Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony by Richard Bauckham (review)

This volume is the second edition of Bauckham's highly influential 2006 work, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses. The first eighteen chapters reproduce the entirety of the first edition, without change and retaining the original pagination. The final three chapters are wholly new material: 19, "Eyewitnesses in Mark (Revisited)"; 20, "Who Was the Beloved Disciple? (Continued)"; 21, "The End of Form Criticism (Confirmed)." This review will focus its limited word count upon this new material.

Each new chapter responds in main to criticisms of the first edition. In large part, this consists of Bauckham demonstrating that his critics had failed to apprehend his arguments. Bauckham's frustration with such failure is at times quite palpable. This frustration is understandable. Bauckham's primary training is as a historian, and it is as a historian that he writes. As is the case with probably most New Testament scholars, many of his critics received primary training in the analysis and interpretation of texts, but as much as such work might constitute a necessary antecedent to history, it remains something that is not quite history. It becomes history when we move from the study of texts to the study of people: real, concrete, even if now deceased people. Jesus and the Eyewitnessesexemplifies such a movement.

A disciplinary resistance to thinking in terms of real, concrete persons is on display among the critics to whom Bauckham responds in each chapter. The legacy of form criticism has rendered New Testament scholars almost allergic to the proposition that when discussing the Jesus tradition we can identify named tradents through our data. This legacy is precisely what Bauckham challenges in chapter 21, and this confirmation of form criticism's end is a fitting end for the second edition. Bauckham had already argued in the first edition that the relevant data simply could not confirm but in fact demonstrably refuted form criticism's understanding of the Jesus tradition as circulating predominantly if not exclusively among now-unknown figures who should be understood in terms of a Christian Volk. This form-critical understanding of course was the foundation for the decision of redaction critics to treat each gospel as embodying the Geistof distinct Christian communities, an understanding that Bauckham had already subjected to fatal critique in his 1998 edited volume, The Gospel for All Christians. Bauckham's new chapter on the matter in a certain sense marks the crescendo for his sustained critiques of both form and redaction criticism.

Chapters 19 and 20 are best situated within this sustained critique. Bauckham's argument against the idea of exclusively if not predominantly anonymous tradents builds largely upon, and in a certain sense sublates, the argument that Peter was the primary tradent for Mark's Gospel and the eponymous John (the Elder) for John's. Again, these arguments were already made in the first edition, and in adding these chapters Bauckham responds to his critics. By rehearsing and reinforcing the argument that the authors of these gospels were either in personal contact with an eyewitness (in the case of Mark's Gospel) or were an eyewitness (in the case of John's), Bauckham can argue in chapter 21 that form criticism's view of an extended process of transmission is unnecessary to account for the relevant data. The tradition-historical approach borne from form criticism is thus not necessarily disproved, but certainly redundant. The chains of transmission need in many cases be extended no further than that from eyewitness to author.

Bauckham emphasizes, as he did in the first edition, that it does not follow that the gospels are not creative products written by the Evangelists, or that the proximity to eyewitnesses guarantees reliability in any direct and wooden fashion. On this he is right: whether eyewitnesses were involved is in principle an altogether different question from what the involvement of eyewitnesses means for the study of the historical Jesus. That having...