Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The
Gospels As Eyewitness Testimony by
Richard Bauckham
Thorough And Interesting Review Of The Gospels As Eyewitness Testimony
This new book argues that the four Gospels are closely based on
eyewitness testimony of those who knew Jesus. Noted New Testament
scholar Richard Bauckham challenges the prevailing assumption that the
accounts of Jesus circulated as anonymous community traditions,
asserting instead that they were transmitted in the name of the original
eyewitnesses. To drive home this controversial point, Bauckham draws on
internal literary evidence, study of personal names in the first century, and
recent developments in the understanding of oral traditions. Jesus and
the Eyewitnesses also taps into the rich resources of modern study of
memory and cognitive psychology, refuting the conclusions of the form
critics and calling New Testament scholarship to make a clean break with
this long-dominant tradition. Finally, Bauckham challenges readers to end
the classic division between the historical Jesus and the Christ of faith,
proposing instead the Jesus of testimony. Sure to ignite heated debate on
the precise character of the testimony about Jesus, Jesus and the
Eyewitnesses will be valued by scholars, students, and all who seek to
understand the origins of the Gospels.
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Richard Bauckham is, along with the likes of N.T Wright, Ben Witherington
and Craig Evans, a Bible scholar with the ability to bring the history of first-
century Judea and Galilee into a form that we can comprehend today. This
is no mean feat; the culture in which Jesus lived was so different from our
own that skeptics are able to point to apparent anomalies as though they
could be evaluated in the same way as, say, a modern news story. With a
combination of incredible attention to detail and a portrayal of the
personalities of the witnesses to Jesus, as opposed to their words without
context, Bauckham expertly weaves together the strands of the gospel
story and how it was understood in early Chri stianity. Much modern
criticism, alleging very late dates for the writing of the gospels, is
convincingly refuted by Bauckham, largely by explaining the context of the
writing and how it can be quite accurately dated much earlier than is
typically assumed. The Gospels were written within living memory of the
events they recount. Marks Gospel was written within the lifetime of many
of the eyewitnesses, while the other three canonical Gospels were written
in the period when living eyewitnesses were becoming scarce, exactly
when their testimony would perish with them if it were not put into writing.
This is a highly significant fact, entailed not by unusually early datings of
the Gospels but by the generally accepted ones.
It is not just the synoptic gospels from which the author draws his factual
evidence: when we remember that the historians considered the very best
for history to be the historians own direct experience of the events of which
he wrote, then the Fourth Gospels claim that the Beloved Disciple was not
only the primary witness to its history but also its author fits easily into this
historic frame of reference. I have read accounts of many skeptics,
including the erudite and credible Bible scholar Bart Ehrman, but they
provide no insight that I have encountered, which is not neutralized by
Bauckhams thorough analysis. But I would caution the reader unwilling to
engage in serious study to avoid this book and stick to lighter but still
authoritative and enjoyable reads by the likes of Gary Habermas a nd Craig
Blomberg.
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