[1] He had a degree in Arabic and literature, systematic theology and wrote his dissertation in the field of New Testament.
Eve notes that an eyewitness to the robber story was the one who changed it to legend quickly before staying stable for decades.
Eric Eve approves of James DG Dunn's usage of Bailey's work and views the conclusions he drew from it as sound, partially because he draws on various other scholars as well.
When Bailey referred to traditions as "authentic", he used the word to say that accounts were stable for decades after an event, not that they were necessarily historical from the beginning; Bailey's point was that oral tradition preserved information largely the same with variation in minor details over substantial periods of time.
[12] Travis Derico, after extensively analyzing Weeden's critique, argues that it "fails in almost every respect".