Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, Chapter 1

Richard Bauckham sets out to merge history and theology in "Jesus and the Eyewitnesses." Obviously this is a huge undertaking given the last two hundred years of Jesus scholarship and quests for the historical one. Immediately questions arise: can such a purely historical Jesus be constructed? Do the gospels mask Jesus as much, more, or less than they reveal him? If the gospels are theology, must they be treated as less than history? If the gospels are theology, whom do they reveal? Are historians and theologians separate? Bauckham seeks a way forward in the midst of this division of theology and history, having history and theology meet "in the historical Jesus." This book is "a first attempt to lay out some of the evidence and methods" for this meeting (5).

The main category for this meeting is testimony. Bauckham immediately this does not mean the gospels are testimony rather than history because testimony always seeks to be trusted. While this does not mean that testimony is treated uncritically, neither does it mean that testimony is irrelevant to its own verification. This means that the gospels, as testimony, can give access to the historical Jesus (5). Indeed, testimony is at times the best source of history and at times its only source, as well.

Thus, Bauckham suggests that testimony lets us treat the gospels as both historical and theological. Testimony is the category we need "to read the Gospels as precisely the kind of text we need in order to recognize the disclosure of God in the history of Jesus" (5). The gospels are recorded ways the witnesses perceived historical events. This means that Bauckham is arguing that the forms the gospels take are "much closer to the form" in which the eyewitnesses told their stories than most form-critical scholarship believes. This does not mean there is no editing, but that they remain faithful to how the eyewitnesses told it. Bauckham also concludes that the Gospel of John was written by an eyewitness. In order to do this, Bauckham holds to the writing of the gospels having been done in living memory of some of the participants. The time between Jesus and the Gospels was not spanned by community transmission, but by the testimony and in the name of the eyewitnesses until they died.

Bauckham then turns to Samuel Byrskog and his recent work, Story as History--History as Story. Following Byrskog, he claims that in ancient historiography, this practice of taking testimony for history was perfectly acceptable. Oral reports and direct experience of history was valued by Thucydides, Polybius, Josephus, and Tacitus. Good historians criticized using only written sources, even to the point that some pretended to have firsthand knowledge of events. This was the importance of eyewitness testimony. This means that involvement in events was far from disqualifying one from an accurate telling, but was essential to it. "The coinherence of fact and meaning, empirical report and engaged interpretation, was not a problem for these historians" (9). (This nears the contemporary study of "oral history.") Certain criticisms of this approach have been lodged (11), but requires testing and development, which Bauckham seeks to accomplish.

Now we see how Bauckham will treat the gospels: accounts written by people who used oral reports of actual eyewitnesses and remained faithful to these sources, as this was the practice of historiography. They used this method because otherwise certain access to truth was unavailable.