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Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony

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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 accepted as what it is.
- We simply cannot function with a fundamental distrust of testimony.
By highlighting testimony in the Gospels, the distinction between the "historical Jesus" and the "Christ of faith" is properly replaced by the "Jesus of testimony".

This book gets my recommendation. My sole real complaint (other than my personal misgivings about Markan priority and Bauckham's discussion of Matthew) is the lack of a bibliography. Bauckham instead keeps his references solely in the footnotes.

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.

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.

This is a wonderfully fresh, challenging new look at the connection between eye-witness testimony and the Jesus tradition. As it argues for a fairly orthodox interpretation of the origin and transmission of the Jesus tradition, it is bound to stir up a skeptical backlash such as the lengthy (and often distorted or inaccurate) 'critical' review by Neil Godfrey. Nevertheless, it is a genuine work of scholarship, distinguishable from works by more skeptical historians and NT scholars only by the conclusions it reaches. The standard of argument and the use of primary and secondary literature are impeccable, as the knowledgeable reader will discern immediately.

Bauckham's case can be (all too briefly) summarized as follows: the Jesus traditions recorded in the canonical Gospels are not two or three generations removed from the eyewitness observers of the ministry and death of Jesus, but at most at one remove. Furthermore these traditions did not pass through a long, anonymous process of modification and expansion, but rather reflect the testimony of specific named tradents who continued to be authoritative sources of the traditions they passed on until they died. He bases this case on several pieces of evidence: 1)the remarks of Papias (and other early Church fathers) on the origins of the Gospels, 2)the named persons in the Gospels most likely reflect eyewitness sources for the Gospel narratives in which they feature, 3)the evangelists use an ancient rhetorical device known as the inclusio (used, for example, by Lucian and Porphyry) to indicate their main eyewitness sources, 4)remarks by Paul indicate the presence of a formal, controlled method of transmitting the Jesus tradition, as well as an official eyewitness collegiate in the form of the Twelve who ensured that the traditions passed on reflected actual contact with Jesus, 5)the pattern of agreement and disagreement among the Synoptic traditions about Jesus is best explained by the agreements and disagreements often observed among eyewitnesses to the same event(s). He devotes several chapters to the Gospel of John as a special case of eyewitness testimony and closes with a philosophical discussion of the role of testimony in the practice of historiography.

This thesis is of course open to challenge at several points. One might argue that the ancient sources (NT, Church Fathers) are simply too scanty to make definitive statements about who wrote what and when. One might examine the pattern of agreements and disagreements and conclude that the variations indicate a more informal, less controlled method of transmission of the Jesus tradition, or that the variations are best explained by theological differences among the evangelists. One might not be convinced by the presence of the inclusio in the Gospels, less still by its supposed function (to indicate eye-witness sources). The crux of the matter is that these are legitimate scholarly objections to a legitimate scholarly argument. Given the controversial nature of our sources, it is inevitable that people will disagree with Bauckham, and doubtless some of his arguments are more plausible than others (as he himself admits). But that is no reason to accuse him of producing "pro-medieval, anti-Enlightenment scholarship" (actually, Godfrey would be hard-pressed to come anywhere near the scholarly achievement of some of the medieval scholars, like Aquinas or Grotius or Scotus).

Whatever one thinks of Bauckham's overall thesis (I am inclined to think that it is broadly convincing, with some qualifications), he surely points the way forward to a fresh examination of the canonical Jesus traditions. Historical-critical NT scholarship began already loaded with theological presuppositions and primitive, un-scientific understanding of how oral tradition works or how corporate memory is preserved. What is called for is a model of the origin and transmission of the Jesus traditions that account for the pattern of agreement and disagreement we actually find in the Gospels, as well as the presence of non-canonical traditions and the references we find in the Church Fathers. James Dunn in his monumental work Jesus Remembered (Christianity in the Making, Vol. 1) and in the smaller A New Perspective on Jesus: What the Quest for the Historical Jesus Missed (Acadia Studies in Bible and Theology) has already taken important steps in this direction, while Gregory Boyd and Paul Rhodes Eddy in The Jesus Legend: A Case for the Historical Reliability of the Synoptic Jesus Tradition apply the most up-to-date anthropological and psychological data to testing the plausibility of the models of Dunn and Bauckham. One can only hope that this trend will continue, and that we will gain a much more historically plausible understanding of Jesus and the Gospels, as well as one more congenial to theological concerns (NOT illegitimate, contrary to Godfrey's rants).

By all means read Neil Godfrey's review, but bear in mind that he is just as biased (if not more so) as Bauckham, and often misrepresents Bauckham's arguments and intentions, with an appalling lack of intellectual generosity and scholarly acumen. Anyone reading this book with an open mind and a nuanced understanding of what "Enlightenment" really means will greatly profit from it.

As both a Christian and a history maven, Bauckham's book gave me the thrill of reading a good detective story. He makes small fragments of evidence tell us more than would seem possible, partly by setting them into the context of how historians wrote and thought at the time. Explaining, for instance, that Greek and Roman historians thought that the highest expression of their craft was to be what we would call oral historians, artfully arranging the testimony of those who had seen what happened....or even better, what they had seen with their own eyes. And how they would often heap scorn on historians who only used written records!

Other Jesus-scholar types I've encountered don't seem to be rigorous historians (NT Wright excepted) and create hazy realms where almost anything might be true, and anything can be just waved away because it doesn't quite "feel true" to the author. This was a refreshing change from that sort of writing.

This is a chunky book with over 500 densely-packed pages, footnotes and exhaustive indices. Initially perhaps appearing rather formidable, I found myself drawn into the book very quickly Richard Bauckham discusses whether the gospels are based on eyewitness accounts and his thorough survey of documents from the time, the early church fathers, names in Palestine and more gives a coherent and persuasive argument that the gospels would have been recognised as coming from eyewitness accounts at the time.

Although a complex subject which is deeply explored, the book is never boring. Some facility with Greek might aid the reader (although the Greek is transliterated into the Roman alphabet) and a basic knowledge of critical methods and early church fathers would be helpful, but this is the sort of book that offers many interesting insights to the reader, whether or not they are New Testament scholars. Whether other scholars will agree with Bauckham's conclusions is not clear, but his book sets out his arguments in a convincing way for this reader.

How refreshing to read a treatment of the Gospels by a major scholar that does not have the stench of the Jesus Seminar ideas or the odor of the Ehrman/Pagels agenda emitting from it! Bauckham actually believes that the Gospel accounts are based on eyewitnesses and are not the result of a long oral tradition finalizing in various forms, each tainted by the theological views of the ones who finally who recorded them. And he offers a very convincing argument for his position! The subtitle of this work could be: "Why we should have listened to Luke and Papias in the first place."
Building on the work of Samuel Byrskog in his "Story as History - History as Story," (he is cited over 30 times), Bauckham conducts a "tour de force" of Gospel history with an amazing amount of detail, always presented in a lively prose. Gospel heavyweights like Wright, Stanton, Dunn, and Hengel sing its praises on the covers, so what can I add? Only to say that readers need to recognize that the misdirected Jesus Quest of the last generation has been fueled by a self-appointed coterie of AMERICAN scholars who have made a lot of money on their "Jesus fantasies" while destroying the faith of many laymen who don't know that their scholarship is bogus. Furthermore, they have made Americans again the laughingstock of the European scholarly world by their agenda-driven writings. (Note the names above are all British/German!).
True, many laymen probably won't read this 536 page book, but hopefully those who want to be informed and to inform others will join Bauckham in his scholarly detective work.
I wish I could require this for reading in my Life of Christ class this Spring, but it is late for course adoption and I can only require so much. On the other hand, no informed pastor, serious layman, or seminary prof and student should neglect what I sincerely believe will become a classic. One complaint: No bibliography is included and although the author usually mentions the details of a book in the footnotes, sometimes he doesn't (Chapman, "John the Presbyter" for example, page 17). Also, some of my evangelical colleagues will not like his Markan priority, but sometimes you have to be thankful for what you can get and not short-sightedly toss out something that has great value otherwise.
These matters are minor in light of the major strengths of this work. If you are wondering what REAL historical research looks like, get this book.

Bauckham accomplished, in my opinion, his goal of demonstrating that the canonical Gospels contain eyewitness testimony and that the Gospels themselves indicate this in the same ways as Roman biographies of that period. I felt that he spent far too much time and energy though, presenting his theory as to the identity of the Gospel of John's "beloved disciple" - a point he admitted, early on, really had no bearing on recognizing eyewitness material in the NT. Also seemed to be a great deal of repitition of throughout the book. Bauckham makes some truly excellent points in this work, but he could have delivered them in a slimmer volume.

I discovered this book thanks to Tim Keller's recommendation. He said the book was so good, it will probably be missed in this present time, and discovered by a succeeding generation. I wouldn't be surprised if he's right (but I hope he's somewhat mistaken).
I am studying this scholarly work together with a friend who, aside from being a brain research PhD, is a fellow Christ follower. Anyone who has been subjected, in and out of the classroom, to the relentless barrage of form critics (those who believe the gospels were corrupted by oral transmission and politics over hundreds of years), will find this work to be a welcome and tough minded counter perspective. I am one who takes Luke 1:1-4 as truthful: that his-and the other 3 gospels-were communicated through eyewitnesses, as Luke plainly states, over the lifetime of those eyewitnesses. I am grateful for the enormous amount of study and research the author put into what is surely a life's work. Speaking as a Christ follower who winces at the unnecessary defensiveness the has characterized too much of the Christian response to cultural and academic affronts to the faith, I celebrate Bauckham's gentle, but forceful arguments and conclusions.

Since Bauckham is one of my favorite NT scholars, I chose to review this book for one of my graduate classes. After finishing the book, I was disappointed with the argumentation. I thought he made a solid case for the Petrine origin of Mark, but his treatment of John was much less powerful (though it seems to be more important to him in the course of the book). Anyhow, I figured that the review I wrote for class, highly constrained by the word limit, might help someone. So I am posting it here. Cheers :-)


Review Introduction

Did the Evangelists draw from densely elaborated oral tradition when writing the gospels, or did they access eyewitness testimony? As a direct challenge to form criticism, Bauckham argues that oral tradition had a very small role to play in the formation of the gospels, with the result "that the texts of our Gospels are close to the eyewitness reports of the words and deeds of Jesus." (240) Fully aware that his position runs counter "to almost all recent New Testament scholarship," (240) Bauckham provides a bedazzling array of reasons and defenses for his position.

On account of the many chapters in seemingly unordered sequence, a review of Bauckham's argument would best be served by grouping his chapters according to their subject matter. Bauckham intends to demonstrate three overarching points: 1- Accounts of Jesus in the early church are "controlled" teachings which fall into the genre of "testimony"; 2- The Gospel of Mark encompasses testimony as told by an eyewitness, Peter; 3- The Gospel of John encompasses testimony as told by an eyewitness, the Beloved Disciple.

Summary

Point 1: Bauckham's tome is richly complex in its argumentation, and many of his chapters feed into multiple points. For the most part, however, chapters 1-6, 10-13, and 18 serve to defend this point. Bauckham posits that, in accordance with Graeco-Roman historiographical best practice, eyewitness testimony was prized more highly than written sources by the Evangelists and early Christian communities. As such, eyewitnesses provided the necessary "control" over Jesus traditions by being the authorized tradents of these accounts.

To defend this point, Bauckham argues extensively for various positions: a- Papias, far earlier than is generally assumed, demonstrates normative practice by seeking information from "living and surviving voices" (students of disciples who are still alive, namely Aristeon and John the Elder); b- at least two of the Gospel authors indicate an understanding that sufficient testimony can only come from eyewitnesses who had been with Jesus "from the beginning" (Acts 1:21-22 and John 15:27); c- names are provided within the Gospels to specify living eyewitnesses that can vouch for the reports; d- onomastic analyses indicate an authentic Palestinian roster of characters in the gospel accounts; e- Jesus tradition is transmitted by individuals to communities (not vice versa) in a formal and controlled manner; f- this formal, controlled transmission dates to the time of Jesus (as noted by Jesus' commissioning of the 12 and 72) and is evidenced in Paul (by well-developed formulae, such as 1 Cor 15:3-8 and 1 Cor 11:23-26); g- these traditions were the kind that are, for the most part, resilient to alteration via memory dysfunction; and finally h- that, as testimony, these accounts "ask to be trusted." (5)

These points cumulatively show that two disciples of Jesus (not among the twelve) were alive at the time of Papias, that the Evangelists wrote early enough to have access to these (and other) eyewitnesses, that named eyewitnesses were specifically referenced to verify the traditions, that the roster of eyewitnesses could not have been a fabrication, and that the traditions shared by the eyewitnesses were likely to be formulated and taught from the time of Jesus. In addition, these early, verifiable, formally controlled traditions are to be primarily approached with trust and secondarily with critical evaluation. (478) In an effort to account for data that may appear to run contrary to these points, Bauckham concedes that oral tradition allowed for a certain degree of narrative and stylistic variability, but this variability is constrained to the degree which one finds in the Synoptics.

Point 2: After laying this foundation, Bauckham defends the argument that Mark is primarily a documentation of eyewitness testimony, and that the eyewitness source was probably Peter himself. The defense is composed of three main sub-points.

First, borrowing from Theissen, Bauckham argues that the omission of certain names in Mark's Passion account is for "protective anonymity," indicating that a fear of retribution still existed when Mark wrote. This closes the temporal gap, increasing the probability of an eyewitness source.

Second, the literary device known as inclusio is introduced, referencing Lucian and Porphyry as contemporary employers of this device. Bauckham emphatically posits that this device was used to indicate a primary witness by bracketing an account with the name of the eyewitness. In the case of Mark, Peter brackets the Gospel starting at 1:16 and ending at 16:7. This implies that Peter's testimony begins immediately after Jesus' baptism and carries through to the end of the Gospel, where Peter's name is the last name to be used.

Third, Bauckham argues for the Petrine origin of Mark by demonstrating that the Gospel has a strikingly Petrine perspective. He shows that the Gospel refers to Peter frequently, that it provides deep insight into the character and attitudes of Peter, and, by referring to Cuthbert Turner's 1925 work on the "plural-to-singular narrative device", that Mark appears to use language that is a remnant of Peter's first person accounts.

Point 3: Perhaps Bauckham's most ambitious argument is that the Fourth Gospel was written by the Beloved Disciple. He attempts to demonstrate an inclusio of the anonymous disciple starting at 1:35 and ending at Jn 21:20. To argue the inclusio, Bauckham must demonstrate both the reference to the beloved disciple in Jn 1 and the genuine authorship of Jn 21, which he attempts to do by marshaling a wide range of evidence, including numerical patterns and literary devices. In addition to this approach, Bauckham argues that the Gospel presents the Beloved Disciple as a superior witness to Peter, since he has special intimacy with Jesus, is present at key points in the story, is mentioned alongside superior observational detail, and is presented as perceptive. Lastly, it is pointed out that the perspective of the Gospel is one which is outside the inner circle of Peter, James, and John, and yet is intimately acquainted with Peter and other disciples mentioned only in passing in the Synoptics. These points cumulatively argue for authorship by the Beloved Disciple.

Finally, Bauckham argues that the identity of the Beloved Disciple is none other than John the Elder based on a prima facie reading of Irenaeus and complex readings of Papias and Polycrates.

It is by this course of argumentation that Bauckham, through an impressive display of erudition and reflection, makes his case for the eyewitness authorship of the gospels in the setting of formally controlled eyewitness testimony.

Critique

One of the foremost difficulties in grappling with Bauckham's tome is that his argument is not streamlined in the least. This makes it difficult to analyze, causing comprehensibility and explanatory power to suffer. This critique will analyze the argument in general and then pay attention to the three overarching points enumerated in the introduction.

General: Bauckham's arguments often seem rather tendentious and strained. Indeed, certain points are significantly unpolished. For example, Bauckham states on p.126 that John mentions Peter's name more frequently than any other Gospel, offering statistics in support, but twice in subsequent chapters relies on an argument that Mark is most frequent in naming Peter. In addition, many arguments appear overstated (the argument that the list of the Twelve in the Synoptics is a sign of an authoritative collegium which authorized the Synoptic accounts, p.97) or under-evidenced (the argument against the pseudepigraphy of the Fourth Gospel, p.409). Moreover, Bauckham builds extensive portions of his case based on these shaky foundations.

Point 1: Concerning "controlled" teachings and the genre of testimony, Bauckham's study is apropos. It is true that his use of Bailey and generous conclusions regarding the efficacy of memory are not compelling, and it is also true that ad hoc argumentation causes one to question his objectivity at times (such as his argument that the allowable variability in oral tradition is constrained to the level found in the Synoptics). That said, he does accomplish his objective: he shows that eyewitnesses probably provided more stability to the oral tradition than is generally allowed by form criticism.

Point 2: Bauckham demonstrates his prowess as a synthesizer of evidence; his strongest points are those he marshals from Ilan, Theissen, and Turner. The argument for a Petrine Mark, including onomastic analyses, an early Passion, and Petrine perspective, as well as the argument from inclusio, is thus surprisingly compelling.

Point 3: Where there is much to be desired, however, is with regards to the authorship of John. Bauckham does successfully address apparent difficulties, such as his exposition on the Johannine "`We' of Authoritative Testimony" to explain Jn 21:24. But Bauckham's thesis demands too much from the evidence, and his case, though theoretically possible, is not compelling. Magnifying the problem is the cumulative nature of his case. That Jn 1:35 contains a silent allusion to the Beloved Disciple is somewhat improbable. That Jn 21 is original is argued to a point between possible and plausible, but is certainly not compelling. The argument for the Beloved Disciple's authorship would be compelling were it not for the fact that it requires the two previous points to be conceded. This says nothing about the argument which identifies the Beloved Disciple with the Elder John (an argument that is itself not compelling) and the argument for authentic authorship at the hands of the Elder John (virtually absent). All these points must be valid, in succession, in order for Bauckham's thesis to stand, and his argument falls short of meeting the burden of proof.

Bauckham is to be lauded for forcefully tackling issues which are regularly taken for granted: the popular conception of oral tradition and its ramifications on Gospel origins. By introducing fresh tools to the field, such as onomastics and testimony analysis, Bauckham has significantly contributed to the methods of New Testament research. The result is a bolstered position for those who claim eyewitness testimony for Mark, and an intriguing new perspective on the authorship of John.