First, he points out that in the Gospels the people whom Jesus healed “are usually unnamed” (39). Luke 1:1-4).īauckham argues that the Gospels have several ways of naming their eyewitness sources. He argues that in the ancient world historiographic best practice was to interview eyewitnesses (9), and this is exactly what Luke did before he wrote his Gospel (34 cf. The narratives about Jesus came directly from the eyewitnesses.īauckham’s thesis is that the eyewitnesses stand directly behind our written Gospels. Bauckham’s argument is that the time period between the events of the life of Jesus and the writing of the Gospels is far too short to imagine a long line of transmission and tradition. In fact, “one reason the Gospels were written was to maintain this accessibility and function of the eyewitnesses beyond their lifetimes” (308).īauckham argues against “form criticism,” which posits a long line of tradition and transmission before the Gospels were actually written down. Paul assumes the accessibility of the eyewitnesses. Bauckham points out that Paul in 1 Corinthians 15:6 encourages the Corinthians to go and ask the eyewitnesses about what they saw. If someone had a question about something that happened in the life of Jesus, a living eyewitness would have been available to them. Thus they would have functioned as guarantors of the events of the life of Jesus even for far-flung Christian communities. We know from the rest of the New Testament that early Christian leaders like Peter and John travelled widely. In fact, the eyewitnesses themselves would have been the ones normally telling the events of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection.
If someone had incorrectly told a story about Jesus, the eyewitnesses would have been present in the community to set the record straight. “The Gospels were written within living memory of the events they recount” (7).įrom that premise, Bauckham argues that the eyewitnesses would have functioned as guarantors of the stories about Jesus that were circulating within the Christian communities. Even the Gospel of John, which most think was written in the 90s A.D., fits within a relatively long life span of an eyewitness. He starts with what all scholars, liberal or conservative, acknowledge: the canonical Gospels were not written hundreds of years after the events they portray. Richard Bauckham challenges this paradigm. Young people from our congregations who go to college may hear this paradigm of how the Gospels came to be. Many unbeliev ing scholars believe that the original stories about Jesus underwent changes and picked up fictional additions before they were finally written down in our canonical Gospels.
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