What They Beheld
Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony
by Richard Bauckham
Eerdmans, 2006
(538 pages, $32.00, hardcover; $26.00, paperback)
reviewed by Peter J. Scaer
Many of my conservative friends, pastors who stand squarely within the Church’s Great Tradition, no longer pay much attention to Biblical Scholarship. Some feel it is too esoteric. Others complain about its clinical, too technical nature. Still others feel as if they have been burned too often by its liberalism. As if the Jesus of scholarship is so far removed from the biblical Jesus as to be unrecognizable.
Rudolf Bultmann taught us that the real Jesus was irretrievably buried beneath layers of history, and that the Resurrection was an unknowable event. The Jesus Seminar took skepticism about our knowledge of Jesus to new heights (or depths), even as folks like Bart Ehrmann, who appears to take pleasure in enumerating perceived biblical errors, seem to get all the press.
Yet, perhaps, it’s time for another look. This past decade has witnessed an insurgency. Some of biblical scholarship’s most talked about books have been written by scholars who have largely supported, using the tools of their discipline, the accuracy of the Gospel accounts.
Insurgent Scholars
Richard Bauckham, a professor of New Testament at St. Andrew’s University in Scotland, launched the first salvo with God Crucified: Monotheism and Christology in the New Testament in 1999. This mighty little work contends that early Christians did indeed worship Christ as Lord (Yahweh), even as they maintained their belief in the one true God.
Next came N. T. Wright’s monumental Resurrection of the Son of God (2003) , which forcefully argues that the doctrine of the Resurrection is based on historical evidence, and Larry Hurtado’s powerful Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity (2003), which systematically contends that Christians worshiped Jesus as Lord and God from the very earliest times. More recently, the young but formidable Simon Gathercole has shown in The Pre-Existent Son (2006) that the Gospels do indeed portray Christ as the heavenly Son, sent by the Father to redeem humanity.
Now add another work by Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, in which the New Testament scholar suggests that the Gospels were indeed based on eye-witness accounts. The scholarly assumption has long been that the Gospels were written many years after the events they describe. Form critics such as Dibelius and Bultmann contended that the Gospels were products of a long evolutionary process. The stories of Jesus were told in isolated communities, and passed on in oral tradition.
These stories were shaped over time, and sometimes fabricated, in order to meet the needs of the community. Miracle stories were supposedly added in order to bring the Jewish faith to the larger Greco-Roman world. Other stories were greatly embellished to meet the needs of the Church. Hence, there is an unbridgeable divide between the historical Jesus and the Christ of faith.
Bauckham uses scholarship to undermine the old assumptions. He notes that too many scholars have relied on outdated models of oral tradition, and have succumbed to romantic notions of community creativity.
Peter J. Scaer is assistant professor of exegetical theology at Concordia Theological Seminary (www.ctsfw.edu) and is finishing a book titled The Lucan Passion and the Praiseworthy Death. ?The Glorious Dying of the Son? is adapted from a paper presented at the Concordia Exegetical Symposium held at Concordia Seminary in Ft. Wayne, Indiana, in January 2003.
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