Can I Get A Witness?

One of the books I'm trying to pick my way through these days is Richard Bauckham's Jesus and the Eyewitness-es.

Bauckham, New Testament Professor at St. Andrew's, argues against a popular view in New Testament Studies that the Gospels were not composed by eyewitnesses to the life of Christ, and are not necessarily about the actual life of Christ. This view posits that the Gospels were an admixture of real and invented events in Christ's life, edited and tailored to suit the particular needs of the "communities" to which they were written.

Bauckham maintains that the Gospels are actual, eyewitness accounts of the historical life of Christ, written by either the apostles themselves, or men who knew them. They are not the product of late invention.

Bauckham was recently interviewed by Christianity Today, an Evangelical website, about his book. Although I do not agree with his assessment of the authorship of the Fourth Gospel, here's part of the interview:

What is the importance of "testimony" for interpreting the New Testament?

I think it helps us to understand what sort of history we have in the Gospels. Most history rests mostly on testimony. In other words, it entails believing what witnesses say. We can assess whether we think witnesses are trustworthy, and we may be able to check parts of what they say by other evidence. But in the end we have to trust them. We can't independently verify everything they say. If we could, we wouldn't need witnesses.

It's the same with witnesses in court. Testimony asks to be trusted, and it's not irrational to do so. We do so all the time. Now in the case of the Gospels, I think we have exactly the kind of testimony that historians in the ancient world valued: the eyewitness testimony of involved participants who could speak of the meaning of events they had experienced from the inside. This kind of testimony is naturally not that of the disinterested passerby who happened to notice something. That wouldn't tell us much worth knowing about Jesus. That the witnesses were insiders, that they were deeply affected by the events, is part of the value of their witness for us.

In the book, I discuss testimonies of the Holocaust as a modern example of an event we would have no real conception of without the testimony of survivors. In a very different way, the Gospels are about exceptionally significant events, history-making events. In the testimony of those who lived through them, history and interpretation are inextricable. But this, in fact, brings us much closer to the reality of the events than any attempt to strip away the interpretation and recover some supposedly mere facts about Jesus.

You can read the rest here.