Criterion of dissimilarity

[2] Although early forms of the criterion of dissimilarity date back to the Renaissance,[4] its modern formulation comes from Ernst Käsemann,[5] who in 1953 started the second quest for the historical Jesus.

[1] Bart D. Ehrman (1999) gave a somewhat different description of how the criterion of dissimilarity is supposed to work: it must be determined whether "there is at least a theoretical possibility that these sayings and deeds were made up precisely in order to advance the views that some Christians held dear," or whether they are "'dissimilar' traditions, that is, those that do not support a clear Christian agenda, or that appear to work against it".

"[9][10]: 8:21  It is unlikely that early Christians would have regarded Jesus as spiritually inferior to John the Baptist, and so they probably would not have invented this story.

[9][10]: 8:21 [6]: 240  Scholars regard this as potential evidence of early Christians' apparent embarrassment that John baptised Jesus and not vice versa; therefore, Matthew 3:14 cannot pass the criterion of dissimilarity, but the rest of the baptism narrative can.

[9][10]: 8:21 [6]: 240  Gerd Theissen and Dagmar Winter (2002) added that early Christians believed that people who underwent baptism confessed to sin, which posed a problem, because the story that Jesus was baptised – and thus presumably had sinned as well – was incompatible with early Christian views of Jesus as a divine being.

[13] Ehrman attributed the traditions of the young Jesus raising children from the dead or magically solving issues in the carpenter workshop of Joseph as recorded in the Infancy Gospel of Thomas to "later Christian imagination".

(...) Hence, while the criterion of discontinuity is useful, we must guard against the presupposition that it will automatically give us what was central to or at least fairly representative of Jesus' teaching.