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Religion See other Religion Articles Title: What He Said Richard Bauckham JESUS AND THE EYEWITNESSES The Gospels as eyewitness testimony 538pp. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. $32. 978 0 80283162 0 The Synoptic Gospels – Matthew, Mark and Luke – present a conundrum that is probably unique in the annals of literary research. On the one hand they display similarities which are sometimes so close that it has been thought impossible they should have occurred had not the author of one had access to at least one of the others (and the reigning but not the only possible hypothesis is that Matthew and Luke both made use of Mark). On the other hand they have differences, mainly of verbal expression but sometimes also of content and arrangement, which generations of scholars, brought up in the tradition of historical criticism, have assumed is due to the use of different sources – so much so that the notion of “source” (Quelle in German) has given rise to the reconstruction of a document (“Q”) that is assumed to be the “source” of material that appears in similar form in Matthew and Luke but is absent in Mark. The consequence is that a Gospel writer must be imagined, no longer as a serene recipient of inspiration from on high (as envisaged in so many ancient works of art) but as a sometimes puzzled, sometimes creative, editor, using scissors and paste to weave together several different narratives or “sources”, and (according to more recent scholarship) compounding the complexity of his task by introducing theological interpretations of his own. For this improbable scenario – the task would be difficult even with modern filing systems and computers, let alone with the limited resources available at the time – there is of course no ancient evidence whatever. Yet it has been unquestioningly adopted by scholars for a century and a half, mainly because, on the assumption that there is a literary relationship between the three Gospels – that is, that one writer had access to the work of another and could physically incorporate it in his own – it has seemed the only plausible explanation of the extraordinarily complex relationship that exists between these three documents. But is this assumption correct? Can the close verbal similarities be explained only by one writer’s having faithfully reproduced (with his own minor amendments) the exact words of a precursor? Are the differences best explained by the use of different sources at certain points in the narrative and by the manipulation of those sources carried out by an “editor” anxious to impress his own theological understanding on the raw material lying on his desk? In the past few years a serious alternative has been ventured. Jesus wrote nothing: his teaching must have been preserved first in the memory of his followers, and only later committed to writing. No one has ever doubted that there must have been a period of “oral tradition” before the Gospels came to be written; but it has always been assumed that this era came to an end when the first Gospel was written down: all subsequent Gospels were handling material that was already in literary form. Comparative material from other cultures in which “oral tradition” was established was therefore thought to be of limited value for the purposes of understanding the evolution of our canonical Gospels. But a new impetus to question old assumptions was given a few years ago by the work of Kenneth Bailey, not a professional New Testament scholar, but a person who had had opportunity to experience a still-living tradition of community storytelling in the Middle East and recognized its relevance to the conundrum of Matthew, Mark and Luke. In such a community, the storyteller would be bound to reproduce the essentials of the narrative, and at crucial points the exact wording, but would also be expected to bring something of his own style and recollection to give new life to the recital. Was not this very like the phenomenon we see in the Gospels, which are similarly almost identical at many points, but diverge in many others? May not the different versions have originated in different performances of the narrative? It is a possibility that has been taken seriously by some of the scholarly guild, even though, if correct, it must surely call into question many of the assumed achievements of generations of previous researchers. But now a new approach altogether has been proposed by Richard Bauckham, a scholar who already has an impressive record of research into Christian origins. In a previous book – Gospel Women (2002) – he was able to show, by a close study of personal names both in our texts and in the records of Palestinian culture, that a particular group of individuals in the New Testament, and their relationships with one another, have a striking internal consistency with regard to names and provenance and also reflect accurately the naming and family connections that were customary in their culture. In the face of such evidence, it is hard to believe either that these names could have been fabricated or that there was any serious loss of accuracy in remembering and recording them by the time the Gospels came to be written. In Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, Bauckham continues his investigation into named individuals, and shows that the same conclusion holds for all. We have every reason, therefore, to assume a faithful and unbroken link between the original witnesses of Jesus’ life and death and the record of these things in the Gospels. Following this clue, Bauckham then suggests we should take seriously the testimony of two second-century churchmen, Papias and Irenaeus – the first of whom has usually been dismissed by scholars as unreliable. Carefully examining the relevant texts – including the famous statement of Papias that Mark’s Gospel is derived from anecdotes heard from St Peter – Bauckham concludes that these writers gave absolute priority to eyewitness accounts of Jesus, many of which are likely to have been given by his closest followers; indeed, he argues that the fact that some minor characters in the Gospels are named, while others remain anonymous, strongly suggests that it was the named ones who were consulted for their personal recollections and that the Gospel writers, or those whom they consulted, were drawing on first-hand evidence that was inherently reliable and consistent, though with the inevitable variations and slight lapses which attend the exercise of memory in any age or culture – hence both the close similarities and the sporadic divergences exhibited by the Synoptic Gospels. None of these propositions is advanced as if it were merely a matter of common sense and informed intuition applied to the age-old enigma of the Gospels – though it is the sheer lack of plausibility of some modern reconstructions which leads Bauckham to say that “scholars rather easily lose touch with common experience”. He calls in aid the findings of students of primarily oral cultures, the research that has been done in ancient historiography, and the value placed by ancient historians on eyewitness testimony (along with clear and elegant arrangement), psychological studies of memory and its relation to the facts remembered, the various occasions for anonymity which were recognized by ancient writers, and much more; and shows that his conclusions, radically different as they are from those of virtually all mainstream scholars, can be supported both by the testimony of early Christian writers (seldom given due weight in recent scholarship) and by comparative material offered by other disciplines. The book is indeed a serious challenge to the paradigm that has commanded almost universal assent for many years. The challenge, of course, will be vigorously met; and critics will be tempted to home in on the points where Bauckham is least persuasive. Does the notion of “protective anonymity” – keeping a person out of trouble by omitting his name – really explain why the naked youth who left his garment in Gethsemane is not further identified in Mark’s Gospel, or why the raising of Lazarus is not mentioned in any Gospel except that of John? Does the statement in Hebrews (2: 3) that “those who heard him [Jesus] confirmed it to us” necessarily mean that “the community addressed in Hebrews had evidently received the Gospel traditions directly from eyewitnesses”? Or – still more controversially – is it plausible that a disciple who is unmentioned in the other three Gospels and who lurks in the background in most of John’s narrative – the “beloved disciple” – is not merely the principal eyewitness behind the narrative from beginning to end but actually wrote the Gospel himself late in life (would someone who accompanied Jesus in Galilee really have been capable of such a highly wrought literary work – and yet, perhaps we should ask, why not?). But the critics’ real reason for disputing Bauckham’s theory will be that to accept it would demand a profound paradigm shift in New Testament studies. All the form-critical assumptions to do with the role of the early Christian communities in the formation of the synoptic tradition would have to be abandoned in favour of decisive personal contributions by recognized and authoritative eyewitnesses. Indeed, the foundations are shaken even more rudely. Bauckham seems to accept without question the conventional assignment of Matthew and Luke to the later decades of the first century; but this dating is itself a construction based on the supposed literary relationship between them, leaving time for Mark to be circulated and digested before another evangelist took up his pen. On the eyewitness model, none of this need be the case. Again, Bauckham still seems to assume that the later Gospels used Mark (he is more reserved about Q), though this assumption seems no longer required in his reconstruction. It is difficult, even for the inventor of a new paradigm, to envisage its full consequences for teaching and research. Will the paradigm eventually be accepted? For all its attractiveness, hesitations must remain, not so much because of any weakness in the presentation of the case (which is impressive), as because of the inherent mysteriousness of the subject. Despite all the comparisons that can be made with other ancient texts, despite descriptions we possess of the formation of historical records and the composition of Greek and Roman histories and biographies, despite all the evidence available about “orality” and memorizing in cultures other than our own (and all of this is taken into account here), the composition of the Gospels, and the intricate relationship between them, remains utterly obscure. “We may suppose . . . ”, writes Bauckham, speaking of how tradition may have been monitored in the early Church; “we can imagine . . .”, he muses, discussing how groups of disciples may have exchanged memories. The trouble is, we can also suppose something different, we can also imagine otherwise. Even a generation or two later, when the four Gospels (along with others which for a time competed with them) were coming into circulation among the churches, it is questionable whether the few ancient writers who discuss the matter knew much more about the process of their composition than we do – and when they do tell us something, the information can be shown to be not necessarily reliable. The probability is that we shall never have an answer to the question how the Gospels came into existence in their present form that is more than a partially tested hypothesis. A great deal more testing will have to be done of this one; but Richard Bauckham’s careful and eloquent presentation of his argument, supported not just by careful scholarship but by admirable common sense, deserves earnest consideration by all who have the training and the perseverance to pursue the elusive explanation of one of the most tantalizing literary relationships in ancient literature, appropriately known since the nineteenth century as “the Synoptic problem”. A. E. Harvey is a former Canon and Sub-Dean of Westminster. A revised edition of his Companion to the New Testament appeared in 2004.
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