ApostateAbe

On pages 220-222 of the third edition of his book, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings (or via: amazon.co.uk), Bart D. Ehrman presents a few pages on the criterion of dissimilarity. This is what he teaches in his introductory course, and I have copied it here.

What an Odd Thing to Say: The Criterion of Dissimilarity

The most controversial criterion that historians use, and often misuse, to establish tradition from the life of Jesus is commonly called the "criterion of dissimilarity." It too can be explained by analogy to a legal trial. Any witness in a court of law will naturally tell things the way he or she sees them. Thus, the perspective of the witness has to be taken into account when trying to evaluate the merits of the case. Moreover, sometimes a witness has a vested interested [sic] in the outcome of the trial. A question that perennially comes up, then, involves the testimony of interested parties: are they distorting, or even fabricating, testimony for reasons of their own? The analogy does not completely work, of course, for ancient literary sources (or for modern ones either, for that matter). Authors from the ancient world were not under oath to tell the historical facts, and nothing but the facts. When examining ancient sources, however, the historian must always be alert to the perspective of the witness.

The criterion is rooted in the fact that early Christians modified and invented stories about Jesus. There is no one who disputes this: otherwise we would have to say that Jesus really did make clay sparrows come to life when he was a five-year-old and zap his younger playmates when they irritated him, that he really did come forth from his tomb at his resurrection with his head reaching above the clouds, supported by angels as tall as skyscrapers, and that he really did reveal the secret Gnostic doctrines to his disciples months and years after his resurrection. No one believes that all of these events actually happened (at least no one that I know). How, then, did they come to be written down? Somebody made them up, and told them to other people, and eventually they came into the hands of an author who wrote about them--unless he made them up himself.

<snip for copyright - this passage can be read on the Amazon preview>

Historians have to evaluate all of the traditions about Jesus to determine whether they coincide with the beliefs and practices of the early Christians who were proclaiming them before they can render a judgment concerning their historical reliability. One of the problems inherent in the criterion of dissimilarity, as you might have guessed, is that we do not know as much about what the early Christians believed and practiced as we would like; moreover, what we do know indicates that they believed and practiced a whole range of things. For these reasons, it is easier to make a judgment concerning a particular tradition when it passes both of the criteria we have discussed [independent attestation and dissimilarity]. The judgment can be made even more easily when a tradition passes a third tradition as well [contextual credibility].

couch_sloth

Stories continue-on and evolve often for odd reasons, and many times untrue stories are just passed on because they make interesting stories.

We don't know with any level of certainty what people felt and believed about Jesus during his life-time or soon after his death, e.g. Did they believe he was literally the biological son of God or just some sort of super prophet, or etc?
(That is, if some type of historical Jesus actually existed).

e.g. Perhaps at some point, early on, it was to the advantage of some of the Jesus-Followers to believe that Jesus was in the same tradition/spiritual-lineage as John the Baptist, so this the story of Jesus's baptism was created as a sort of demonstration of John passing on the mantle to Jesus. (e.g. Mark 1:7-8, "After me comes the one more powerful than I, the straps of whose sandals I am not worthy to stoop down and untie. I baptize you with water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”)

I.O.W. Just because a story seems dissimilar to later beliefs doesn't mean it was so to those who created and spread the story.
And once a story is established/accepted by many it is difficult to just toss-it just because it could be construed as conflicting with your pet beliefs.

Toto

I always get the impression that Ehrman is speaking to a class of southern college students who have been indoctrinated into the idea that the Bible is the font of all knowledge, wisdom, and certainty. He knows that what he is telling them is almost too radical for them to absorb as it is, and anything more might provoke a riot.

ApostateAbe

I think Bart Ehrman makes a good point when he says, "Most Christians appear to have understood that when a person is baptized, he or she was spiritually inferior to the one who was doing the baptizing." That is the seemingly-universal belief about baptism that we know about. Mark certainly has John the Baptist "pass on the mantle," but there are presumably many other symbolic ways to "pass on the mantle" between a previous authority figure and Jesus, and the particular method of John baptizing Jesus poses a special problem for anyone who believed that Jesus should have been the spiritual superior to John (which they apparently believed as we know from reading the earliest gospel accounts). Otherwise, wouldn't it seem better to belong to the cult of John and not of Jesus?

John the Baptist is a historical religious leader attested by Josephus, much like Jesus, though of course the attestation to Jesus and James is controversial (needlessly). John the Baptist apparently lived just a few decades before the composition of Mark, which means that Mark was early on, not significantly late. It presumably reflects oral religious myths that existed before it was written, and there really is not much of a range of time to plausibly speculate about a drastically different religious dynamic about baptism earlier than that, and there is still less time to speculate about a drastically different religious dynamic about baptism between Matthew/Luke and Mark. Embarrassment about the baptism can be plausibly discerned in Mark, in my opinion, given the exceptionally extreme deference of Mark's John the Baptist to Jesus ("...the straps of whose sandals I am not worthy to stoop down and untie") and the announcement from God in Jesus' favor at the baptism event itself ("This is my beloved Son with whom I am well pleased"). The signs of embarrassment are of course much more strikingly certain in the later gospels of Matthew, Luke and John.

couch_sloth

"However, most contemporary scholars now regard it as the earliest of the canonical gospels [1] (c 70)"

"John the Baptist (Hebrew: יוחנן המטביל, Yoḥanan ha-mmatbil, Arabic: يحيى‎ Yahyá or يوحنا المعمدان Yūhannā al-maʿmadān, Aramaic: ܝܘܚܢܢ Yoḥanan)[1] (c. 6 BCE – c. 36 CE)"
If the Gospel of Mark was written 34 years after John the Baptist and Jesus died that's plenty of time for all sorts of nonsense stories to develop and spread about them.
Untrue stories are spread all the time about people even while they are still alive (e.g. Urban legends).

The signs of embarrassment may have been present in Matt., Luke and John but not present at all for the writer of Mark.
e.g. The later gospels were just stuck with Mark's story and had to deal with it.


What I am saying is that (Assuming there was some sort of historical Jesus) that we don't know what the predominate belief was about him during his life or just after.
e.g. It could be that early on the following for John the Baptist was stronger than it was for Jesus, so it was seen as appealing to portray John as passing on the mantle to Jesus. The writer of Mark wasn't upset by John Baptizing Jesus because John's ministry precede Jesus's, and John was perhaps more popular than Jesus.(?)

It's not that I'm saying that the Criteria from embarrassment is total without merit, it just that it seems to be weak evidence when we can't even say with any real level of certainty what was going on at all.

ApostateAbe

The criterion does indeed require a premise that we have a rough idea of Christian interests at the time the relevant myth was told, and I think you bring up a few good points that the criterion is not so useful for those who give serious consideration to alternative possibilities about how Christians thought even if they are only possibilities and not directly implied by the evidence. If we can't trust the earliest relevant evidence to infer about how the earliest Christians probably thought, then I don't think any criteria specific to New Testament history are useful. Ehrman's criteria are appropriate only among those who share his own fundamental methods of reasonable decision-making, but I know of a set of criteria that may be more relevant when there are more fundamental disagreements about what makes for "probable" and "improbable" propositions. It is called, "Argument to the Best Explanation" (ABE), and the five criteria are explanatory power, explanatory scope, more plausible, less ad hoc, and disconfirmed by fewer accepted beliefs. I think "less ad hoc" would be most relevant in this case--the proposal "must include fewer new suppositions about the past which are not already implied to some extent by existing beliefs." ABE is outlined here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histori...st_explanation

Toto

This thread is now in BCH. I clipped the overly long quote for copyright.

But this is from a textbook where Ehrman seems to be describing how this criterion is used by the guild. He notes its limitations and does not seem to endorse it wholeheartedly

ApostateAbe

If anyone is interested in reading the full excerpt from Ehrman, just let me know and I will PM it to you.

aa5874

Again, the criterion of dissimilarity cannot be applied to HJ since there is little or nothing about HJ.

Do you not understand that one must first find sources of ANTIQUITY that mentioned HJ?

There is NO source of antiquity for HJ, INDEPENDENT OR NOT.

Please tell me where can the criterion of dissimilarity be applied for HJ?

The NT Canon is about the Jesus of Faith.

stj

I think this is sometimes also called "admission against interest."

The problem of course is knowing what is against interest. Suppose the writer of the gospel of Mark conceived a theological interest in giving Paul's spiritual Jesus, who spoke in visions and dreams after his death, instead of during his obscure (unremembered?) life a biography. Claiming that a genuine historical personage engaged with Jesus would have been the theological interest. John the Baptist would have baptized Jesus (that being what John the Baptst does) and that was the key point. By the time of a later gospel like Luke, the historicity isn't the real interest, since that is now assumed by faith. At that time, the theological embarrassment of the implication of John's superiority becomes more important. the writer of the gospel ofLuke then makes up an entirely different connection between John the Baptist and Jesus, namely, they are blood relatives!

Judging intererst, or similarity to practice, calls for careful exercise of historical judgment. Theologians by and large are miserably poor at it. One infamous example (or at least it should be,) was the story of Jesus' brothers and sisters and mother trying to tell him he was crazy. This has actually been argued as internal evidence of Jesus' historicity. The theological interest of course is the armor the new cult member against taking his family's remonstrations seriously.