Unreliability

Briefly, here are some reasons Perrin considered the NT tradition historically unreliable.
 The evangelists’ primary concern was not preserving historical data. Every pericope that appears
in the gospel can be shown to have a purpose for the early church.
 The early Christian community did not differentiate between the risen Christ and the historical
Jesus.
 We know that the gospels contain a great deal of “teaching ascribed to Jesus and yet, in fact, [it
comes] from the early Church” (Perrin, p. 16)
 The evangelists show a remarkable degree of freedom in how they changed or added to the
traditions they received.
 Even Mark, which most scholars believe is the earliest gospel, shows clear signs of theological
motivation.
We should note here that many of today’s conservative scholars deny the unreliability of the tradition
and the burden of proof.
As was the case with the criterion of dissimilarity, this second criterion
has also been used by Jeremias. It is particularly to be found in his work
on ‘unknown sayings of Jesus’, i.e. sayings to be found in sources
outside the gospels, both canonical and extra-canonical. 53. He
formulates it as follows: ‘By a process of elimination we are left with
twenty-one sayings whose attestation and subject matter do not give rise
to objections of weight, which are perfectly compatible with the genuine
teachings of our Lord, and which have as high a claim to authenticity

‘the criterion of coherence’: material from the earliest strata of

the tradition may be accepted as authentic if it can be shown to cohere
with material established as authentic by means of the criterion of
dissimilarity."

determine whether certain actions or sayings by Jesus in the New Testament are from Historical
Jesus. Simply put, the more independent witnesses that report an event or saying, the better.