As a follow-up to my previous post on the criteria of
authenticity I would like to address an issue raised in response via Facebook.
The issue can be phrased as question: are you not employing the criteria of
multiplicity and of coherence in your own example? The answer, simply, is “No.”
Yes, I note a multiplicity of similar data; yes, I note that from this data one
can infer a coherent narrative. It does not follow that I am using criteria of
authenticity. In fact I’m not, for a very good reason: authenticity is not my
question.
Authenticity, in this particular connexion, refers to
whether or not one can state that a given account in the gospels, a given pericope
(or “cut out,” to invoke the Greek etymology), describes events that, in that
perennially mischievous phrase, “go back to Jesus.” In other words, “Did this
really happen?” That is not my question. My question is “What happened?” Those
are in fact quite different questions. The latter question does not necessarily
depend upon answering the former. This is indicated by that equally perennially
equivocation, “something like this,” as in the phrases: “Jesus said something
like this,” “Jesus said something like this.” The “something like
this” is an explicit concession that Jesus did not do or say this, for “like”
is not “is,” which is to say that similarity is not identity. Thus the answer “Jesus
did something like this” is in fact an answer to the question “What happened?”,
not to “Did this really happen?”, for the latter question can only admit of two
answers: “Yes or no.” I suppose one could then modify the question to read “Did
something like this really happen?”, but that is again to concede that an
affirmative answer is possible only if one has already given a negative answer
to the initial question, “Did this really happen?” Moreover, it raises that
delightfully sticky question, “How ‘like’ must ‘something like this’ be in
order to actually qualify as ‘something like this’?”
Thus in the example of the Bethany/Bethphage complex, given
in my initial post, I argue that the data is sufficient to judge that Jesus did
indeed have followers in and around Bethany/Bethphage. I do not state that any
given account is “authentic,” or “happened.” Such a statement is what the
criteria are calculated to allow; it is not what I aim to do. Therefore I am
not using the criteria of authenticity because I am not making judgments of
authenticity. Put otherwise, the genitival “of” in “criteria of authenticity”
means something, such that not just any invocation of heuristic insights
regarding multiplicity of data or coherence of narratives will be instances of
the criteria of authenticity.
Note further that in fact I am not using the criteria of multiple
attestation or coherence, as they are commonly articulated. The criterion of
multiple attestation is fully the criterion of multiple independent attestation.
It states that if two witnesses, independently of each other, both report much
the same thing on a given matter then we can suppose that something much like
those reports occurred (note that pernicious “something like” again). I am not
using the criterion of multiple independent attestation because independence is
irrelevant to my argument. Put more precisely, I do not think that there is
such a thing as genuinely independent attestation in the gospel tradition. “Independence”
in this connexion has always implicitly, sometimes explicitly, meant “literary
independence.” But the stuff of history is not textual relations but human
relations, and first-century Christianity is much too small to realistically
think that the evangelists did not receive knowledge via media other than
writing. In other words, oral interference interferes with the criterion of
multiple attestation. When I speak of a multiplicity of data I mean precisely
and only that: the Bethany/Bethphage complex recurs sufficiently in the tradition
that whether it has come to these sources independently or not (a matter that
we probably cannot establish) is quite beside the point. Come to think of it
Mark Goodacre said much the same in his chapter on the criterion of multiple
attestation in Keith and Le Donne’s Demise of Authenticity.
Nor do I use the criterion of coherence. The test of
coherence that I employ is not whether the data coheres with that which is already affirmed as authentic, which is what
the criterion of coherence tests. It cannot be, as I am not interested in affirming anything as authentic. So if there are no judgments of authenticity regarding the data to what can further data cohere? Coherence is a perfectly good test, especially when directed at the coherence of my hypothesis. Is it coherent? Is it logically valid? Does it make good internal sense? Even better is correspondence, defined as finding adequate warrant for my hypotheses in the data. Put negatively, and to borrow a phrase from Schröter, does the data "veto" my hypothesis? Is my hypothesis rendered unlikely given what we find in the extant data? That is the question. And among those hypotheses that survive that acid test, which account for the greatest amount of relevant data with the fewest number of suppositions?
To sum up. I am not employing criteria of
authenticity because I am not concerned with questions about authenticity. And not every instance of advert to multiplicity or coherence in Jesus studies constitutes use of the criteria of authenticity, and certainly will not when authenticity isn't the question. And whilst surely there are criteria of judgment they are precisely that: criteria of judgment. They ask: by what do I judge a hypothesis to be reasonable or unreasonable. Is the hypothesis adequately parsimonious? Does render the data unintelligible? Etc. They are, in short, what puts the "critical" in "critical realism."
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