark of Mark’s dating thus impacts the dating of gospels who relied on Mark as their source.
VI. The Synoptic Problem and the Question of Q
Here is where the Synoptic Problem enters the picture and where things get really interesting. And somewhat contested.
Matthew, Mark, and Luke are what scholars call the Synoptic Gospels. Synoptic is taken from the Greek word for “seen together” because they share so much material that they can be laid side by side and read in parallel. Literally, you can see it for yourself if instead of reading them vertically (viz. the whole of Mark, the whole of Luke, and so on), you read them horizontally. Comparing like stories to like stories, you will see the overlap. In many places, Matthew and Luke reproduce Mark’s text almost word for word. The story of Jesus healing a paralytic, the account of the Gerasene demoniac, the parable of the mustard seed, the apocalyptic discourse of Mark 13 – in passage after passage, the verbal agreement between the three Gospels is so precise that it cannot be explained by independent eyewitnesses happening to remember the same things in the same words. It can only be explained by literary dependence. Someone was copying someone else.
The general scholarly consensus, established in the nineteenth century and refined but not fundamentally overturned since, is that Mark was written first and that both Matthew and Luke used Mark as a primary source. The evidence for Markan priority is extensive. When Matthew and Luke agree with each other against Mark, it is typically in minor stylistic improvements. Mark’s grammar is comparatively rough, immediate, and primarily uses the historical present tense (i.e., narrating past events in the present tense). Where Matthew and Luke alter the same direct quotations of Mark, they tend to introduce cleaned-up grammar, often altering tense, and softening passages that seem undignified. It is extremely telling that Matthew and Luke’s borrowing of Mark’s narrative units tend to follow the same sequence in the vast majority of cases. That they most often append and insert their own materials into the existing flow of Mark’s framework strongly suggests they are leveraging a common source.
When Matthew and Luke diverge from each other in citing Mark, they almost always do so by diverging from Mark in different directions. The pattern is exactly what you would expect if Mark were the source text and Matthew and Luke were independent editors working from it. This is why Markan priority is accepted across virtually the entire spectrum of serious scholarship, and this series takes it as established.
Here are specific examples of how Matthew and Luke altered Mark, with the bold text indicating Markan language retained by either of them:
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Mark |
Matthew |
Luke |
Analysis |
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1:9-11 In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens opened and the Spirit descending like a dove upon him. And a voice came from the heavens, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” |
3:14-17 John would have prevented him, saying, “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?” But Jesus answered him, “Let it be so now, for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness.” Then he consented. And when Jesus had been baptized, just as he came up from the water, suddenly the heavens were opened to him and he saw God’s Spirit descending like a dove and alighting on him. And a voice from the heavens said, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” |
3:21–22 Now when all the people were baptized and when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, the heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” |
Matthew and Luke both preserve most of Mark’s wording with slight alterations. However, Matthew inserts an apologetic preamble that signals the tradition’s discomfort with Jesus’s baptism by John. Luke partially sidesteps the embarrassment by having Jesus possibly baptized after John was imprisoned by Herod (see v. 20). |
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2:14 As he was walking along, he saw Levi son of Alphaeus sitting at the tax-collection station, and he said to him, “Follow me.” And he got up and followed him. |
9:9 As Jesus was walking along, he saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax-collection station, and he said to him, “Follow me,” and he got up and followed him. |
5:27-28 After this he went out and saw a tax collector named Levi sitting at the tax-collection station, and he said to him, “Follow me.” And he got up, left everything, and followed him. |
This is an example of how cleanly Matthew and Luke often lift language from Mark in the triple tradition. |
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6:5-6 And he could do no deed of power there [Nazareth], except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and cured them. And he was amazed at their unbelief. |
13:58 And he did not do many deeds of power there [Nazareth], because of their unbelief. |
4:24-25, 28-29 And he said, “Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in his hometown [Nazareth]. But the truth is, there were many widows in Israel in the time of Elijah…” … When they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage. They got up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff. |
Mark and Matthew are clearly parallel. However, Matthew softens Mark's embarrassing "could do no deed of power" to "did not do many deeds of power," attributing the limitation to unbelief rather than incapacity. Luke's version is sufficiently divergent that scholars debate whether he's inferring Mark or drawing on an independent tradition. Luke relocates it to the beginning of Jesus’s ministry as well. |
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10:17-18 As he was setting out on a journey, a man ran up and knelt before him and asked him, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus said to him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone.” |
19:16-17 Then someone came to him and said, “Teacher, what good deed must I do to have eternal life?” And he said to him, “Why do you ask me about what is good? There is only one who is good. If you wish to enter into life, keep the commandments.” |
18:18-19 A certain ruler asked him, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus said to him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone.” |
Apart from identifying the man as a ruler, Luke retains Mark with precision. However, Matthew alters the pericope to avoid any implication that Jesus is not good or not God. |
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15:39 Now when the centurion, who stood facing him, saw that in this way he breathed his last, he said, “Truly this man was God’s Son!” |
27:54 Now when the centurion and those with him who were keeping watch over Jesus saw the earthquake and what took place, they were terrified and said, “Truly this was God’s Son!” |
23:47 Now when the centurion saw what had taken place, he praised God and said, “Certainly this man was innocent.” |
Matthew again incorporates the apocalyptic sign of the earthquakes into his Markan editing. Luke changes the centurion’s confession to focus on the injustice of Jesus’ crucifixion, in keeping with Lukan themes. |
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15:34, 37 At three o’clock Jesus cried out with a loud voice, “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?” which means, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” … Then Jesus gave a loud cry and breathed his last. |
27:46, 50 And about three o’clock Jesus cried with a loud voice, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?” that is, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” … Then Jesus cried again with a loud voice and breathed his last. … [Addition of earthquakes and other apocalyptic signs in v. 51-53] … |
23:46 Then Jesus, crying out with a loud voice, said, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” Having said this, he breathed his last. |
Matthew more tightly preserves Mark’s wording, but follows the pericope with cosmic apocalyptic signs absent from Mark. Luke preserves only the narrative from but replaces the cry content. |
What this means for the question of independent testimony is important. Matthew, Mark, Luke are not three independent eyewitness accounts of the same events. Matthew and Luke are, in large part, edited versions of Mark supplemented with additional material. Scholars call their shared material the triple tradition. Thus, Matthew and Luke do not provide independent corroboration of Mark’s narrative. They provide evidence about how later Christian communities chose to modify and expand an earlier document. From a historian’s perspective, this is critical for assessing the historicity of each individual episode that make up their wider narratives.
But Mark does not explain everything. Matthew and Luke also share a substantial body of material (roughly two hundred verses), that does not appear in Mark at all. This shared non-Markan material is what scholars refer to as the double tradition, and it includes some of the most distinctive and recognizable content in the entire Christian canon. The Lord’s Prayer, the Beatitudes, the parable of the lost sheep, the parable of the talents, extended sayings collections and ethical teachings that constitute a significant portion of what most people think of when they think of Jesus’s teaching. The question of where this shared material came from. If we accept the assumption that Matthew and Luke are both working from Mark but clearly have access to a source Mark does not contain, that is the heart of the Synoptic Problem.
Three solutions currently compete for scholarly allegiance. All three accept Markan priority. They disagree about what happened after Mark.
Specifically, about the literary relationship between Matthew and Luke and about whether the double tradition requires a lost source to explain it. The dominant solution, which has held majority support since the late nineteenth century, is the two-source hypothesis. On this model, Matthew and Luke each independently used two written sources: Mark, for their narrative framework, and a second document – a collection of Jesus’s sayings that no longer survives as an independent text – designated Q from the German word Quelle, meaning “source.” Q can be partially reconstructed from the material Matthew and Luke share but that is absent from Mark. The Q reconstruction yields something that looks like a sayings collection. It is predominantly teachings, aphorisms, and wisdom material, with just a few units of narrative content.
The two-source hypothesis explains the double tradition by positing that Matthew and Luke each drew independently on this lost document, incorporating its material into their respective Gospels in different ways and in different locations within their narratives. Again, this is exactly the pattern you would expect if two editors were independently weaving material from the same source into different frameworks. The four-source hypothesis is an expansion of this model because it acknowledges that, in addition to Mark and Q, Matthew and Luke each had unique material they incorporate as well – labeled M and L respectively. These theories were given definitive formulation by B.H. Streeter in 1924, and they have been thoroughly developed by John Kloppenborg, whose study Q, The Earliest Gospel (2000) represents the most comprehensive recent defense.
The case for Q rests on several arguments. First, there is the thematic and stylistic consistency of the double tradition material. It’s overwhelmingly composed of sayings of Jesus, and the sayings have a recognizable flavor and thematic coherence that suggests they derive from a unified source rather than from scattered independent traditions.
Second, a structural argument. Kloppenborg has observed that if you give a group of writers two sources, viz. a narrative and a collection of sayings, and ask them to produce a single document, you would expect each writer to intermix the two sources differently. They would place the sayings material at different points in the narrative framework. The gospels display exactly this pattern. Matthew tends to gather the sayings material into large thematic blocks: the Sermon on the Mount being the most famous example, while Luke distributes similar material across a more extended narrative. The different placement of the same material in different narrative locations is more naturally explained (in terms of editorial behavior and compositional practice) by two editors independently incorporating a shared source than by one editor dismantling and redistributing the other’s carefully constructed arrangements
Third, there is the observation that Matthew and Luke’s editorial relationship to Mark is demonstrably different from their relationship to each other: the kinds of changes they make when editing Mark – polishing grammar, softening theologically difficult passages, adding explanatory details – are not the same kinds of changes visible in the double tradition. Which would be difficult to explain if one of them were simply editing the other in the same way they both edit Mark.
Q has vulnerabilities, however. The most basic is the most obvious: no manuscript of Q has ever been found. No documentary evidence, no patristic citation. No explicit reference in any early Christian writing to a document of this description. Q is entirely a scholarly construct, inferred from the pattern of agreements between Matthew and Luke. This doesn’t make it impossible of course, many ancient documents have been lost. But it does mean that the entire hypothesis rests on the strength of the literary argument rather than on any external confirmation that the document existed.
Note that this particular criticism against Q has been substantially weakened by the discovery of the Nag Hammadi library in 1945. A cache of early Christian documents was found in a sealed jar near the Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi, likely buried in the late fourth century to protect them from the orthodoxy’s campaign of suppression. There was found the Gospel of Thomas, a collection of 114 sayings attributed to Jesus with no passion narrative, no resurrection account, and no sustained biographical framework. To be clear, Thomas is not Q. But its existence establishes beyond dispute that sayings gospels, these hypothetical collections of a teacher’s words without the narrative apparatus that the canonical Gospels would make normative, were a real literary genre in early Christianity. Not merely a modern scholarly invention. Before Nag Hammadi, critics of the Q hypothesis could argue that no document of the type Q is purported to be had ever been shown to exist. After 1945, the argument weakened.
The second vulnerability is what scholars call the minor agreements problem. It is probably the most formidable challenge the Q hypothesis faces. If Matthew and Luke are working independently from Mark and Q, and have no knowledge of each other, then they should not agree with each other in changes to Mark where Q passages are not involved. But they do occasionally. From time to time, Matthew and Luke make the same small modifications to Mark’s text. Modifications that cannot be attributed to Q, because Q is reconstructed precisely from non-Markan shared material. The most striking example occurs in the passion narrative. In Mark’s account of the mocking of Jesus before the Sanhedrin, the accusers blindfold Jesus, strike him, and say “Prophesy!” Matthew and Luke both (apparently independently) insert the same question that does not appear in Mark: “Who hit you?” They are not getting this from Mark. They are not getting it from Q. If they are truly independent of each other, the agreement requires an explanation. The explanations that have been offered (scribal harmonization, lingering oral tradition, coincidental editorial logic) are individually plausible enough, but collectively they represent the kind of multiplication of ad hoc hypotheses that Farrer, in 1955, identified as the Q hypothesis’s structural weakness.
That brings us to the second solution. The Farrer hypothesis was named for Oxford scholar and Anglican priest Austin Farrer, who argued in his 1955 essay On Dispensing with Q that the entire Q edifice was unnecessary if one simple assumption was granted – that Luke had read Matthew. On this model, Mark was written first, Matthew used Mark as a source and added his own material (including the sayings traditions), and subsequently Luke used both Mark and Matthew, drawing his double-tradition material directly from Matthew rather than from a hypothetical lost document. The hypothesis has the considerable advantage of simplicity. It explains all the shared material without requiring any source that does not survive, using only documents we actually possess.
Farrer’s core insight was methodological. The Q hypothesis, he observed, “wholly depends on the incredibility of St Luke having read St Matthew’s book.” If that incredibility could be removed, if it could be shown that Luke’s editorial choices were intelligible as the work of someone who knew Matthew and was deliberately reworking Matthew’s material for his own purposes, then the entire rationale for positing a lost source disappears. Mark Goodacre, currently the most prominent scholar advocating the Farrer position, has developed this argument considerably in his 2002 study The Case Against Q. Goodacre agrees that Matthew and Luke used sources beyond Mark, but that a Q source cannot be reliably constructed from their writings. He deduces that the simpler explanation (Luke used Matthew) accounts for the evidence without requiring a hypothetical document for which no external evidence exists.
The Farrer hypothesis has its own difficulties though. The most significant is the question of Luke’s editorial behavior. If Luke had Matthew’s Gospel in front of him, why did he so thoroughly dismantle Matthew’s most impressive literary constructions? The Sermon on the Mount is Matthew’s most carefully organized block of teaching – a sustained, thematically structured discourse that is among the most recognized passages in the entire tradition. If Luke knew this text, he chose to break it apart and scatter its components across his narrative in a way that is difficult to explain as editorial improvement. Kloppenborg and other Q advocates have pressed this point with force. A writer who dismantles a predecessor’s most distinctive literary achievement and distributes its fragments across a less organized narrative is behaving in a way that requires explanation, and the explanations Farrer advocates have offered, viz. Luke’s preference for distributing teaching material across his travel narrative, Luke’s different literary sensibility, Luke’s theological reasons for resisting Matthew’s thematic concentrations are possibly reasonable, but not self-evident.
There is a third solution. A minority position, but gaining attention in recent scholarship because it resolves some of the difficulties that both the two-source hypothesis and the Farrer hypothesis struggle with. The Matthean posteriority hypothesis, sometimes called the Wilke hypothesis after the nineteenth-century German scholar Christian Gottlob Wilke who first proposed it, holds that Mark was written first, Luke used Mark, and then Matthew used both Mark and Luke. On this model, the double tradition is explained not by Luke copying Matthew (as Farrer proposes) but by Matthew copying Luke. The solution similarly makes Q unnecessary, but in the opposite direction.
This hypothesis was largely dormant for over a century before being revived in 1992 by Ronald Huggins who gave it its current name. It has since been developed by Martin Hengel, Evan Powell, and most substantially by Robert MacEwen in his 2015 study Matthean Posteriority. The arguments in its favor are specific and textual. Matthew’s versions of double-tradition material consistently appear more developed in wording and structure than Luke’s, which appear more primitive. This is also an observation that Q advocates make, since they regard Luke as preserving the Q source more faithfully. Matthean posteriority advocates might explain it more economically: Matthew’s versions are more developed because Matthew is editing Luke, not because both are independently editing a lost source that Luke happens to preserve better. Matthew contains passages that appear to be conflations of elements drawn from both Mark and Luke. This appears to be a phenomenon that is unique to Matthew with no parallel in Luke, which would be difficult to explain if Luke were the one conflating. Moreover, the kinds of editorial changes Matthew makes to Luke in the double tradition are consistent with the sort of changes he makes to Mark in the triple tradition.
The Matthean posteriority hypothesis remains the smallest minority position of the three, and it faces its own challenges. Particularly the question of whether Matthew’s apparent knowledge of Luke can be demonstrated with sufficient rigor across the full range of the double tradition. There is also the difficulty of explaining certain passages where Matthew’s version appears less developed than Luke’s, contra the argument. But its recent resurgence is a trend of Synoptic studies in the past decade, and it has entered the mainstream of scholarly discussion in a way that wasn’t true twenty years ago.
I have laid out these three positions at some length in the spirit of transparency, and because the Synoptic Problem is one of those areas where the presumed academic consensus, that is, the assumption that scholars have basically figured this out and Q is the answer, can overstate things. To be sure, the Q hypothesis is still the majority opinion. Farrer comes in second, with Matthean posteriority coming in a distant third. Yet, the field is alive. The question is open. Serious scholars with substantive arguments are in genuine disagreement about the documentary relationships between the most important texts in the Christian tradition.
What I want to emphasize then is that for the purposes of the argument this series is making, the specific resolution of the Synoptic Problem is less important than what all three solutions agree on. Regardless of whether the double tradition derives from a lost sayings source, from Luke’s use of Matthew, or from Matthew’s use of Luke, the material itself – the shared body of sayings, teachings, and aphorisms that constitute the double tradition in Matthew and Luke — is a strand of the tradition focused on what Jesus taught rather than on who he was cosmically. It reflects very little interest in Jesus’s death as a theological event, contains virtually no developed atonement theology, and no resurrection narrative. It is a tradition of teachings, aphorisms, and wisdom sayings, presented as the words of a teacher whose authority derives from what he says rather than from the supernatural framework that later tradition would construc around him. The cosmic theological apparatus of Paul and John appear to post-date this material, which makes it plausibly very early. That conclusion doesn’t depend on the existence of Q. It emerges from the character of the shared material itself, however that material reached the Gospels which later preserve it.
VII. The Gospel of John
If the gap between Mark and Matthew is instructive, the gap between the Synoptics as a group and the Gospel of John is extraordinary.
John is a different kind of document in almost every respect. This gospel reflects awareness of the basic Markan narrative events that precede him, yet he betrays no literary dependence on the Synoptics whatsoever. Where the Synoptics present a Galilean ministry of roughly one year, John presents a ministry spanning three years with multiple visits to Jerusalem. The Synoptics place the cleansing of the Temple at the end of Jesus's ministry, as the precipitating event of his arrest. John on the other hand places it at the very beginning. Where the Synoptics record Jesus speaking primarily in short, pithy sayings and parables, John records lengthy theological discourses in a style that bears no resemblance to anything in the other three Gospels. The Sermon on the Mount has no parallel in John. The Lord's Prayer and its concerns find no place in John. The parables of mustard seed, prodigal son, good Samaritan, the sower; they are absent.
What John does have, and what the Synoptics conspicuously lack in the same form, are the great "I am" sayings: I am the bread of life. I am the light of the world. I am the good shepherd. I am the resurrection and the life. I am the way, the truth, and the life. I am the true vine. The author has John the Baptizer describe Jesus as the lamb of God, whereas the synoptics do not. And the Prologue, a soaring opening passage that begins "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God", presents Jesus as the pre-existent divine Logos – the platonic principle through which the entire cosmos was created, who "became flesh and dwelt among us."
The Christology of John's Gospel (meaning the doctrine expounding Jesus’s identity) is the most elevated in the New Testament. Jesus in John's Gospel knows exactly who he is from the beginning. He speaks with the authority of God because, in John's telling, he is God. He lacks confusion, uncertainty, and is never subject to the kinds of human limitations that appear in Mark's portrait. When Mark's Jesus cries from the cross "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?", a cry of genuine desolation borrowed from Psalm 22 that has troubled theologians for two millennia, John's Jesus says from the same cross, "It is finished." Spoken with the serenity of someone who has accomplished exactly what he set out to do without a moment of misgiving. This is the primary reason that the mainstream of biblical scholarship assesses John to be later.
A few additional lines of evidence reinforce the late dating. The aposynagōgos passages, three references to expulsion from the synagogue (9:22, 12:42, 16:2), reflect a social world in which Jesus-followers and the broader Jewish community have substantially separated with finality. That is a situation most scholars associate with the decades of development after the 70 CE temple destruction. It is sometimes linked to the Birkat ha-Minim, a Jewish benediction against heretics connected with the rabbinic consolidation at Yavneh in the late 1st century. The document also shows signs of editorial layering. Chapter 21 reads as a later appendix, suggesting the Gospel went through stages of composition before reaching its final form. The P52 Rylands Papyrus fragment (referenced earlier in this post) dating to ~150 CE gives us a likely terminus date, and working backward from when the text was already circulating in Egypt points to a composition window around 100 CE give or take.
All of this converges on the same conclusion: John's markedly elevated Christology, firm identity distinction between Jesus-followers and Jews, the editorial layering, and the manuscript evidence together point to a document that reached its final form at the turn of the first century. The theological differences are hardly minor tonal differences. They represent an amplification of Jesus’s identity in a highly developed fashion. And they map precisely onto the chronological sequence of the documents. Mark, the earliest Gospel, presents the most human and most urgent Jesus. John, the latest Gospel, presents the most divine and most serene. The dominant trend is a trajectory that runs in one direction, and that is toward escalating supernatural claims about who Jesus is.
VIII. The Rest of the New Testament
The preceding sections have examined the texts most essential to the project of recovering the historical Jesus: Paul's authentic letters, the synoptic Gospels, and John. The remainder of the New Testament, while significant for understanding how the early movement developed, has much less bearing on that reconstruction. These texts postdate most of the Gospels, address the internal concerns of maturing communities rather than preserving memory of Jesus's ministry, and are preoccupied with questions of church governance, false teaching, and the delayed return of Christ. But a brief survey of their authorship and dating is useful here, because it reinforces that the names attached to these documents are, with very few exceptions, not the names of the people who wrote them.
· Acts of the Apostles. Anonymous, but unanimously attributed to the author of Luke's Gospel. Traditionally dated to the 80s or 90s CE, though some recent scholarship argues as late as 120 CE. The attribution to a companion of Paul (Luke) is a later tradition without support in the text itself.
· Hebrews. Anonymous. The text never claims Pauline authorship, though later tradition assigned it to Paul. Modern scholarship is unanimous that he was not the author. Origen's famous verdict from the mid-third century still holds: "who wrote Hebrews, God alone knows." Dating is debated with some positing late 60s CE, but most scholars place it toward the end of the first century.
· The Deutero-Pauline Epistles (Colossians, Ephesians, 2 Thessalonians). Disputed. While these letters claim Pauline authorship, they are regarded by the majority of critical scholars as pseudepigraphic. They reflect more developed theology, ecclesiology, and vocabulary than the authentic letters. Generally dated to the 70s through 90s CE.
· The Pastoral Epistles (1 & 2 Timothy, Titus). Consensus pseudepigraphic, written in Paul's name by later followers. Dated between 90 and 125 CE, reflecting a more developed church hierarchy and ecclesiastical vocabulary absent from the authentic letters.
· The Catholic Epistles. James and Jude both claim authorship by figures associated with Jesus's family, but most critical scholars regard these claims as spurious, with dates ranging from the late first to early second century. 1 Peter claims Petrine authorship but is majority-viewed as pseudepigraphic on the basis of its polished Greek and theological affinities with Pauline thought. It is almost certainly written after 70 CE and usually dated toward the end of the first century. 2 Peter is consensus pseudepigraphic and widely considered the last text written in the New Testament, frequently dated to 100 to 125 CE. It references Paul's letters as a collected body of authoritative writing, which itself points to a second-century composition.
· The Johannine Letters (1, 2, 3 John). Anonymous, though the writer of 2 and 3 John identifies himself as "the elder." Their relationship to the fourth Gospel is debated, though probably produced by the same community. Dated shortly after John's Gospel, around 95 to 110 CE.
· Revelation. Names its author as "John" but does not claim apostolic identity. Most critical scholars distinguish this John from both the fourth Gospel's author and the historical apostle. Commonly dated to around 95 CE, during the reign of Emperor Domitian.
Outside of the seven authentic Pauline letters, the entire non-Gospel remainder of the New Testament is either anonymous or pseudepigraphic by mainstream scholarly assessment. It should be noted that the practice of writing in the name of an authoritative figure was not uncommon in the ancient world, though Bart Ehrman has demonstrated in Forgery and Counterforgery (2013) that it was not the innocent literary convention scholars once assumed. Ancient audiences did object to false attribution when they detected it. The intent was nevertheless to claim continuity with an authoritative tradition, and in many cases the deception was successful enough that the texts entered the canon under their assumed names.
Students of Mormonism's founding era will recognize the broader pattern at work here. The retroactive attribution of documents to authoritative figures, the quiet revision of earlier material to accommodate later theological concerns, and the progressive elaboration of founding claims across successive generations of texts are hardly unique to early Christianity. This is what traditions do with their most important stories. What’s critical from the historian's perspective is learning to recognize the development. To read the seams where the elaboration is visible, and to interrogate what the actual history beneath them looks like. Next, we turn the criteria of historical authenticity.
IX. The Five Standard Criteria
The documentary picture was critical to understand before introducing the set of tools scholars have developed for distinguishing earlier tradition from later elaboration in that material. To discern authentic memory from theological invention. These tools go by the name of historical criteria, and they will be referenced throughout the rest of this blog series as we seek to reconstruct Jesus. Here I introduce them with examples.
The criterion of multiple attestation holds that if a saying, practice, or event appears in multiple independent sources, it is more likely to reflect genuine historical memory than something appearing in only one source. Jesus as an exorcist appears in Mark, in the double-tradition material shared by Matthew and Luke, in the special Matthean material, and is implied in Paul. Ergo, no single strand of the tradition invented it. The practice of open table fellowship in which Jesus is described as eating with the ritually impure, tax collectors, sinners, etc., appears across Mark, the double tradition, and Luke's special material. The Kingdom of God as the central theme of Jesus's proclamation appears in every stratum of the tradition without exception. And the baptism by John – the fact that Jesus submitted to John's baptism of repentance before beginning his own ministry – is attested in Mark, present in the double tradition, and serves as the assumed backstory of the entire Gospel tradition.
These are the most historically secure units of the enterprise, precisely because they cannot be explained as the invention of any single community. The obvious caveat that needs mentioning is this: the force of the multiple attestation argument depends entirely on the independence of the sources being cited. If the double-tradition material derives from an independent document (the Q hypothesis), it constitutes a genuinely separate attestation. If it derives from one evangelist’s use of the other (the Farrer or Matthean posteriority hypotheses), the independence is reduced, though not eliminated since the material may still preserve earlier oral traditions that predate the editorial relationship between the Gospels. The criterion remains useful, but its strength varies depending on which solution to the Synoptic Problem one finds most persuasive.
The criterion of embarrassment holds that if a saying or event would have been awkward or embarrassing for the early community to invent, its presence in the tradition suggests it was too well established to suppress. The baptism by John is the classic example. John's baptism was explicitly a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. No community in the process of establishing Jesus as sinless and divine would have invented a story in which he submits to a baptism of repentance administered by someone else (the Christian tradition has held from the start that the person doing the baptizing is spiritually superior). Matthew's Gospel shows the discomfort directly when it modifies Mark’s account to add dialogue in which John protests that he should be baptized by Jesus, not the other way around. The embarrassment becomes visible in the editorial repair work.
The same logic applies to the cry of dereliction from the cross previously cited: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (Mark 15:34). A community inventing a passion narrative for the exalted Christ would be unlikely to put a cry of divine abandonment in the mouth of the dying Jesus. The saying is so theologically uncomfortable that Luke omits it entirely and replaces it with a serene commendation of his spirit to the Father. Also, recall Jesus's explicit limitation of knowledge in Mark 13:32: "But about that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father." A community developing an increasingly elevated Christology would not have invented a saying in which Jesus claims not to know something the Father knows. That saying created such theological difficulty that it became a central exhibit in the 4th century Arian controversy. These are almost certainly authentic early tradition precisely because early followers were embarrassed by their implications and wouldn’t have invented them.
The criterion of dissimilarity holds that if a saying or practice is unlike both the Judaism of Jesus's time and the theology of the early movement, it is more likely to be authentic. That is, since neither community would have invented it. The saying "Let the dead bury their own dead" (Matthew 8:22/Luke 9:60; Q) is an instructive case. The burial of one's parents was among the most sacred obligations in Jewish law. No Jewish community would have invented a saying that dismisses it. And Gentiles who converted to the early Jesus movement also had enormous investment in family structures and burial rites at the outset. They would be unlikely to have invented it either. The saying is so radical that it sits uncomfortably in both directions, which is why scholars regard it as one of the most securely authentic sayings in the tradition. The address of God as Abba, the intimate Aramaic term preserved as a loanword in Paul's Greek letters, was long considered a strong case for dissimilarity – unusual in Jewish prayer practice and unlike the formal Trinitarian language of the later church. More recent scholarship has moderated this, recognizing the address as characteristic of Jesus but not wholly unparalleled in Second Temple Judaism. The criterion's usefulness survives the correction, but the example illustrates its limits.
The criterion of coherence holds that once a core of authentic material has been established by other criteria, additional material that coheres with it can be accepted with reasonable confidence. The parables are the best example. Once the Kingdom proclamation is established as authentic and the social context of Galilean peasant life is understood, the parables that deal with agricultural labor, debt, landlords, day wages, and economic anxiety cohere powerfully with that established core. A Galilean teacher addressing Galilean peasant concerns would tell exactly these stories. The coherence is sociological as well as thematic.
The criterion of rejection and execution holds that a historically adequate account of Jesus must explain why the Romans executed him and why some Jewish leaders possibly facilitated his handover. E.P. Sanders built much of his reconstruction around it in Jesus and Judaism (1985). It’s a simple principle: any reconstruction that produces a Jesus too innocuous to have been crucified is historically inadequate. The prophetic Temple action, whatever form it actually took, is multiply attested in all four Gospels and provides the immediate trigger for the sequence of events leading to the arrest. Similarly, the titulus crucis – the "King of the Jews" charge nailed above the cross – is attested in all four Gospels, passes the criterion of embarrassment (the early community would have preferred a more explicitly theological title), and establishes that Rome understood what Jesus was doing as a religio-political claim that warranted execution as a royal pretender. Any historically adequate reconstruction of Jesus's ministry must be adequate to explain why Rome read it that way.
Candidly, these criteria are imperfect tools. They involve judgment as well as method, and many scholars applying them to the same material have reached different conclusions. Some of them have fallen out of favor with modern scholarship to greater or lesser extent. But they aren’t arbitrary. They represent an accumulation of methodological wisdom stemming from two centuries of serious historical inquiry into perhaps one of the most difficult evidentiary puzzles in human history. And they build tensile strength to historical authenticity whenever multiple criteria can be applied to any single unit in the tradition. The posts that follow will show how scholars have applied them with some nuance and alteration on very specific questions: what Jesus was actually doing in Galilee, what was his program, what the crucifixion actually meant, and what happened in the aftermath of his death. These tools are especially useful when supplemented and buttressed by academic studies from other sociological, psychological, and anthropological disciplines.
Literary and narrative approaches should also be applied. Associated with scholars like David Rhoads and Donald Michie who pioneered narrative criticism of the Gospels beginning in the 1980s, this method brackets the historical question to ask how the text works as a story: who the narrator is, how characters are constructed, what the implied reader is assumed to know, how plot and rhetoric generate meaning. These are legitimate questions since our primary sources for reconstruction are literary. The readings they produce are often not in competition with historical conclusions but complementary to them. A text's narrative choices are themselves evidence about the communities that shaped it. In at least one illustration later in this series, the narrative architecture of a Gospel story will serve as the primary evidence for a historical argument about the earliest communities' experience.
X. The Sixth Criterion: Contextual Plausibility
This brings us to a sixth and final criterion which has been proposed more recently, and it connects the documentary analysis of the tradition to the social and historical world the tradition grew out of.
Gerd Theissen and Dagmar Winter, in their 2002 study The Quest for the Plausible Jesus, proposed what they called the criterion of historical plausibility – or in the version that has gained wider currency, contextual plausibility. The criterion has two related components. The first asks whether a saying or practice attributed to Jesus makes sense within the specific social, cultural, and religious world of first-century Jewish Palestine. Viz. whether it is the kind of thing that someone operating in that context, with those pressures and those resources, could plausibly have said or done. The second asks whether the saying or practice plausibly generated the effects it is claimed to have generated; whether it is adequate to explain the tradition that developed from it, the opposition it provoked, and the movement it produced.
The value of this criterion is that it cuts in two directions simultaneously in a way the older criteria do not. The criterion of dissimilarity, for instance, has weaknesses because it tends to isolate Jesus from his context – to identify as authentic precisely those things that set him apart from Judaism and from early Jesus movements. Taken on its own, this has the perverse effect of producing a Jesus who floats free of any particular tradition, belonging neither to the Judaism that formed him nor to the messianic groups that claimed him after his death. Taken to the extreme, it becomes historically implausible on its face. A real person living in a real historical context is always shaped by that context even when they challenge or contradict it. Contextual plausibility corrects this distortion by requiring that the recovered Jesus make sense within his world, not merely in contrast to it.
Applied to the reconstruction this series is building, the criterion does useful work. The practice of open table fellowship, the proclamation of the Kingdom of God as imminent, the healing ministry understood as social restoration, the use of parable as subversive pedagogy, the challenge to purity boundaries, the Temple action as prophetic sign. All of these make excellent sense within the specific social world of Roman-occupied Galilee. A Galilean peasant prophet operating under layered imperial and religious exploitation, drawing on the resources of the prophetic tradition and the apocalyptic imagination, responding to the specific conditions of his sector of the mediterranean world: this is not a figure invented by later tradition. This is a figure that the social world of first-century Galilee was capable of producing. The contextual fit isn’t quite proof, but it is a significant form of corroboration. The older criteria are focused on the relationship between Jesus and the documents. Contextual plausibility shows us where those conclusions align in relationship to his world.
XI. The Memory Studies Challenge
There is a challenge to the criterion of historical authenticity that comes from what is broadly called the memory studies turn in New Testament scholarship. The section on genre conventions around bios touched on this issue earlier. But here we ask a prior question: what had already happened to oral material before any evangelist touched it? Associated with scholars like Jens Schröter, Anthony Le Donne, and Dale Allison (whose work on the resurrection we will encounter in Part Five), the core argument is that the criteria of authenticity rest on a model of memory that cognitive science has largely discredited. The older model assumed that memory functions something like a recording device: the original event is deposited in the memory, and subsequent retrieval either accurately plays it back or distorts it through interference. On this model, the task of historical scholarship is essentially an archaeological exercise in stripping away the distortions to recover the original deposit (as I have occasionally characterized it in this series).
The problem is that this is not how memory works, and has not been understood to work since Frederic Bartlett's foundational experimental work in the 1930s, Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology. Memory is reconstruction, not retrieval. Every act of remembering is simultaneously an act of interpretation, shaped by the “schema” of concerns, frameworks, and social contexts of the person remembering in the present. This is the normal operation of human memory, and it applies as much to sincere and careful witnesses as to careless or motivated ones. The implication for the Gospel tradition is significant: even if the tradition accurately preserves memories that go back to eyewitnesses of Jesus's ministry, those memories were never raw recordings of events. They were always already interpreted and shaped by the frameworks of the people who experienced them. And of course, subsequently reshaped for decades by the communities that reiterated them, then further reshaped by the evangelists who recorded, edited, and redacted them.
This argument has real force. But I do not believe it renders the historical enterprise pointless – some of its more enthusiastic proponents have sometimes drawn that conclusion too quickly in my judgment. The memory studies critique establishes that the criteria cannot deliver what the most confident versions of the older scholarship claimed: a direct, unmediated access to what Jesus said and did, cleanly sifted of interpretation. That confidence was always overblown and it deserves some deflation.
Even after the memory studies challenge is taken seriously, what the criteria can still do is provide probabilistic guidance. A saying that appears in multiple independent sources, that would have been awkward for the tradition to invent, that fits the social world of first-century Galilee, and that coheres with other well-attested features of Jesus's ministry is more likely to reflect genuine historical memory than a saying that appears in only one late source and serves obvious apologetic purposes. Layered application of the criteria augments a calibrated historical judgment.
To reiterate: the project of this series is more reconstruction than pure recovery. A probable picture built from fragmentary evidence by an interpreter interpreting interpreters who brings his own frameworks to the material. It is a microcosm of the essential hermeneutical problem. Part Six of this series will return to the questions of memory from a different angle, examining how the research on oral tradition – from Milman Parry and Albert Lord’s studies of living epic performance through Werner Kelber’s application of that research to the Gospel tradition – deepens our understanding of how the Jesus tradition traveled and changed in the decades before it was written down.
XII. Non-Christian Documentary Sources
This brings us to the final documentary sources we will account for in this part of the series. The question of what evidence exists for Jesus and the early Christian movement outside the New Testament canon itself impinges. The honest answer is that the non-Christian documentary record is limited and fairly late.
The most commonly cited non-Christian source is the passage in Josephus known as the Testimonium Flavianum and has been debated by scholars for centuries. Flavius Josephus (37 – 100 CE) was a Jewish historian who was born, raised, and operated within Judea throughout his life. A Pharisee and military leader, he fought in the Jewish revolt against Rome in 66 CE, surrendered, and spent the rest of his career writing in the service of his Roman patrons. His two major works, The Jewish War and Antiquities of the Jews, are invaluable sources for the history of first-century Palestine. They are among the most important non-Christian documents we have for understanding the world Jesus inhabited. In Book 18 of Antiquities (dated to 93/94 CE), he mentions Jesus:
“About this time there lived Jesus, a wise man, if indeed one ought to call him a man. For he was one who performed surprising deeds and was a teacher of such people as accept the truth gladly. He won over many Jews and many of the Greeks. He was the Messiah. And when, upon the accusation of the principal men among us, Pilate had condemned him to a cross, those who had first come to love him did not cease. He appeared to them spending a third day restored to life, for the prophets of God had foretold these things and a thousand other marvels about him. And the tribe of the Christians, so called after him, has still to this day not disappeared.” (Antiquities 18.3.3)
The problem is obvious to anyone who thinks about this excerpt for a moment. Josephus was not a Christian. He was a Jew writing for a Roman audience, with no evident interest in Christian theology and no record anywhere else in his writings of Christian belief. The passage as it stands includes claims (viz. that Jesus was the Messiah, that he rose on the third day) that a non-Christian Jewish author of the first century would not have written. It also expresses credulity that Jesus could be called “just a man”. If Josephus had believed Jesus was the Messiah and divine, he would have been a Christian, and we would know about it.
The modern scholarly consensus is that the passage is a partial interpolation. There was a genuine original reference to Jesus, likely brief, probably neutral or mildly negative in tone, noting his execution by Pilate and the persistence of his followers. Scholars posit that this original footnote was subsequently embellished by Christian scribes who were custodian to Josephus’ works once Christianity was dominant in the Roman empire, and that they found the neutral reference insufficient and improved it in transmission. Fascinatingly, this theory seems to find corroboration in a tenth-century Arabic version of the passage that is preserved by the Christian historian Agapius. He shows no allergy to the miraculous, portentous events in his recounting of Jesus’s life, but in contrast to the Greek manuscript tradition of Josephus, he cites from a Syrian source what may be a closer approximation of the original:
“Similarly, Josephus the Hebrew. For he says in the treatises that he has written on the governance of the Jews: At this time there was a wise man who was called Jesus. And his conduct was good, and he was known to be virtuous. And many people from among the Jews and the other nations became his disciples. Pilate condemned him to be crucified and to die. And those who had become his disciples did not abandon his discipleship. They reported that he had appeared to them three days after his crucifixion and that he was alive; accordingly, he was perhaps the Messiah concerning whom the prophets have recounted wonders.” (Kitab al-'Unwan, or Universal History, Vol. II)
Despite Agapius’s faith commitments to Christianity, this presents a more neutral text that describes Jesus as a wise man who was crucified, whose disciples reported that he had appeared to them after death, and who may have been the Messiah – with the last two details rendered as disciples' claims rather than Josephus's own endorsement.
There is a second, shorter mention of Jesus in Josephus in Book 20 of Antiquities, where he refers to the execution of James, describing him as "the brother of Jesus who was called Christ." This passage is much less contested, is generally regarded as authentic, and provides independent confirmation that Jesus existed and was known by his contemporaries as the one called Messiah/Christ.
That brings us to the second major non-Christian source. The letters of Pliny the Younger, a Roman imperial administrator writing in 111 CE. Pliny was serving as governor of the province of Bithynia-Pontus in Asia Minor when he encountered the Christian communities there in sufficient numbers to require his official attention. His letter to the Emperor Trajan is one of the most informative non-Christian documents about early Christianity that survives to us, and its authenticity is undisputed by scholars. Pliny's letter is an administrative one, wherein a provincial governor writes to his emperor asking for procedural guidance on how to handle this new tribe of Jesus worshippers:
“I have never been present at an examination of Christians. Consequently, I do not know the nature or the extent of the punishments usually meted out to them ... For the moment this is the line I have taken with all persons brought before me on the charge of being Christians. I have asked them in person if they are Christians, and if they admit it I repeat the question a second and third time, with a warning of the punishment awaiting them. If they persist, I order them to be led away for execution ... I considered that I should dismiss any who deny that they were or ever had been Christians when they had repeated after me a formula of invocation to the gods and had made offerings of wine and incense to your statue … and furthermore had reviled the name of Christ ... They declared that the sum total of their guilt or error amounted to no more than this: they had met regularly before dawn on a fixed day to chant verses alternately among themselves in honor of Christ as if to a god, and also to bind themselves by oath ... To abstain from theft, robbery, and adultery, to commit no breach of trust and not to deny a deposit when called upon to restore it. After this ceremony it had been their custom to disperse and reassemble later to take food of an ordinary harmless kind ... This made me decide it was all the more necessary to extract the truth by torture from two slave-women ... I found nothing but a degenerate sort of cult carried to extravagant length.” (Epistulae X.96)
Trajan's response is equally telling: Christians are not to be actively sought out, but if brought before the authorities and proven guilty, they are to be punished unless they demonstrate their innocence by offering sacrifice to the Roman gods and cursing Christ. Both of which, Pliny notes, genuine Christians are apparently incapable of doing.
What makes Pliny's letter valuable for the historical argument is not what it tells us about Jesus directly. It tells us almost nothing about Jesus. Rather, it informs us about the movement Jesus generated. By 112 CE, roughly eighty years after the crucifixion, the “Anointed” communities of Bithynia had grown large enough that their activities were significantly disrupting the local religious and civic economy. Pliny reports that the temple cults, which had been almost deserted, were beginning to be frequented again now that prosecutions had commenced, implying that Christian growth had previously drawn people away from them. The movement had spread from the villages and rural districts into the metropolis. It included people of every age and social class. Women and slaves. And Pliny reports its members gathered before dawn on a fixed day to sing hymns to Christ as to a god, and subsequently participated in a shared meal.
Taken together, what the non-Christian documentary sources give us is this:
1. An independent report from a Jewish historian that Jesus existed, was executed by Pilate, and generated a movement that persisted after his death.
2. Independent confirmation from a Roman administrator that the movement was geographically widespread, socially diverse, communally organized, and worshipping Jesus “the Anointed [King]” as a divine figure.
It is possible Josephus’s sources were received within living memory of the events that generated them. And Pliny confirms that by the early second century it was increasingly becoming a matter of political concern to Rome's imperial administration, raising explicit questions of civic loyalty that required the emperor's personal guidance. The test Pliny devised for distinguishing genuine followers from former ones (offering incense to the emperor's image and cursing their Lord) is itself an insight into how Rome read the movement: as a community whose primary allegiance was to a figure competing with Caesar’s lordship, and whose members' inability to curse that figure under threat of execution demonstrated the depth of that competing loyalty.
Neither Josephus nor Pliny is a neutral reporter. Josephus was writing under Roman patronage; Pliny was writing as an instrument of Roman administrative power. And neither source tells us anything about the content of Jesus's teaching or the nature of his ministry – except that its consequences were political in Rome’s eyes. They confirm only the bare historical skeleton. The man existed, Rome killed him, and the movement that resulted was growing, difficult to suppress, and politically treasonous.
XIII. What the Documentary Picture Gives Us
In summary, here is what the documentary picture renders.
The earliest surviving Christian literature are Paul’s letters. Their content about Jesus focuses almost entirely on a cosmic, risen Christ and shows minimal interest in Jesus’s earthly life and teaching. The earliest Gospel was written forty years after the crucifixion and presents a Jesus who is urgent, human, and morally demanding yet mysterious. Mark’s Christology is ambiguous but the author clearly understands Jesus to be the Messiah. The later Gospels progressively heighten and elaborate that identity, culminating in John’s portrait of the pre-existent divine Logos. The documents themselves are anonymous, written by later communities rather than eyewitnesses.
Despite challenges to understanding their relationships, we have a variety of tools to guide us toward a probable historical Jesus. The instruments help us map the trajectory of the tradition’s development while also allowing us to distinguish – partially, with appropriate humility about the limitations – the earlier layers from the later ones. To discern the pre-theological core from the theological elaboration that accretes with time.
In anticipation of the next installment which will launch my detailed reconstruction, I will here state in compressed form the core of historically reliable results that the next several posts will develop with deeper argument and analysis of the evidence. They are the conclusions that survive the crucible of the historical-critical method. Taken together, they represent the minimal bedrock that biblical scholarship across the theological spectrum broadly agrees upon. Think of them as a map before the journey:
1. Jesus existed as a historical person. This is independently attested by Paul, the Synoptic tradition, John, Josephus, and the evidence of a movement organized around his name within living memory of his death. The mythicist position does not survive serious engagement with the evidence.
2. Jesus was a Galilean Jew who was baptized by John the Baptist. He entered the public record as a disciple of John’s prophetic movement. The baptism is among the most securely established episodes in the tradition. This fact is multiply attested and deeply embarrassing to a community developing a Christology in which Jesus was sinless and superior to John.
3. Jesus’s message centered on the imminent arrival of the Kingdom of God. This is the single most widely attested theme in the entire tradition — present in Mark, the double tradition, the special material of both Matthew and Luke, and assumed as background in Paul. It appears in every documentary stratum without exception. No serious scholar of any theological persuasion disputes that this was the center of his public message.
4. Jesus was reputed to be an exorcist and healer. Whatever one makes of the miracle traditions theologically, the historical fact that Jesus was understood by his contemporaries as someone who performed healings and exorcisms is multiply attested across independent sources and coheres with the social world of first-century Galilee, where such figures were quite common.
5. Jesus taught in parables. The parabolic form is so distinctive, so multiply attested, and so unlike both the teaching style of contemporary Jewish sages and typical theological discourse of the early church that it passes the criterion of dissimilarity cleanly. The early church wrote parabolic history about Jesus, but it was not their rhetorical mode. The parables are recognizably the product of a specific mind working in a specific pedagogical style.
6. Jesus practiced open table fellowship that violated social and purity boundaries. The tradition of Jesus eating with tax collectors, sinners, and the ritually impure appears across multiple independent sources and coheres with the Kingdom proclamation’s emphasis on inclusion and reversal. The specificity of the practice was more pointed than generalized kindness. It was a systematic challenge to the honor-shame logic of Mediterranean table culture, and it passes the criterion of contextual plausibility with ease.
7. Jesus created a disturbance in the Temple during Passover. The episode is attested in all four Gospels, contextually plausible as a prophetic sign-act, and critically, is adequate to explain what happened next. The criterion of rejection and execution requires that any historically viable reconstruction produce a Jesus who did something provocative enough to trigger his arrest. The Temple provocation is the most plausible candidate.
8. Jesus was crucified under Pontius Pilate on the charge of claiming to be King of the Jews. The crucifixion is among the most certain facts in all of ancient history. It is attested by Paul, all four Gospels, Josephus, and Tacitus. The crucifixion itself and the titulus crucis (“title of the cross”) pass the criterion of embarrassment. This specific form of execution was reserved for political offenders and slaves. It was a shameful punishment, and it establishes that Rome understood him as a political threat, not merely a religious nuisance.
9. Jesus’s disciples did not anticipate Jesus’ death by crucifixion. Mark’s portrait of consistent incomprehension throughout the ministry – the hardened hearts, the three passion predictions met with incomprehension, Peter’s rebuke – passes the criterion of embarrassment decisively. No community building the authority of its founding apostles would have invented a tradition in which those apostles consistently failed to grasp their teacher’s messianic failure. The flight at the arrest, Peter’s denial, the hiding behind locked doors. These are the behaviors of people for whom the crucifixion was a catastrophe that contradicted their every expectation for the messiah.
10. Jesus’s followers claimed shortly after his death that he had appeared to them alive. Paul’s list in 1 Corinthians 15, written within twenty-five years and transmitting tradition older still, establishes that the appearance claims were early, specific, and foundational to the movement’s reconstitution. The historian cannot fully adjudicate whether the appearances were physical, visionary, or something else. However, the fact that the earliest community experienced something they interpreted as encounters with a living Jesus is beyond dispute.
These ten points are the skeleton. They constitute the load-bearing structure on which my detailed reconstruction over the next several posts will build. Each one will be developed with summary evidence and argument in its proper place. What I want the reader to carry forward from this post is simply the recognition that the documentary picture, read with the tools the field has developed, and audited or supplemented by related contextual disciplines, yields something remarkable. The next installment will turn to the man himself – the Galilean prophet whose life and circumstances ultimately inspired a new world religion.
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Recommended Reading
Robyn Faith Walsh. The Origins of Early Christian Literature: Contextualizing the New Testament within Greco-Roman Literary Culture (2021). Cambridge University Press.
Richard Burridge. What Are the Gospels? A Comparison with Graeco-Roman Biography (1992). Cambridge University Press.
Bart D. Ehrman. Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why (2005). HarperSanFrancisco.
Gerd Theissen and Dagmar Winter. The Quest for the Plausible Jesus (2002). Westminster John Knox Press.
John Kloppenborg. Q, The Earliest Gospel (2000). Westminster John Knox Press.
Mark Goodacre. The Case Against Q (2002). Trinity Press International.
Robert MacEwen. Matthean Posteriority (2015). Bloomsbury T&T Clark.
E.P. Sanders. Jesus and Judaism (1985). Fortress Press.
Frederic Bartlett. Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology (1932). Cambridge University Press.
Bart D. Ehrman. Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics (2013). Oxford University Press.
This is Part Two of a seven-part series. Part One – From Nauvoo to Nazareth – established the methodology and the stakes. Part Three will turn to the historical Jesus himself: what biblical scholarship actually reconstructs from beneath the layers of tradition, and how the figure and his Kingdom program provoked a socio-political response from his original audience.
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