A.4. Indices to Historicity and to Nonhistoricity

In forming historical judgments on the data of the gospels there are three possible verdicts: historical, nonhistorical, and suspended judgment. All these verdicts should turn not on general assumptions but on specific evidence. This means that the historian cannot do without concrete indices both to historicity and to nonhistoricity; it also means that the critic should acknowledge that in some instances the issue of historicity remains unresolved.

The indices to historicity are: discontinuity with early Christianity; originality vis-à-vis Palestinian Judaism; multiple attestation (i.e., attestation in relatively independent strands of tradition); multiform attestation (e.g., in narrative material and in sayings material); and correlation with modes of speech characteristic of Jesus (Jeremias 1971: 8-37). Such modes include the use of the divine passive (a circumlocution which for reverential reasons avoids naming God as the subject of an active verb; e.g., the second clause of the macarism “Happy the mourners, for they shall be comforted” is the equivalent of “for God is about to comfort them”); antithetical parallelism (Burney 1925: 83-85); rhythmic patterns in two-beat, three-beat, four-beat, and qínâ (dirge) meter (in Aramaic); alliteration, assonance, and play on words (in Aramaic); use of hyperbole and paradox; riddles and parables, especially as exhibiting stylistic and thematic features otherwise known to be characteristic of Jesus; new coinages in connection with “the reign of God”; a distinctive use of “amen” to introduce an emphatic statement; the use ofʾabbāʾ in addressing God.

All these indices operate independently of the recovery of historical intentions on the part of the narrator. On occasion, however, it may be possible to ascertain that a given writer means to affirm something precisely as having happened. If in addition it can be shown that the writer is knowledgeable on the matter and free of the intention to mislead, historicity may be inferred. An example is Paul's presentation of the eucharistic words of Jesus in 1 Cor 11:23-25.

Of the indices mentioned above, discontinuity with the transmitting church is regularly the most cogent. It was a clear tendency of the transmitting church to present Jesus as independent of John the Baptizer; therefore, it is highly probable that the tradition of Jesus' seeking the baptism of John is historical. Again, the index of originality vis-à-vis Palestinian Judaism is often cogent of itself, for we have far more extensive and persuasive evidence of Jesus' originality than we do of the originality of the post-Easter Christian community, especially that of the earliest and, in this context, most important community, Jerusalem. The other indices, though not independently cogent, are indispensable in marshaling cumulative and convergent evidence in favor of historicity. Increase in the probability of historicity accrues to data that are coherent with what has already been established as historical by appeal to discontinuity and originality. Here especially multiple attestation, multiform attestation, and stylistic indices are relevant confirmatory factors.

Before leaving the issue of historicity, we should distinguish two kinds of relations of accounts to events—namely, the one-to-one relation and what might be called the generic relation. In gospel reports of responses to Jesus, a solid case can occasionally be made for a one-to-one relation of text to event. In most cases, however, it is neither possible nor necessary to build a case for historicity. The widely varied responses to Jesus depicted in the gospel literature doubtless corresponded in general to the historical reality. It was to be expected in advance that responses to him would vary widely, and it must be assumed in retrospect that they did. The literature supports such expectations and assumptions.

The form critics were the first to recognize clearly that many Synoptic pericopes—especially those that failed to exhibit the inner coherence that would have typified a remembered event, but many other, quite coherent pericopes as well—were not, indeed, simply recorded memories and did not intend a one-to-one relation to a particular event. The gospel literature had been composed, and in this composition Jesus' career had been, in Bultmann's metaphor, “precipitated”—i.e., condensed and presented anew, in the pericopes (Bultmann 1963: 40). But the form critics failed, on the whole, to spell out clearly what this meant for historicity. Instead of fashioning a positive and supple conception of historicity adjusted to this literary insight, they left the impression that historicity itself, and not merely an excessively rigid conception of it, had thereby been put in doubt. A more apt and exact conclusion would be that besides the specific patterns of inference that followed on the indices to historicity, there were generic judgments supported by the typical character of numerous pericopes. The form-critical insight allowed the exegete to recognize that in a few strokes an individual pericope might present the gospel in a nutshell. It should also allow the historian to differentiate between the details, on the one hand, and generic or substantial historicity, on the other.

An example is the story of Zacchaeus the tax collector (Luke 19:1-10). Did there really exist a rich tax collector named Zacchaeus, who, being short, climbed a sycamore tree to catch a glimpse of the charismatic figure Jesus, as he walked along accompanied by a crowd? Did Jesus look up and address Zacchaeus by name and invite himself to table with him? The indices to historicity yield virtually nothing in response to these questions. Nevertheless we have solid evidence elsewhere (e.g., Mark 2:14-16 = Matt 9:9-10 = Luke 5:27-29) of Jesus' appeal to the ostracized tax collectors and publicans of the time. What the Zacchaeus episode adds to this is a further set of indications showing the early Christian community's understanding777 of how Jesus mounted his initiative toward sinners and of how the sinners reacted to it.

The commonest error respecting nonhistoricity turns on a false analogy. It is the assumption that since discontinuity with the transmitting church establishes historicity, continuity with the transmitting church establishes nonhistoricity. In fact, no conclusion can be legitimately drawn from the mere presence of such continuity. A true index to nonhistoricity is the incompatibility of data under examination either with data established as historical or with solidly grounded historical conclusions. If, for example, the historian were to succeed in recovering the eschatological scheme supposed by words of Jesus on the future, and if according to this scheme there was to be no interval between the vindication/glorification of Jesus and the consummation of history, then gospel tests positing such an interim would be nonhistorical.

Second, a positive index to nonhistoricity is attestation both as a post-Jesus development and as gospel datum. The Christian mission to gentile lands, for example, is attested as a post-Jesus development in Acts 13, but also as foretold by words of Jesus (Mark 13:10 = Matt 24:14; Mark 14:9 = Matt 26:13), foreshadowed by his travels (seemingly but not actually) outside lands inhabited by Jews (Mark 7:24, 31), and grounded on the explicitly universalist prophecy (Luke 24:47) or on the explicitly (Matt 28:19; cf. Acts 1:8; Mark 16:15) or implicitly (John 20:21-22) universalist mandate of the risen Christ. Why was the idea of the gentile mission converted into a gospel datum? It was a tendency of the early Christians to overlook what they did not have the resources to understand (namely, development and its legitimacy) and so to retroject developments to their origins.

Third, linguistic indices to nonhistoricity include the use of words having no Aramaic equivalents, or the use of a vocabulary attested for the early church but not otherwise attested for Jesus (e.g., in Jesus' “explanations” of his parables). This index, to be sure, is not cogent of itself.

If the hypothesis could actually be established, rather than merely posited, that early Christian prophets speaking in the name of the exalted Christ supplied the church with sayings that were finally assimilated to the Synoptic tradition, this might be made to generate concrete indices to nonhistoricity. Thus far, however, the case for this creative role on the part of Christian prophets has not been successfully made; hence, no conclusion along these lines appears to be justified (Hill 1979: 160-85; Aune 1983: 142-45).