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154 of 169 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Another Home Run for Bauckham, January 9, 2007
Anything by Bauckham is likely to get a high rating from me, simply by the sheer quality of his work. In this book, he presents several lines of evidence to support his contention that the Gospels constitute or rely upon eyewitness testimony. Before I get into that, though, I'll give you the table of contents:
1) From the Historical Jesus to the Jesus of Testimony
2) Papias on the Eyewitnesses
3) Names in the Gospel Traditions
4) Palestinian Jewish Names
5) The Twelve
6) Eyewitnesses "from the Beginning"
7) The Petrine Perspective in the Gospel of Mark
8) Anonymous Persons in Mark's Passion Narrative
9) Papias on Mark and Matthew
10) Models of Oral Tradition
11) Transmitting the Jesus Traditions
12) Anonymous Tradition or Eyewitness Testimony?
13) Eyewitness Memory
14) The Gospel of John as Eyewitness Testimony
15) The Witness of the Beloved Disciple
16) Papias on John
17) Polycrates and Irenaeus on John
18) The Jesus of Testimony
Bauckham engages in an extensive treatment of Papias. For those of you who don't know, Papias was an early Christian writer who may very well have been cotemporaneous with the disciples of Jesus, as he professes to have been. He makes a number of statements about the Gospels, as do other early Christians. Papias, Bauckham contends, has been somewhat misunderstood and dismissed in recent scholarship. Not only does Bauckham defend Papias by showing his usage of historiographic terms and the notions of historiography at the time, he also provides a better understanding of what Papias is saying. In summary, Papias believes that the Gospel of Matthew was originally written by Matthew in Hebrew or Aramaic, but was translated into Greek by a number of workers who somewhat botched the project in terms of order. Mark, perhaps written sometime in between those events, was written by a translator of Peter's eyewitness testimony, setting things down in a topical order because he himself was not at liberty to attempt a truly chronological ordering of events. This explains why neither of the two has the chronological order (the preferable one, in Papias' eyes) in comparison to the Gospel of John, which Papias esteems highly. (Papias' knowledge of the Gospel of John is evidenced in the decidedly Johannine list of disciples which he provides.) Papias and other early Christians contended that the figure "John the Elder" was distinct from "John the son of Zebedee", the former being the author of the Gospel and the Johannine epistles, the "disciple whom Jesus loved", and the disciple who survived longer than the rest, eventually dying in Ephesus. One of Bauckham's stronger arguments for rebuffing the identification of the two is that Papias, remembering a time decades before he wrote, noted that one John (undoubtedly one of the Twelve, this being the son of Zebedee) was dead, whereas John the Elder (as well as a disciple named Aristion) was alive and continuing to preach). Bauckham has other arguments for the case, but it will suffice to simply say that it's best to read the book yourself, and that I think he's essentially convinced me of this particular point.
However, I'm utterly losing the order of the book here. Returning to his case, Bauckham also contends that the Gospels themselves intended to identify themselves as based on eyewitness testimony. The naming of certain characters in the Gospels, for example, is intended on occasion to indicate that they were the eyewitness sources from whom the authors derived information. (Mark, according to Bauckham, occasionally omits this in instances in which the eyewitnesses might be in particular danger if identified as such--he draws this point from Thiessen.) The naming of the Twelve in the Synoptics, even though very few of them appear to play a specific role in the Gospel narratives, functions to identify them as a major source. One interesting case that Bauckham additionally makes is that, when one examines the balance of names among Gospel characters, the balance is decidedly consistent with name frequency in Palestine, but inconsistent with the Diaspora. The conclusion to be drawn from that is an indication of authenticity, in contrast to the claims of some that the Gospel stories were fabricated by anonymous authors in Christian communities beyond Palestine.
Another feature of the Gospels is the inclusio, by which the authors denoted very primary sources of information for a period. The use of this method framed the narrative between mentions of the figure in question. Bauckham discusses a few clear examples of this in other Greco-Roman bioi, but his primary focus, of course, is the Gospels. For example, Mark has a very prominent inclusio involving Peter, as could be expected. (Bauckham also notes that the point-of-view used in Mark's Gospel is such that it gives very telltale signs of being from a perspective amongst the Twelve, particularly with the occasional "they" passage without a clarified referent, which makes sense particularly if one imagines that Mark was simply placing Peter's "we"-testimony into the third person.) Luke also has a Petrine inclusio, but there is also a smaller inclusio involving Jesus' female disciples, particularly at the tomb. John, on the other hand, has the Petrine inclusio surrounded (just slightly) by an inclusio of the author himself (the "disciple whom Jesus loved" in the later parts of the Gospel, in which that would make sense), thereby attempting to establish the author's superiority as a witness, as he does other times in the Gospel. Peter, rather than being portrayed in the witness aspect of discipleship, is instead confirmed in his role as the chief shepherd.
John also evidently used the occasional "we", not so much as a plural referent but as a method of emphasizing his authoritative testimony on the matter. The use, as Bauckham illustrates with a quotation from Dionysius of Halicarnassus, is not without attestation in the ancient literature.
It seems rather clear that the Gospels were intended by the authors to be eyewitness testimony. The ascription to the authors in question, furthermore, is unanimous in church history, and surely the eyewitnesses of Jesus' life and ministry would have served as guarantors of the oral history set forth (contrary to the suppositions of form criticism, which Bauckham exposes as thoroughly obsolete). Furthermore, those selected are hardly prominent figures, as we have on some of the apocryphal pseudo-Gospels. Matthew, a minor member of the Twelve; Mark, a disciple of Peter but not himself an eyewitness; Luke, a companion of Paul who definitely does not appear in the Gospels; and John the Elder, not one of the Twelve at all, though still an eyewitness according to the accounts.
Richard Bauckham highlights the absurdity of the notion that authorial ascriptions were far down the road after the composition of the Gospels by noting the manner in which authors' identities were affixed to scrolls in the ancient world.
Bauckham also gives a treatment of the reliability of eyewitness memory, drawing on numerous memory studies. As it turns out, the episodes in the Gospels are precisely the sort of thing one would expect eyewitnesses to remember. Factor in the fact that disciples in the ancient world were expected to memorize masters' teachings, and that many of Jesus' statements are presented in a form that was designed for memorization, and there's little reason to not trust that they got it right.
Finally, Bauckham makes the case that the very nature of testimony is that it demands to be trusted. That isn't to say that honest critical evaluation can't be applied--Bauckham is very clear that such is a rational approach--but testimony is such that the very authority of the statement is the grounds for trusting the statement. Indeed, as the book maintains, it is necessary to treat testimony as testimony. He even goes so far as to highlight the philosophy of Thomas Reid, who regarded testimony as one of the "social operations of the mind", on the same level as basic "solitary operations of the mind" such as sensory perception, inference, and memory. Bauckham also notes that John the Elder, being an eyewitness, would feel freer to expound on the significance of the events in addition to reliably reporting them--hence, the distinctive nature of John's Gospel, in addition to the fact that John was undoubtedly writing with an awareness of the Synoptics and aiming to make his own contribution.
All in all, the book makes a rather good case for reasons to trust the Gospels.
- The Gospels bear in themselves the claim to eyewitness authority, the highest standard of historiography possible
- It makes sense that eyewitness testimony would be operating as a fundamental component in the oral history in the early church, including that of the surviving eyewitnesses themselves, who would serve as authorities on the matter.
- Other early Christians affirm traditional authorship for the Gospels, with the authors identified as either eyewitnesses themselves or relying upon eyewitness testimony
- The ascriptions to the authors as we know them were undoubtedly very early and probably original
- The authors to whom the Gospels are ascribed are not the sort who would be likely choices for authors falsely ascribing work to them
The names in the Gospels bear signs of a Palestinian Jewish setting unlikely to be concocted by anonymous authors outside of Palestine, thus strengthening the claim to authenticity
- The sort of eyewitness testimony professed in the Gospels is the most trustworthy variety, as studies of memory show.
- Testimony, by its nature, asks to be accepted and should be...
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58 of 66 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Kind of disappointed, March 31, 2008
I heard many good things about this book, and Richard Bauckham is a terrific New Testament scholar, so I ordered it. His thesis is that the gospels are largely records of eyewitness testimony. He rejects the form critical conclusions of Bultmann and others, and argues that the gospels are more indebted to oral traditions and oral history.
He bases a lot of his views on the reliability of the early 2nd century church father Papias. Papias heard testimony from those who were with the first century Christians. He was told that the Gospel of Mark was a repository of the apostle Peter's memories. He also says that this gospel was the one with the least chronological order.
He also sees John as being the eyewitness testimony of the beloved disciple, who Bauckham takes to be John the Elder (not John the apostle, son of Zebedee).
Bauckham talks alot about the differences between personal memories and collective memories and relates this to the study of the gospels.
Bauckham also has an interesting chapter about the names in the gospels. He arrives at the dubious conclusion that Levi the tax collector in Mark's Gospel is not the same as Matthew the tax collector in Matthew's gospel, believing that the author of Matthew changed the name to apply Levi's story to a bona fide member of the Twelve apostles. Kind of strange.
It is more likely to me that Matthew changed his name from Levi to Matthew because the name "Matthew" is close to the word mathete, meaning "disciple," and Matthew wanted his name to reflect his changed status as a disciple of Jesus.
Other than that, the book was loaded with dense argumentation and analysis, and I had to really concentrate to follow the discussion. This is definitely not light reading. I recommend it to the scholarly Christian leader, but I can't see the average layperson reading it.
Much better reading is Bauchkam's book on the theology of Revelation, and his excellent commentary on 2 Peter and Jude, which is coming out again in a revised edition. I also enjoyed his book of the female witnesses of Christ - Gospel Women.
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77 of 92 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Eyewitness Testimony & Cross-Examination, January 12, 2007
Bauckham here does the church and world a significant scholarly favor by taking on the form critical approach and assumptions to the gospel as being nothing other than an outcome of a community formation process of oral tradition, that has been edited, and redited and applied and reapplied. Thus, layer upon layer that needs this search for a supposed authentic Jesus.
Bauckham argues in a thorough and academic way that this is incorrect. Primarily it does not approach the Gospels for what they are: personal engaged eyewitness testimony of the most accepted and solid histoiography of its times. He unloads and unpacks this in over five-hundred pages of engagement with the sources, academia opinions, and critics. He is thorough, articulate and reacts to various schools and opinions.
He finds the break to this modern disengagement of many in academia with the historical Gospel approach through an Enlightenment arrogance to challenge ancient history as not truly being able to know what they were witnessing to. Rather than seeing themselves standing on the shoulders of the history past, they rather see themselves as standing on their own shoulders and judging/rewriting through their interprative tools all history before them.
Bauckham here not only refutes this with the Biblical/historiography evidence, but also with philosophy of epistemology, showing that trust in testimony is critical to interpersonal communication. The Enlightenment's trend to make the individual supreme here needs to move back to the past view of trust in testimony until it can be shown as an unreliable bedrock as faulty memory.
Besides the historography examination of this ancient Greco-Roman world, the author explores at length the second century connection through Eusebius' history with the likes of Papias, Polycrates, and Irenaeus.
Some doubts as to his concentration on discounting of John of Zebedee not being author of any Biblical book, but will wait to see the reaction and dialogue on this vital topic.
To be carefully read, pondered, discussed and rejoiced with thanks for again raising this vital area of discussion for the church and its faith in eyewitness testimony and history.
Can't recommend its reading enough.
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