Tag: Bauckham: Jesus and the Eyewitnesses

We probably should envisage . . .

We probably should envisage a carefully compiled and formulated collection of Jesus traditions, incorporating other important eyewitness testimony as well as that of the Twelve themselves, but authorized by the Twelve as the official body of witnesses. (p.299)

This would surely be not too difficult to test. What would we expect the final compilation of this collection to look like? What features would it have that would clearly indicate it was “carefully compiled and formulated”, and that it incorporated different classes of eyewitness testimonies? Continue reading “Bauckham’s Jesus and the Eyewitnesses. Chapter 12b”

12. Anonymous Tradition or Eyewitness Testimony

Eyewitnesses: a superfluous hypothesis?
Bauckham argues that the primary sources of the gospel authors (following best historical practice by ancient standards) were the eyewitnesses. He therefore takes issue with Dunn when he says:

[ I]t is almost self-evident that the Synoptists proceeded by gathering and ordering Jesus tradition which had already been in circulation, that is, had already been well enough known to various churches, for at least some years if not decades. (p.291 — Dunn p.250)

But then Bauckham seems to admit that Dunn’s statement here is quite sufficient as an explanation for our gospel materials when he responds: Continue reading “Bauckham’s Jesus and the Eyewitnesses. Chapter 12a”

So far Bauckham has not addressed two of the most graphically told gospel scenes to explain how his eyewitness hypothesis accounts for them: his series of trial appearances and scourgings and his resurrection appearances. Continue reading “Richard Bauckham’s Jesus and the Eyewitnesses. Interlude”

Added about a day after the original post:

Knew it would be a mistake to rush that last chapter. (wifta: ‘what i forgot to add’). Had originally intended to address Bauckham’s Theissen reference:

Certainly something happened when the traditions were appropriated by the writers of the Gospels, but it could not have been so discontinuous with the attitude of the oral traditions themselves. The nature of the traditions . . . shows that they made reference to the real past history of Jesus. The fact that this is stated in the excellent textbook The Historical Jesus, by Gerd Theissen and Annette Merz, shows how far the mainstream of Gospel scholarship has moved . . . (p.277)

B’s reference to the gospels recording “real past history” is to pp.102-104 of Theissen. Here are a few quotations from those pages in Theissen: Continue reading “Bauckham’s Jesus and the Eyewitnesses. Chapter 11/WIFTA”

11. Transmitting the Jesus Traditions

In this and the next chapter Bauckham presents his case for the manner in which the Jesus traditions were transmitted by the eyewitnesses of Jesus, in particular by the Twelve as represented by Peter. He claims that: Continue reading “Bauckham’s Jesus and the Eyewitnesses. Chapter 11”

(P.S. on chapter 9: another interesting thing I learned in the previous chapter was that the notion of “translating” a text among some ancients was nothing like our concept. Josephus says he was going to make a translation of the Hebrew scriptures, no more or less, but of course he does do much more and less in his complete retelling of them. That point pretty much allows anyone to interpret Papias’s claim of Matthew being a translation from an original Aramaic as meaning anything.)

10. Models of Oral Tradition

Bauckham attempts in this chapter to place the eyewitnesses within the context of the scholarly models of the processes of transmission of gospel traditions. Continue reading “Bauckham’s Jesus and the Eyewitnesses. Chapter 10”

I have completely re-written the last section of my chapter 8 review (the discussion of the fleeing naked youth) after discovering I had initially misread B’s citation of Brown re symbolic interpretations.

8. Anonymous Persons in Mark’s Passion Narrative

I enjoyed Backham’s opening paragraph. Until reading this I had not had opportunity to discover some of the more detailed reasons scholars have wondered if the Passion Narrative pre-existed independently before being incorporated into Mark’s gospel. It is logical to conclude that if an author writes the bulk of his book as a chain-like series of loosely connected episodes, but then concludes with a complex of episodes in which each episode presupposes some other episode, and the presence of one hangs on the webbed links to the others, — it is logical to conclude that the latter was not original to the author who composed the first part. (Unfortunately the logic is not conclusive since one sees exactly the same type of two-part book mirrored in Homer’s Odyssey — a loosely chained sequence of discrete events followed by a highly integrated complex of events.)

Bauckham sums up the main thrust of his “argument” till now as attempting to explain why some characters are named when the norm appears t be for characters to be unnamed. In chapter 8 B considers those contrary cases where the fact that some characters are UNnamed appears to be unusual. Continue reading “Bauckham’s Jesus and the Eyewitnesses. Chapter 8”

Revised last paragraph about an hour after first posting this.

In my previous post I commented that the Gospel of Mark is the least “petrine” of the gospels doctrinally. I have since turned to chapter 7 to find I must clear my mind of that presumption and reassess Mark’s extent of “petrine-ness” and read with an open mind.

7. The Petrine Perspective in the Gospel of Mark

Bauckham opens this 7th chapter by stating categorically in relation to the last,

We have seen that Mark’s Gospel has the highest frequency of reference to Peter among the Gospels, and that it uses the inclusio of eyewitness testimony to indicate that Peter was its main eyewitness source. (p.155)

So what began as a hypothesis has become a phenomenon of Mark that “we have seen”. Those who have read my discussion of chapter 6 will know I regard the validity of this assertion as questionable.

Bauckham now asks in chapter 7 if we can go “further than this” and see if there is evidence that the gospel of Mark is narrated from Peter’s personal perspective, and to what extent Peter appears as an individual and not just as a representative of the Twelve. Continue reading “Bauckham’s Jesus and the Eyewitnesses. Chapter 7”

6. Eyewitnesses “from the Beginning”

On page 114 Bauckham writes:

If the Gospels embody eyewitness testimony, then some at least of the eyewitnesses must have been able to testify not just to particular episodes of particular sayings of Jesus but to the whole course of Jesus’ story. Broadly the four Gospels agree on this scope of this story: it begins with John the Baptist and it ends with the resurrection appearances.

1. First of all Bauckham has not yet established (merely hypothesised) that the gospels were the result of any “eyewitness” reports — after 5 chapters he has yet to point to a single item of evidence to justify this assertion;
2. Secondly, Bauckham is guilty of limiting his study to the canonical gospels exclusively when we know that there were other gospels and these 4 were preserved because of their “orthodox” status and frequently heavily redacted over the years — compare the additional ending of Mark after 16:8 to make it conform to the “broad scope” of other gospels;
3. Thirdly, it is perhaps debatable to assert that the four gospels broadly agree: John has the temple cleansing — a singular event — at the beginning, not the end, of the story; some gospels have the resurrection appearances in Galilee and others in Jerusalem; Mark has a secretive Jesus who hides his identity while John has one proclaiming his divinity at every opportunity; Continue reading “Bauckham’s Jesus and the Eyewitnesses. Chapter 6”