Jesus and the Eyewitnesses

Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony (Wm. B. Eerdman, 2d ed. 2017)

Book Review

Thomas Alderman 2024

I. Introduction.

Cambridge scholar and New Testament theologian Richard Bauckham has two major complaints about mainstream New Testament scholarship: it assumes that the Gospel tradition reached the authors of the Fourfold Gospel only after a long, uncontrolled process of anonymous oral transmission; and it often exhibits a deep scepticism about the reliability of the text unless each passage can be independently verified.  In this important work, Bauckham deals a decisive blow to both of these misconceptions and makes a powerful argument that the text of the New Testament as it has come down to us is “close to the eyewitness reports of the words and deeds of Jesus.”¹

II. The prevalent view: assumed, not demonstrated.

The prevailing view is that before the reports of the eyewitnesses of the teachings and deeds of Jesus reached the Gospel writers, they first underwent several decades of anonymous word-of-mouth transmission within the Christian community.  But according to Bauckham, this was never demonstrated, but was only assumed.  In actuality, says Bauckham, the time between the Ascension and the writing of the Gospels was that of “a relatively (for that period) long lifetime”²; and during that time the Apostles and other eyewitnesses remained on the scene to safeguard the traditions.

III. The traditions were preserved.

The great majority of scholars believe that the Crucifixion took place either in the year 30 or the year 33 A.D.; the Gospel of Mark was written some time between 55 and 65 A.D.; Matthew and Luke, around 60 A.D.; Acts, around 65 A.D.; and the Gospel of John, around 85 to 90 A.D.  Thus, Mark was written as soon as 22 years after the Ascension or within 35 years at the outside – well within an ordinary lifetime after Jesus’ ministry, and Matthew and Luke also.

What’s more, the Apostles remained in Jerusalem long after the Ascension; and during that time they would have acted as “official eyewitnesses and guarantors of the core of the [Gospel] traditions.”³  According to Acts 15:2-12, in A.D. 48⁴ there was a council in Jerusalem, attended by “the apostles and elders,” including Peter, James, Paul, and Barnabas by name, along with “the whole church.”  And according to Acts 21:17, in A.D. 59 Paul and Luke returned to Jerusalem where they met James and the elders.  In all probability, many, or most, or even all of the other apostles also remained in Jerusalem long after the Ascension.  This means that the autographs were written when many of the eyewitnesses were still accessible.

Furthermore, it was not only the apostles and elders who were available to ensure the accuracy and preservation of the tradition.  It is a fair surmise that many of those who had been touched by Jesus also became members of the Church in Jerusalem – some who had been healed by Jesus – Bartimaeus, the women in Luke 8:2-3, perhaps Malchus.  Many others by name were also there: Mary the mother of Jesus, Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Susannah, Mary, Martha, and Lazarus, Cleopas, Nicodemus, Joseph of Arimathea, Simon the leper, Zacchaeus.  All of these would have told their stories again and again as long as they had breath, with their testimony, in all likelihood, taken down verbatim.

Bauckham reminds us of the story of the two disciples on the road to Emmaus after the Resurrection (Luke 24:18):

[T]he story does not require that [Cleopas] be named and his companion remain anonymous.  There seems no plausible reason for naming him other than to indicate that he was the source of this tradition.  He is very probably the same person as Clopas, whose wife Mary appears among the women at the cross in John 19:25.  Clopas is a very rare Semitic form of the Greek name Cleopas, so rare that we can be certain this is the Clopas who, according to Hegesippus, was the brother of Jesus’ father Joseph and the father of Simon, who succeeded his cousin James as leader of the Jerusalem church.  The story Luke tells would have been essentially the story Cleopas himself told about his encounter with the risen Jesus.  Probably it was one of many traditions of the Jerusalem church which Luke has incorporated in his work.⁵

The women at the cross and at the tomb are not anonymous: “[A]ll the Gospels name some of them, also stating or implying that there were [many] others (Matt 27:55; 28:1, 5; Mark 15:41, 47; 16:6; Luke 24:10; John 20:2).”⁶

The variations in the names of the women assigned by the Gospel writers, in Bauckham’s treatment, far from placing the accounts in question, actually become a higher-order proof of their reliability, and are among the choicest and most encouraging material in his treatise.  Some have proposed that the purpose for naming the women was to compensate for the fact that their testimony was already discounted because of their sex.  But Bauckham observes that naming them would do little to enhance their credibility as witnesses.  “The naming,” Bauckham avers, “is surely more likely to reflect how very important for the whole story of Jesus were the events of which they were the sole witnesses. . . .  [T]he divergences among the lists . . . properly understood, demonstrate the scrupulous care with which the Gospels present the women as witnesses.”⁷  Bauckham’s solution: there were three key events witnessed by the women: the Cross, the burial, and the empty tomb.  Each Evangelist named those whom he knew to be at each event, respectively, being careful not to include the names of any of whom he was unsure.

Bauckham helpfully provides a chart of the names of women at the Cross, at the burial, and at the empty tomb (p. 49), from which it appears that Matthew and Mark each identify three women who were at the Cross when Jesus died.  They are not necessarily the same three, however, unless the Salome of Mark 15:40 and “the mother of the sons of Zebedee” of Matthew 27:56 are the same person.

But there were many women at the Cross.  Those identified individually by Matthew were “among . . . the many women [who] were there.”  Matthew 27:55-56; and Mark: “Many other women . . . were also there.”  15:41.  (My emphasis.)

At the burial there were Mary Magdalene, Salome, and one other Mary, assuming that the “Mary the mother of Joses” of Mark 15:47 and “the other Mary” of Matthew 28:61 are the same person.

At the empty tomb were Joanna (Luke 24:10), Salome (Mark 15:40), Mary Magdalene and one other Mary, assuming that “Mary the mother of James” of Mark 16:1 and “the other Mary” of Matthew 28:1 are the same person.

All of the foregoing assumes that there was only one Mary besides Mary Magdalene, described variously as “Mary the mother of James the lesser and Joses” (Mark 15:40), “Mary the mother of Joses” (Mark 15:47), “Mary the mother of James” (Mark 16:1), “Mary the mother of James and Joses” (Matthew 27:56), “the other Mary” (Matthew 27:61 and 28:1), and finally, “Mary the mother of James” in Luke.

There is no inconsistency in the variations on the name of the second Mary.  All may be presumed accurate.  Indeed, the variations themselves lend additional credit to these accounts, since they militate against collusion.

Similarly, there is nothing about Mark’s account of the healing of blind Bartimaeus that “requires that the story was shaped by anyone other than Bartimaeus himself and Mark (who may well have heard it told by Bartimaeus himself in Jerusalem).”⁸

Bauckham concludes: “[T]he Evangelists were in more or less direct contact with eyewitnesses, not removed from them by a long process of anonymous transmission of the traditions.”⁹

IV.  Scepticism toward ancient documents is unwarranted anyway.

Just as access to the eyewitnesses matters greatly in our assessment of the reliability of the Gospel narratives, it is also crucial that we bring a healthy scepticism to our reading.  Such a healthy scepticism is to be contrasted with the “radical suspicion” which the form critics bring to biblical exegesis.  Bauckham calls such suspicion a form of “epistemological suicide.”  The sceptical paradigm, he says, “presumes the Gospels to be unreliable unless, in every particular case of story or saying, the historian succeeds in providing independent verification. . . .  [T]his approach is seriously faulty precisely as a historical method.  It can only result in a misleadingly minimal collection of uninteresting facts about a historical figure stripped of any real significance.”¹⁰

Bauckham’s remedy is a set of hermeneutical principles for the evaluation of testimony, which together form a persuasive argument for tentatively granting to the testimony of the Gospels, or any testimony, for that matter, a degree of credit, at least initially.  Says Bauckham:

Testimony asks to be trusted.  This does not mean that historians must trust testimony uncritically, but rather that testimony is to be assessed as testimony.  The question is whether it is trustworthy, and this is open to tests of internal consistency and coherence, and consistency and coherence with whatever other relevant historical evidence we have and whatever else we know about the historical context.¹¹

The rules of evidence followed in courts of law reflect the same understanding. “A witness is presumed to speak the truth. This presumption, however, may be overcome by the manner in which the witness testifies, by the character of the testimony of the witness, or by evidence affecting the character or motives of the witness, or by contradictory evidence.”¹²  Indeed, the facts relevant to any legal claim must almost always be established through testimony, and most of those facts have to do with past events.  It makes no difference in principle whether the events in question took place last year or two millennia ago.  The rules of evidence, and this rule in particular, were carefully crafted to reflect how we evaluate testimony in ordinary life.  As in the courts, and as in ordinary life, so in historiography:

In good historical work it is no more an epistemic virtue to be sceptical than it is to be credulous. In everyday life, we do not systematically mistrust everything anyone tells us. When someone who is in a position to know what they tell us does so, we normally believe them; but we keep our critical faculties alert and raise questions if there is specific reason to doubt. There is no reason why historical work should be substantially different in its dialectic of trust and critical assessment.¹³

Excessive scepticism may arise out of a desire for certainty, where “Everything must be doubted so that what survives the sceptical onslaught is something we can be really sure of. . . .”

But in historical work the desire for certainty, for any sort of total accuracy, is as misplaced as systematic scepticism. In history we only deal with probabilities (as is also the case in much human knowledge). Historians are in the business of constantly making reasonable judgments of probabilities.  To believe testimony, to trust it when we have no means of verifying its content in detail, is a risk, but it is the kind of risk we are constantly taking when we trust testimony in ordinary life.¹⁴

V. Conclusion.

Bauckham very effectively advocates a view of the Gospels as being at once both testimonies of faith and as historically trustworthy.  The Gospels “give us . . . representations of Jesus . . . representations whose historical basis can be tested.”  His claim is that “they transcend the dichotomy between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith.  They give us the Jesus of testimony.” As such, “they are the entirely appropriate means of access to the historical reality of Jesus.”¹⁵

END NOTES

¹Bauckham, 240.  (All references to Bauckham are to the Kindle Edition.)

²Bauckham, 7.

³Bauckham, 99.

⁴All dates: Bible Hub, https://biblehub.com/timeline/new.htm; last visited 5.5.24.

⁵Bauckham, 47.

⁶Bauckham, 48.

⁷Bauckham, 49.  Emphasis in original.

⁸Bauckham, 600.

⁹Bauckham, 6.

¹⁰Bauckham, 505-506.

¹¹Bauckham, 506.

¹²Oregon Revised Statutes 44.370.

¹³Bauckham, 613.

¹⁴Bauckham, 613.

¹⁵Bauckham, 615.