Criteria for historicity

The Criterion of Multiple Attestation. Multiple attestation refers to the principle that the more often a story or saying appears in independent traditions, the more probable its historicity. Note that the converse statement cannot be deduced from the former (“the less often a story or saying appears in independent traditions, the less probable its historicity”). This falls prey to the logical fallacy of negating the antecedent.^[5]

Appearance in a multiplicity of independent traditions strongly suggests that those traditions go back to a common source, which would presumably be either the early Palestinian community and/or Jesus Himself. However, an absence of multiple attestation does not necessitate non-historicity, because sometimes the author(s) of particular traditions may not have heard about a particular story/saying or may have chosen to ignore it (for theological or apologetical reasons).

Prior to the discoveries of form and redaction criticism, it was commonly thought that each Gospel represented a separate tradition, and therefore multiple attestation consisted merely in repetition in the four Gospels. However, since the time of literary criticism (leading to form and redaction criticism), this simplistic view could no longer be sustained. These methods showed that Mark was very likely the first Gospel, and that Matthew and Luke relied very heavily upon it. Furthermore, it was also shown that Matthew and Luke shared a common source, namely, Q (referring to “Quelle,” meaning “source” in German), which was an early collection of Jesus’ sayings translated into Greek. Luke and Matthew had their own special sources which are not found in either Mark or Q. We know that these sources are not mere inventions of the Evangelists because many of them have the characteristics of an oral tradition developed prior to any literary tradition, and many of them do not follow the literary propensities of the Evangelists (e.g., some of Luke’s sources write in a far less sophisticated and stylized way than Luke himself – and the fact that Luke does not correct them indicates that he is being respectful of his sources). The Johannine source has long been recognized to be independent of the Synoptics (Matthew, Mark, and Luke). Thus, contemporary biblical criticism has been able to identify five independent traditions for the four Gospels, namely, Mark, Q, M (Matthew special), L (Luke special), and J (the independent Johannine tradition). We may now retranslate our principle to read, “the more often a story appears in the five independent Gospel traditions, the more probable its historicity.” Thus, if a story appears in all five traditions, it is very probable that it originated with a very early common Palestinian oral tradition and/or Jesus’ ministry itself. If it appears in three or four independent traditions, it is still quite probable. It must also be remembered that if a story appears in only one or two traditions, it does not necessitate non-historicity.^[6]