Helen Bond on the Criteria of Authenticity in Historical Jesus Research

Over at The Marginalia Review of Books is a great review by Helen Bond of Chris Keith and Anthony Le Donne’s edited volume on Jesus, Criteria, and the Demise of Authenticity. Bond is a very capable scholar, having written on Pontius Pilate, Caiaphas, and fine introduction to the historical Jesus.

I think she puts it well when she says:

It is clear that future historical work will need to abandon the traditional piecemeal approach. Instead, we’ll need to attempt to understand each source on its own merits, as embodying a specific interpretative framework. We’ll need to attune ourselves to memory studies, and the impact that social memory has exerted on the transmission of Jesus traditions. It is only then, and with an appropriate degree of reservation, that we can ask what historical events might have given rise to these particular (and often conflicting) interpretations.