| | "In summary, if the interests of Christian faith and theology in the Jesus who really lived are to recognize the disclosure of God in this history of Jesus, then testimony is the theologically appropriate, indeed the theologically necessary way of access to the history of Jesus, just as testimony is also the historically appropriate, indeed the historically necessary way of access to this 'uniquely unique' historical event. It is in the Jesus of testimony that history and theology meet." --Richard Bauckham (Jesus and the Eyewitnesses 508) Hello, everyone.  How are y'all? I haven't exactly been hearing much from you lately (i.e., just look at how few comments were made on my last post). Well, like I mentioned (I'm going to rant about my personal life for about a paragraph, so bear with me), yesterday I had trips to both the dentist and a chiropractor. The first encounter involved a fair bit of bleeding, but I'm glad that's over. The chiropractor visit, though, I thoroughly enjoyed. At any rate, it appears I have the beginning stages of carpal tunnel (who would've ever guessed that I, a humble computer addict, would have such a thing?), as well as a minor scoliosis. Plus, well, my spine is just strange. Ever seen an old representation of a Neanderthal's posture? Yeah, that's me. When I walked out of the office, I was actually standing straight for once in my life. Didn't last long before things returned more-or-less to normal, though. But I did get a few exercises to stave off the carpal tunnel. As for the abortion debate (on this site, for those who haven't been paying sufficient attention) in which I and several of my readers are engaged, all four entries for Round 3 are up. I'm beginning my entry for the fourth round, and it looks like it's going to be absolutely enormous, I'm afraid. I have a lot of work to do. Heck, I don't know if I am going to be able to complete it by the deadline, and I (in my capacity as administrator) am the one who set it! (Though I admit to having presently forgotten exactly what it is...) Well, because I intend to operate with integrity, I refuse to extend the deadline on my own behalf. I'll simply be sure to submit whatever little I achieve by then, whether or not it's my best work. Likewise, I expect other debaters to do the same. Best of luck to everyone! The biggest thing I'd like to announce is that I've finally finished Jesus and the Eyewitnesses! It's about time, too. The 508-page book took me almost a week! That's much longer than usual for me (save, of course, that Augustine's Confessions was much shorter and took me several weeks). Anyway, as can be seen above, I'm now reading William Lane Craig's 1979 classic, The Kalam Cosmological Argument. I'm already over half of the way through that one. Having read through his treatment on the uses of the argument by al-Kindi, Saadia, and al-Ghazali, I think I understand better why Craig's arguments utilize certain statements. However, rather than blather on about that, I'll be blathering about the book I've finished. I did, after all, promise to summarize/review it. It's not going to be an easy task, but I'll give it a shot. Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony is the latest book by Dr. Richard Bauckham. In it, 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: From the Historical Jesus to the Jesus of Testimony Papias on the Eyewitnesses Names in the Gospel Traditions Palestinian Jewish Names The Twelve Eyewitnesses "from the Beginning" The Petrine Perspective in the Gospel of Mark Anonymous Persons in Mark's Passion Narrative Papias on Mark and Matthew Models of Oral Tradition Transmitting the Jesus Traditions Anonymous Tradition or Eyewitness Testimony? Eyewitness Memory The Gospel of John as Eyewitness Testimony The Witness of the Beloved Disciple Papias on John Polycrates and Irenaeus on John The Jesus of Testimony
I'll certainly preface this summary by saying that by no means is it a substitute for actually reading the book yourself. I'm a man of poor memory, and I'm likely to skip over something crucial. I advise reading the book. (I'll also note that it appears that Chris Tilling is going to be doing a more in-depth treatment of the work, and is also in correspondence with Bauckham himself. Thanks for the notification go to BronzeArcher.) 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. As Bauckham writes: John's Gospel thus uses the inclusio of eyewitness testimony in order to privilege the witness of the Beloved Disciple, which this Gospel embodies. It does so, however, not simply by ignoring the Petrine inclusio of Mark's Gospel, but by enclosing a Petrine inclusio within its inclusio of the Beloved Disciple. In ch. 1, the anonymous disciple, along with Andrew, appears just before Peter, whose importance is then stressed by Jesus' bestowal of the name Cephas on him (1:41-42). In ch. 21 Jesus speaks to the Beloved Disciple (21:22-23) just after Jesus' dialogue with Peter, in which he has made Peter the chief shepherd of his sheep and predicted that Peter will lay down his life for Jesus and his sheep (21:15-19). The giving of the name Cephas (assuming that the name alludes to Peter's role after Jesus' departure, as in Matt 16:18-19) and the giving of the role of chief shepherd doubtless correspond, thus reinforcing the significance of the Petrine inclusio. The proximity of the two ends of the inclusio functions to indicate that this Gospel's distinctive contribution derives no from Peter's testimony but from the Beloved Disciple's witness. But at the same time it acknowledges the importance of Peter's testimony, as it appears in Mark's Gospel, and the extent to which the narrative of the Gospel of John runs parallel to Mark's, while also diverging to a considerable extent. (Bauckham 129)
And: There is a sense in which, up to and including 21:7, the Beloved Disciple is represented as superior to Peter. But the sense in which this is true becomes apparent only when we see that Peter and the Beloved Disciple represent two different kinds of discipleship: active service and perceptive witness. (Bauckham 395)
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. Obviously. God bless you all. |
