For I did not imagine that things out of books would help me as much as the utterances of a living and abiding voice. In this regard, he reconsiders the vital testimony of Papias, who states:Īnd whenever anyone came who had been a follower of the presbyters, I inquired into the words of the presbyters, what Andrew or Peter had said, or Philip or Thomas or James or John or Matthew, or any other disciple of the Lord, and what Aristion and the presbyter John, disciples of the Lord, were still saying. The author arrives at the tantalizing conclusion that credible history was not written by those who had only a bookish knowledge of events, but rather by eyewitnesses to those events. Then, after surveying the appropriate secondary literature, chapter 2 reviews Roman and Greek historians concerning their views about what constitutes valid historical writing. In order to establish this, Bauckham first discusses the criteria for writing history in first-century Judea and in the larger Mediterranean world.

As the above-cited thesis implies, the author proposes to establish a causal link between the eyewitness tradition about Jesus and the later authors who recorded those early testimonies and stories about Jesus. In this volume the reader will be treated to an admirable display of scholarly acumen and original insight. They remained throughout their lifetimes the sources and, in some sense that may have varied for figures of central or more marginal significance, the authoritative guarantors of the stories they continued to tell. These eyewitnesses did not merely set going a process of oral transmission that soon went its own way without reference to them. It is the contention of this book that, in the period up to the writing of the Gospels, gospel traditions were connected with named and known eyewitnesses, people who had heard the teaching of Jesus from his lips and committed it to memory, people who had witnessed the events of his ministry, death, and resurrection and themselves had formulated the stories about these events that they told. Like others who have contributed to this field of study, Bauckham (professor of New Testament studies at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland) sets out to describe the sources used by the authors of the canonical Gospels, and, in doing so, provides a viable theory that has been met by exuberant praise and will certainly encounter significant rebuttals. Undoubtedly, Professor Richard Bauckham’s most recent contribution will add life to an already thriving scholarly discussion on the historical foundations of the New Testament Gospels, particularly the Synoptic Gospels-Matthew, Mark, and Luke.

Jesus and the eyewitnesses