environment—cannot bear all the weight that has often been placed on them.13 In fact, N. T. Wright and a trio of German scholars (Gerd Theissen, Dagmar Winter and Annette Merz) have independently developed a four-part criterion that holds out considerably greater promise for valid historical-Jesus research. Wright (1996: esp. 131–133) calls it the criterion of ‘double similarity and dissimilarity’. The Germans refer to it as the Plausibilitätskriterium, which in English translation has been rendered