JSNT 31.

2 (2008) 195-209 © 2008 SAGE Publications

http://JSNT.sagepub.com
DOI: 10.1177/0142064X08098281

The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony? A Critical Examination of

Richard Bauckham’s Jesus and the Eyewitnesses

Jens Schröter
Theologische Fakultät, Otto-Schill-Straße 2, 04109, Leipzig, Germany
Prof.Jens.Schroeter@t-online.de

How is the formation of the Gospels related to the historical Jesus? This
question has been discussed passionately since the beginning of historical-
critical research on the Gospels, unsurprisingly, for at stake here are the
foundations of Christian theology and faith. Is it possible to trace back
the contents of Christian faith to Jesus himself, or is the Christian con-
fession based on ideas that were imposed on his life and death only
afterwards? Are the origins of Christian faith accessible by ‘pure histori-
cal’ examination, or is there always an inextricable interrelation of his-
torical event and interpretation? Does Christian faith have a secure
historical basis in the activity and fate of Jesus of Nazareth lying behind
all shapes and peculiarities of Christianity, or is such a foundation always
a construct of the historian, depending on his or her view of reality and
therefore provisional and changeable?
Richard Bauckham’s monumental monograph is a challenge not only
for the interpretation of the Gospels, but also for historical Jesus research.
The main argument of the book, namely that the Gospels are based on
eyewitness testimony, is aimed at a re-evaluation of the transmission pro-
cesses of the Jesus traditions prior to the Gospels. Bauckham wants thereby
to develop a paradigm that is able to answer the questions mentioned
above. The necessity of such an approach for Bauckham results from the
observation that the relationship of event and interpretation is adequately
considered neither in recent Jesus research nor in the prevalent methodo-
logical paradigm for the interpretation of the Gospels. With regard to the
former he thinks of approaches in recent Jesus research in North America,
with regard to the latter he has his sights on older German form criticism.
Whereas more recent Jesus research has tried ‘to reconstruct the historical
figure of Jesus in a way that is allegedly purely historical, free of concerns

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196 Journal for the Study of the New Testament 31.2 (2008)

of faith and dogma’,1 the form critics attributed the Gospels to an anony-
mous church tradition and ignored fundamental aspects of those processes
that led to their formation. Bauckham wants to overcome these insuffi-
ciencies, which resulted in a historical Jesus without Christian faith or in
Christian faith without a historical Jesus, by introducing eyewitness testi-
mony as the appropriate historiographic category for the formation of the
Gospels.
In some way Bauckham’s approach reminds the reader of the recent
monograph of Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI (Ratzinger 2007). Both
authors emphasize the close connection between the ministry of Jesus
and the shape of Christian faith, which have been separated in a question-
able way by historical-critical exegesis, and especially by the form critics.
Moreover, in both approaches, the attribution of the Gospel traditions to
eyewitnesses plays an important role. This becomes particularly obvious
with regard to the Gospel of John, which is attributed by Bauckham and
Ratzinger to the personal memories of Jesus’ beloved disciple, whom
Bauckham even identifies with the presbyter John mentioned in two of
John’s letters and by Papias. In Bauckham’s book the methodological and
historiographic value of the category ‘eyewitness testimony’ is even
reflected in a fundamental way. He highlights its importance for histori-
ography in the ancient world in general and for the formation of the
Gospels in particular.
Bauckham introduces the category ‘eyewitness testimony’ (sometimes
only ‘testimony’) right at the beginning. The basis is his conviction ‘that
all history, like all knowledge, relies on testimony’.2 Therefore, the
assumption in ‘modern development of critical historical philosophy and
method’ that the historian could access the historical truth independent
from testimony has to be rejected. History, instead, is always an indis-
soluble combination of fact and interpretation. In the case of the Gospels
the category ‘testimony’ is especially appropriate because it enables us to
read the history of Jesus as the revelation of God in a way which
precisely meets the intention of these writings. ‘Testimony’ therefore is

1. Bauckham 2006: 2. Such a historic-hermeneutical and naive approach may

apply to some recent North American Jesus scholarship but is by no means repre-
sentative of actual Jesus research in general. Cf. Dunn 2003: 99-136; Schröter 2006.
2. Bauckham 2006: 5. That Bauckham describes this insight as a ‘rather neglected
fact’ is surprising insofar as hermeneutical and epistemological aspects have been
broadly discussed in theory of history and also in Jesus research in recent years. It is
somewhat disappointing that this discussion, apart from James Dunn’s seminal study
on Jesus, is not considered in Bauckham’s book.

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 SCHRÖTER The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony 197

the historiographically and theologically appropriate model for the

interpretation of the Gospels. It calls into question the idea of an anony-
mous oral transmission of the Jesus tradition before the formation of the
Gospels. The fundamental misapprehension of this idea is that it leaves
unconsidered the role of the eyewitnesses, testified to by Papias as well as
by the Gospels themselves, in favour of an ‘anonymous folk literature’ as
the appropriate model for the transmission of the Jesus tradition.
With his view Bauckham aligns himself with the criticisms against the
form-critical approach which, since Vincent Taylor, has been accepted in
British scholarship only with reservation. Taylor’s famous dictum ‘[i]f
the Form-Critics are right, the disciples must have been translated to
heaven immediately after the Resurrection’ is quoted by Bauckham with
approval (7). In a later chapter he takes up the main criticisms against the
form-critical approach from recent decades: the assumption of a ‘pure
form’ at the beginning of the transmission process, the supposition of a
strict relation between genre and ‘Sitz im Leben’, the notion of certain
laws of transmission, the ‘romantic’ idea of an anonymous folk literature,
the hypothesis of an exclusively oral transmission of the Jesus tradition in
the first decades and the application of a literary model to processes of
oral transmission (246-52).
Although these criticisms would already suffice to prove the form-
critical model as unsatisfactory, Bauckham sees the main problem in the
influence that the idea of a ‘long period of creative development of the
traditions before they attained written form in the Gospels’ (249) still
exerts on current Gospel research. His approach presents a fundamental
criticism of this presupposition. Taking eyewitness testimony as his point
of departure, he wants to show that those persons who were themselves
involved in the events, and therefore are reliable witnesses, transmitted
the Jesus traditions from the beginning. Before this approach will be
scrutinized in more detail, a remark will be given on the theological-
historical constellation behind this debate.
The assumption of a longer oral, ‘creative’ phase of the Jesus tradition
goes back as far as Johann Gottfried Herder and was prominently
advanced a hundred years before the basic publications of the form critics
by David Friedrich Strauss. Strauss traced the traditions behind the
Gospels back to ‘mythical’ interpretations of the events of Jesus’ activity
during their oral transmission. The designation ‘myth’ thereby means that
Jesus’ ministry was interpreted by religious ideas taken over mainly from
the Old Testament. That these ideas were imposed on the Jesus traditions
from the very beginning would make it impossible to draw a sharp dis-
tinction between historical and unhistorical aspects in the Gospels. The

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198 Journal for the Study of the New Testament 31.2 (2008)

inseparable connection of historical event and ‘mythical’ interpretation

has rather to be regarded as a characteristic of the Jesus tradition since its
earliest commencements.
Strauss’s ideas were heavily disputed already during his lifetime.
Christian Hermann Weiße, professor of philosophy at the University of
Leipzig, criticized them as ‘faint and nebulous suppositions’ that were
already disproved by Papias’s testimony about Mark and Matthew (Weiße
1838). The sources mentioned by Papias—a Gospel of Mark that is
allegedly based on Peter’s memories, as well as Jesus’ ‘logia’ collected
by the apostle Matthew—were the actual commencements of the Jesus
tradition and would prove speculations about a phase of oral transmission
as pure fancy. The reference to these two sources was the origin of the
so-called ‘two-source-theory’. It is worthwhile to note that this theory
originally was not developed to solve the Synoptic Problem, but to trace
back the Jesus tradition to two written sources in order to refute the idea
of an oral tradition behind the Gospels.
The problem indicated by Bauckham has therefore been an integral
part of the historical-critical research on the Gospels since its very
beginning. It could even be stated that Bauckham’s refutation of the form-
critical approach is a version of the controversy between Strauss and
Weiße under new circumstances. Thereby it is remarkable that with Weiße,
as with Bauckham, Papias’s testimony plays a decisive role for the assump-
tion of a tradition that originated with identifiable witnesses. As already
mentioned, Bauckham applies this theory even to the Gospel of John, as
Weiße did not. The differences between this Gospel and the Synoptic
Gospels are in his view due to the fact that John’s Gospel is an ‘idiosyn-
cratic testimony of a disciple whose relationship to the events, to Jesus,
was distinctive and different’ (411).
The theologically and historically explosive question therefore is
whether the traditions that were taken over by the Gospel writers deliver
an adequate picture of Jesus’ activity because they originate with eyewit-
nesses, or whether the theological convictions that shaped these traditions
have displaced their historical reliability to a considerable degree. There
is agreement between Bauckham on the one hand and Strauss and the
form critics on the other that Jesus’ activity and fate—as all historical
events—are only accessible by their recollections. But it is disputed
whether these memories by their interpretations concealed the events
themselves or, to the contrary, kept their essential aspects.
Strauss, like Bultmann and Dibelius, regarded the first option as more
probable. According to Strauss, the history of Jesus was embedded into
‘mythical’ interpretations, as for example the parousia of Elijah was trans-

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 SCHRÖTER The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony 199

ferred to John the Baptist, or Jewish expectations of a Messiah were used

for the interpretation of Jesus’ activity. According to Strauss, the dogmatic
truth of Christian faith was in no way affected by these observations. In
the Gospels this truth is expressed, however, as ‘ideal truth’, not as trans-
mission of historical facts. Bultmann and Dibelius also highlighted the
formative influence of Old Testament stories (as for example in the
vocation story in Mk 1.16-20), referred to analogies in Graeco-Roman
texts (as for example in the chreiai or in the miracle stories) and empha-
sized the influence of the early Christian confessions on the Gospels (as
for example in the story of Jesus’ baptism or in Peter’s confession ‘You
are the Christ’) to point out that the Jesus traditions underwent processes
of massive shaping and interpretation before they reached the Gospels.
Bauckham’s view is strongly opposed to these assumptions. According
to him, the Jesus tradition has to be regarded as ‘recollective memory’
relying on eyewitness accounts that did not go through a phase of anony-
mous oral transmission and was therefore not altered in a significant way
before it was written down by the authors of the Gospels. As Bauckham
points out, using insights from psychology, such memories should be
characterized as reports about ‘unique or unusual events’ of great impor-
tance for the transmitters themselves because they were emotionally
involved in them. They were shaped by ‘vivid imagery’, contained irrel-
evant details about places and persons, mostly lacked exact dating and
were frequently recalled. Exactly these features would also characterize
the traditions taken up by the Gospel writers (319-57). The process of
transmission of these traditions has therefore to be described as ‘remem-
bering Jesus’.
Bauckham thus defines the concept of ‘remembering’ in a particular
way. He dissociates himself from the model of an anonymous folk
literature, but at the same time deals critically with the approach taken by
Kenneth Bailey and thereafter by James Dunn. In that approach there is a
distinction between the form-critical model of an ‘informal, uncontrolled
oral tradition’ on the one hand and the ‘formal controlled oral tradition’
of the Scandinavian school on the other. Bailey’s own model of an
‘informal controlled oral tradition’ is placed between these two.3
Bauckham makes the criticism that with the characterization ‘informal’
Bailey and Dunn neglect the role of the eyewitnesses. That would do
justice neither to the importance of eyewitness accounts in ancient
historiography nor to the way the Jesus tradition was transmitted in the
first decades according to the earliest testimonies.

3. Bailey 1991: 34-54. Cf. Bauckham 2006: 252-63.

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200 Journal for the Study of the New Testament 31.2 (2008)

For his own description of the transmission process, Bauckham refers

to the importance of eyewitness testimony in ancient historiography as it
was emphasized already by Samuel Byrskog (2000). Byrskog had pointed
out, however, that the eyewitness at the same time appears as an ‘inter-
preter’ who was ‘socially involved’ in the reported events as a ‘partici-
pant’. For ancient historiographers this personal involvement was no
obstacle to considering eyewitnesses as especially qualified witnesses of
the concerned events. It means, however, that events from the past are
only accessible through the reports about them. Eyewitness testimony,
therefore, ensures closeness to the reported events but by itself says
nothing about the authenticity or even reliability of the reports.
At this point a crucial aspect for the evaluation of the conception of
‘testimony’ emerges: As already becomes obvious from the differences
between the Synoptic Gospels and the Gospel of John, Jesus’ activity
could be recounted in early Christianity in quite different ways. This
spectrum would even be broadened if the apocryphal Gospels were
included, for example the Gospel of Thomas, which Bauckham touches
on only in passing. Bauckham explains this diversity not historically or
theologically—for example by pointing to the elaborated post-Easter
perspective of the Gospel of John or to the Gospel of Thomas as a text
from a later stage in the tradition history than the New Testament Gos-
pels—but by referring to different modes of recollections of eyewitnesses.
Here a serious problem emerges. If the category ‘eyewitness testimony’ is
defined in such a broad way, its relationship to the recollected events is
obscured. If Jesus’ life and fate could be recounted in markedly different
ways in early Christian Gospels, it seems necessary to distinguish between
historical, reliable recollections and secondary, legendary traditions
which originated only later. Without such a distinction legendary stories
in the New Testament Gospels and the apocryphal Gospels would gain
the same status as those accounts that are fundamental for a historical
description of Jesus’ activity. It seems unavoidable, therefore, to evaluate
the different accounts critically with regard to their particular perspective
and to evaluate them accordingly. From such an evaluation it could
result, for example, that particular accounts in the Gospels—for example
the birth stories in Mt. 1–2 and Lk. 1–2, Jesus’ teaching about the
mystery of the kingdom in Mk 4 or the revelatory speeches in the Gospel
of John—are in the first place due to interpretations of Jesus’ activity in
different historical situations and from various theological perspectives.
Only after an interpretation within the context of the Gospels, then, does
it seem possible to ask whether they might originate from recollections of
eyewitnesses.

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 SCHRÖTER The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony 201

What does that now mean for the traditions behind the Gospels?
Bauckham, referring to Papias’s testimony and to the prologue of Luke’s
Gospel, argues that the reliance on eyewitnesses played a determining
role for securing the Jesus tradition in the first decades. Papias’s reference
to a ‘living and surviving voice’ (zw~sa fwnh\ kai\ me/nousa) should thereby
not be interpreted metaphorically but as referring to a witness who was
still alive in Papias’s time and had personal memories of Jesus. This is,
however, hardly convincing. It is much more probable that Papias here
takes up the ancient topos of the viva vox in order to underline the priority
of oral tradition over against written accounts.4 Moreover, the participle
me/nousa is hardly to be understood as referring to a living eyewitness. As,
for instance, 1 Pet. 1.23 (lo&goj qeou~ zw~n kai\ me/nwn) shows, it is rather a
reference to the everlasting quality of ‘God’s living word/voice’.
It is also hardly possible to draw conclusions concerning the origin of
Jesus traditions from Luke’s prologue.5 Rather, Luke uses various topoi
of prologues in ancient literary works to describe his own work as relying
on careful investigation of the events which are reported in correct order.
In that way Luke justifies the fact that he retells again what others have
already written down before him. A judgment concerning the origin of
the traditions taken over by Luke can scarcely be derived from such a
highly conventional statement.
From Papias’s testimony Bauckham develops another remarkable
hypothesis. According to this view, Papias observes a lack of order not
only in the Gospel of Mark, but also in Matthew’s Gospel. The reason for
the former was that it is a transcription of Peter’s speeches (though
Bauckham himself considers the assertion of a missing order in Mark as
unjustified), while in the latter the original order was destroyed by the
different translations mentioned by Papias. Bauckham’s conclusion is
that Papias must have known a Gospel with the ‘correct’ order and com-
pared it to those of Mark and Matthew—namely the Gospel of John! This
surprising solution allows Bauckham to interpret the Gospels of John and
Mark as respectively indirect and direct eyewitness testimonies that
represent Jesus’ activity in particular ways. Thereby the Gospel of John
made use of Mark’s Gospel and also presupposes readers’ knowledge of
it.
The most relevant eyewitness for the history of Jesus, according to
Bauckham, was the circle of the Twelve. This would already become
obvious from the preservation of their names in the lists that occur in the

4. Cf., e.g., Körtner 1998: 47.

5. Cf., e.g., Schmidt 1999: 27-60.

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202 Journal for the Study of the New Testament 31.2 (2008)

Synoptic Gospels and Acts. This conclusion remains somewhat unclear

because the preservation of names by itself says nothing about the role of
the concerned persons as eyewitnesses. Bauckham also refers to otherwise
unknown persons in Gospel stories as, for example, Levi in Mk 2.14,
Bartimaeus in Mk 10.46, Simeon and Hannah in Lk. 2.25 and 36, or
Nathanael and Nicodemus in Jn 1.45 and 3.1. Using Tal Ilan’s Lexicon of
Jewish Names in Late Antiquity (2002), Bauckham is able to show that in
most cases the persons mentioned in the Gospel stories bear common
Jewish names. It is hardly convincing, however, to draw a historical con-
clusion from this observation. It simply shows that the Gospel authors
gave their narratives a ‘realistic effect’ by choosing names that were
common in the Jewish context of ancient Palestine where the narrated
events took place. Every good narrator of a novel or a fictional story
would do the same. It is nevertheless absolutely possible that the persons
mentioned in the Gospels are in some cases individuals who experienced
the healings or were called as followers and hence became bearers of the
concerned traditions.6 If this assumption is correct, it would enable us to
identify some of the bearers of the Jesus tradition by their names. This
has of course to be distinguished from the literary form and pragmatic
function of these traditions in the context of the Gospels in which they
now appear.
Taking the story of the blind Bartimaeus in Mk 10.46-52 as an example,
this can be clarified as follows: Bartimaeus might have had an encounter
with Jesus and been healed from his blindness. Afterwards he might have
told this life-changing event to others who picked up the story and retold
it again in Christian circles or to highlight the extraordinary power of
Jesus in the context of early Christian mission. When Mark included the
story into his Gospel it had already passed through a transmission history
of approximately 40 years. In this process the report about the encounter
experienced considerable elaborations. Probably Jesus and Bartimaeus
spoke Aramaic with each other. Perhaps even the whole story about the
healing was transmitted in Aramaic in the first years. At some point,
however, it must have been translated into Greek. It obtained the form of
a miracle story and was embellished with features which made it more
lively (Jesus’ command to be quiet, the even louder crying of Bartimaeus,
the throwing off of the cloak, the healing because of Bartimaeus’s faith).
Moreover, the designations ‘Son of David’, ‘the Nazarene’ and ‘teacher’
point to the perception of Jesus by the inhabitants of Galilee. In this way
the story became an example for Jesus’ healing activity and received a

6. For the healing stories this was argued already in Zeller 1981.

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 SCHRÖTER The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony 203

general meaning which goes beyond the single event.

Mark took the story over, reworked it according to his own literary
style and incorporated it in his composition of the story of Jesus. His
account elucidates that the ‘true’ meaning of Jesus’ way is not adequately
expressed in Bartimaeus’s addresses to Jesus. According to Mark, Jesus
is more than a teacher and more than the Son of David: he is the Son of
Man whose way leads through suffering and death to his resurrection,
exaltation and return to the last judgement (cf., e.g., 8.31-38). The healing
of the blind Bartimaeus, who is saved by his faith and henceforth follows
Jesus in Mark’s story, therefore has at the same time a symbolic meaning:
the healing of the blind Bartimaeus in a symbolic sense means that he
learned to ‘see’ who Jesus is and as a consequence joined the group of his
followers. The story is therefore consciously placed at the transition from
Jesus’ public ministry in Galilee and the surrounding regions to his
passion in Jerusalem.
Thus, different stages in the transmission of the story can be distin-
guished: the initial transmission by the eyewitnesses of the event (perhaps
even Bartimaeus himself), the translation into Greek and the transfor-
mation into a typical story of Jesus’ healing activity, eventually the
literary and compositional incorporation into Mark’s Gospel. Because of
the diverse reformulations and interpretations during this process it is
hardly possible to reconstruct earlier versions of the story, let alone an
‘original’ version (whatever that means) or the event itself (whatever that
means). That such attempts would be fruitless becomes already obvious
from more recent studies on the style of Mark’s Gospel, the character of
oral tradition as well as from the inadequacy of the idea of a ‘pure’ form
at the beginning of a transmission process. The criticism of the form-
critical method therefore not only calls into question the assumption of an
anonymous church tradition; it also shows that the interpretation of the
Jesus tradition has to take its point of departure from the literary form
and function of the traditions within the context of the Gospels.
The episode of blind Bartimaeus therefore reveals a significant feature
of the early Jesus tradition: in earlier stages it consisted of shorter
episodes that sometimes may have contained names of involved persons
and other details. Here Bauckham has formulated a justified objection
against older form criticism, which is of course not new. However, this
insight must not be played off against the interpretation of these episodes
in the transmission process and their linguistic and compositional integra-
tion into the Gospels’ narratives. The episodes were formed according to
genre-specific conventions (in the particular case according to a healing
story); they were interpreted theologically (in our example as salvation by

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204 Journal for the Study of the New Testament 31.2 (2008)

faith in Jesus, the Son of David); and they were integrated into the
specific perspective on Jesus developed by the Gospel writers (in the
Bartimaeus episode by the integration into Mark’s story of Jesus, the Son
of Man, who acts in God’s power and whose way leads through suffering
and death to exaltation). Both perspectives—the obligation to historical
events and early traditions as well as the shaping and theological interpre-
tation at later stages—must not be played off against each other. ‘Remem-
bering Jesus’ therefore cannot mean to invoke the trustworthiness of
eyewitness accounts against interpretations in the transmission process
and by the Gospel writers, but to correlate both aspects in an appropriate
way.
In three of the Gospels, eyewitnesses are presented in a remarkable
way, namely in Mark, Luke and John. Bauckham explains this observation
with regard to Mark by the fact that he refers to the memories of Peter.
Concerning the literary form of the episodes, he refers to the studies of
Cuthbert Turner, who had explained certain characteristics of Mark’s
style with the assumption that Mark in several cases had taken over epi-
sodes narrated by Peter and transferred them from the first into the third
person. Against the background of more recent research in the literary,
compositional and theological characteristics of Mark’s Gospel, however,
this assumption is hardly convincing. These studies have emphasized that
Mark has revised the traditions according to his own style and not simply
taken over eyewitness accounts.
Bauckham further argues that Mark as well as Luke and John used the
historiographic principle of ‘inclusio of eyewitnesses’. In Luke, in addition
to Peter, an outstanding role is attributed to the women, as in John to the
beloved disciple. Bauckham explains this by the respective ‘inclusio’: in
Mark, Peter is the first and the last of the disciples who is mentioned
(1.16 and 16.7). Bauckham finds it especially striking that in 16.7 Peter is
explicitly mentioned in addition to the disciples to whom he of course
belongs: ‘tell his disciples and Peter’. Luke introduces the women already
during Jesus’ activity in Galilee (8.2-3) and they occur again at the empty
tomb in ch. 24. In John, the beloved disciple first appears as the anonymous
companion of Andrew (1.35-40) and again in ch. 21, both times in close
relationship with Peter with whom he stands in ‘a friendly rivalry’ (128).
This ‘inclusio of eyewitnesses’, according to Bauckham, works as a
historiographical principle that can be discovered also in other historio-
graphical works.7

7. Bauckham refers to the Alexander novel by Lucian of Samosata as well as to

the biography of Plotinus by Porphyry. Cf. 2006: 132-45.

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 SCHRÖTER The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony 205

The reference to named individuals at several places in the Gospels is

indeed striking. It is a merit of Bauckham’s study to have worked out that
characteristic with admirable erudition. Sometimes, however, his hypoth-
eses seem somewhat far-fetched and hardly convincing, as, for example,
the alleged transformation of Peter’s accounts from the first into the third
person in Mark’s Gospel or the identification of the beloved disciple in
John’s Gospel with the presbyter who is mentioned in the second and
third letter of John and by Papias.8 Moreover, the assignment of the
traditions to eyewitnesses must not lead to a disregard of the literary and
theological shaping of the traditions by the Gospel authors. Even if the
traditions originated with eyewitnesses, they now appear as literarily
reworked and theologically interpreted traditions and as integral parts of
the compositional strategies of the Gospel writers. Moreover, the deriva-
tion from eyewitnesses says nothing about the reliability of the accounts.
As Johannes Fried has demonstrated in a comprehensive study, it should
not be forgotten that the category ‘memory’ has to be examined critically
because it presents incidents from the past more often than not in a highly
selective and subjective manner (Fried 2004). Because of their personal
involvement, eyewitnesses lack a critical distance from the reported events.
This was certainly also the case with Peter and the other disciples as
companions of Jesus during his activity and detention.
This observation is even underlined by Bauckham’s comparison of
‘Holocaust testimony and Gospel testimony’ (493-505). The reports of
survivors of the concentration camp in Auschwitz are highly subjective
accounts from the perspectives of affected persons. There is no doubt that
as memories of those individuals these reports deserve the highest
respect. But it is also obvious that they cannot serve as the only relevant
or authoritative sources for a history of German National Socialism. Eye-
witness testimony is rather a very specific historical source whose charac-
teristic is that it derives directly from people who were personally
involved in the events. When it is included into the description of a
certain period of history, this characteristic has to be considered critically
and brought into relation with other sources. It would be by no means
plausible, however, to argue that eyewitness testimony has by itself a
privileged position among historical sources.
The reference to ‘testimony’ as a ‘theological model for understanding

8. The unnamed disciple from Jn 1.35 is often identified with the beloved disciple.
Whether one follows that assumption or not, the introduction of an (at least in this
story) anonymous disciple is a literary characteristic of John’s Gospel, not a historical
statement about an eyewitness.

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206 Journal for the Study of the New Testament 31.2 (2008)

the Gospels’ therefore in no way leads by itself to the ‘historical reality

of Jesus’. The description as testimony first and foremost means that
some of the episodes in the Gospels may have been transmitted in the
beginning as selective and subjective eyewitness reports. It is at the same
time obvious that the recollections of Jesus’ activity did not enter the
Gospels as unchanged and uninterpreted eyewitness testimony. The lin-
guistic and compositional peculiarities of the Gospels instead show that
these reports underwent a thorough reworking. It must be regarded as a
weakness of Bauckham’s study that he does not adequately consider that
latter aspect. It should have led to a more balanced evaluation of the
origin of the Jesus tradition and its interpretation in the Gospels.
This leads to a further basic demur that should be raised in connection
with the model of ‘eyewitness testimony’. Bauckham criticizes a ‘naïve
historical positivism’ that ignores the fact that history is always a com-
bination of fact and interpretation. This might be an apt criticism of
certain tendencies in more recent Jesus research, especially in the United
States. This insight means that a historical-critical interpretation of the
Gospels does not present events from the past as they ‘really’ happened
but rather draws a picture of the past by using the tools of historical
criticism. As such, the distinction between event and interpretation should
not be neglected. It is also not plausible to consider the interpretation of
eyewitnesses from the outset as the ‘appropriate historical interpretation’.
Probably, other contemporary witnesses who left no written documents
interpreted the activity of Jesus quite differently—for example his
enemies—and it is possible even today to describe the activity and fate of
Jesus from other perspectives than those of the Gospels—as it is usually
done in historical-critical Jesus books. The ‘naïve positivism’ that is aptly
criticized by Bauckham cannot be overcome therefore by replacing the
events of Jesus’ ministry and fate with allegedly eyewitness testimony.
At the end of his book, Bauckham integrates the eyewitness accounts
into the perspective of critical historiography. He refers to Paul Ricœur,
who has, however, tied historical memories strictly to traces from the past
as their critical measure. Bauckham concedes that trust in testimony must
not mean ‘blind belief’, because the reception of testimony is characterized
by ‘a dialectic of trust and critical assessment’ (490). The reason is that
‘[t]estimony shares the fragility of memory’, but often no other sources
are available. That the Gospels are to be preferred for the reconstruction
of the historical Jesus because ‘for most purposes, testimony is all we
have’ does of course not lead to the conclusion that ‘[t]estimony offers
us…both a reputable historiographic category for reading the Gospels as
history, and also a theological model for understanding the Gospels as the

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 SCHRÖTER The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony 207

entirely appropriate means of access to the historical reality of Jesus’ (5).

That in most cases no other sources than the Gospels are available says
nothing about the character of these sources and their usefulness for a
historical outline of the ministry of Jesus on the basis of historical-critical
analysis. The statement ‘trusting testimony is indispensable to historiog-
raphy’ should therefore be reformulated into ‘relying on testimony’ is
indispensable for historiography, whereas ‘trusting’ is not, because
historical testimonies are not by themselves trustworthy but in need of
critical examination.
To sum up, Bauckham’s book is an outstanding study of the early Jesus
tradition and the origin of the Gospels. It rightly criticizes weaknesses of
the form-critical model of an allegedly anonymous church tradition.
Problems with Bauckham’s approach, however, arise mainly at three
points.
The main problem is the unreflective assignment of literary observations
to a historical level. As a consequence, the model of eyewitness testimony
is not adequately related to the literary and theological character of the
Gospels. Already a hundred years ago William Wrede had made the criti-
cism that Gospels scholars in their interpretations moved too quickly from
the literary to the historical level. The observation of Wrede and Karl-
Ludwig Schmidt that the picture of the life of Jesus provided by the
Gospels is a literary product and does not rely on living experience should
also not be put aside too airily. In the footsteps of these predecessors,
contemporary research has shown that the Gospels are linguistically and
compositionally coherent narratives that develop the meaning of Jesus’
activity and fate in the form of ‘narrative Christologies’. The category
‘eyewitness testimony’ can contribute to this picture insofar as it elucidates
the origin and early stages of transmission of some Jesus traditions. It
cannot explain, however, the formation of the Gospels themselves. In this
regard the insights highlighted by Wrede, the form critics and narrative
criticism are still valid and are put aside too hastily in Bauckham’s study.
This is all the more astounding as he forcefully emphasizes that history is
always an interrelation of event and interpretation. This insight is not
sufficiently applied to the Gospels as theological interpretations of the
early Jesus traditions in the light of early Christian confession.
Second, Bauckham underestimates the dynamics of oral tradition. Even
if one agrees with his assumption that in the beginning the Jesus tra-
ditions were transmitted by identifiable eyewitnesses, ‘performances’ of
these traditions during the process of oral transmission cannot be
excluded even as linguistic variations and theological interpretations that

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208 Journal for the Study of the New Testament 31.2 (2008)

they received before they gained their written form in the Gospels cannot
be excluded.
The third and final objection is related to this. A danger of the model
developed by Bauckham might be that it promotes an uncritical view on
the Gospels as writings that should be ‘trusted’ rather than scrutinized
critically. That would be a problematic consequence, already because in
not a few episodes it would be difficult to prove eyewitness testimony,9
and even where it may be plausible, that cannot mean that a historical-
critical analysis should be put aside. In fact, such an analysis is in any
case necessary in order to develop a convincing scenario of the formation
of the Gospels. The category ‘eyewitness testimony’ can contribute to an
understanding of the early Jesus tradition only insofar as it is integrated
into a perspective on the Gospels as consciously composed literary and
theological Jesus stories.

References
Bailey, K.E.
1991 ‘Informal Controlled Oral Tradition and the Synoptic Gospels’, AJT 5: 34-
54.
Bauckham, R.J.
2006 Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony (Grand
Rapids, MI: Eerdmans).
Byrskog, S.
2000 Story as History—History as Story: The Gospel Tradition in the Context of
Ancient Oral History (WUNT, 123; Tübingen: Mohr).
Dunn, J.D.G.
2003 Jesus Remembered (Christianity in the Making, 1; Grand Rapids, MI:
Eerdmans).
Fried, J.
2004 Der Schleier der Erinnerung: Grundzüge einer historischen Memorik
(Munich: C.H. Beck).
Ilan, T.
2002 Lexicon of Jewish Names in Late Antiquity: Part I: Palestine 330 BCE – 200
CE (TSAJ, 91; Tübingen: Mohr).
Körtner, U.H.J.
1998 Papiasfragmente (Schriften des Urchristentums, 3; Darmstadt:
Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft).

9. It is probable that several episodes in the Gospels—for instance the prologues

or the infancy stories—cannot be interpreted as eyewitness accounts but are due to
the theological shaping of the Gospel writers. This would affect, for example,
Bauckham’s reference to Simon and Hannah in Lk. 2 as eyewitnesses.

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 SCHRÖTER The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony 209

Ratzinger, Joseph (Benedict XVI)

2007 Jesus von Nazareth. Erster Teil: Von der Taufe im Jordan bis zur
Verklärung (Freiburg: Herder).
Schmidt, D.D.
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geschichten’, BZ NF 25: 204-22.

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