The Gospels, it has been convincingly argued, came from one eyewit-ness (John) and from three other evangelists who took much of their material from eyewitnesses. Mark drew especially on Simon Peter.
Luke (as well as drawing on Mark’s Gospel and Q or Quelle (source), a collection of Jesus’ sayings also used by Matthew) relied on a number of eyewitnesses (Luke 1: 2), who included women (Luke 8:
1–3). Matthew drew on eyewitnesses, as well as on Mark and
3For details on other (minor) sources for the life of Jesus (e.g. the letters of the apostle Paul and the work of Flavius Josephus) see G. O’Collins, Christology:
A Biblical, Historical, and Systematic Study of Jesus (2nd edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 2–4. On the non-canonical or ‘apocryphal’ Gospels, which add little or no reliable data and none of which is an authentic, first-century work, see C. S. Keener, The Historical Jesus of the Gospels (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2009), 47–69.
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Q. Eyewitness testimony played a major role in the formation of all three Synoptic Gospels (Mark, Matthew, and Luke).4
The four Gospel portraits of Jesus can be classified as more repre-sentational and historical (Mark, Matthew, and Luke), or more theological, impressionistic, and concerned to develop characteristic effects produced by Jesus (John). The first three evangelists here and there modify the traditions derived from eyewitness testimony to Jesus (e.g. the longer form of the Lord’s Prayer found in Matt. 6: 9–13), occasionally project back into the lifetime of Jesus traditions which come from the post-Easter period (e.g. Matt. 18: 20), and are largely responsible for the contexts in which they place the sayings and doings of Jesus. Yet their testimony provides reliable access to the history of what Jesus said, did, and suffered. At the same time, these evangelists have their particular spiritual and theological messages; they are not to be reduced to mere compilers of traditions that they have drawn from eyewitnesses or otherwise inherited.
One of them, Luke, presses on to write a second volume, the Acts of the Apostles, in which he presents the presence and power of the risen Christ and the Holy Spirit in the mission and life of the early Church. Yet the Christians’ ongoing experience of the exalted Christ and his Spirit continued to depend upon the past history of Jesus and did not dissolve it. From the opening chapters of his Gospel to the end of Acts, Luke makes it clear that the history of Jesus was decisively important for the life and preaching of the Church. In his life, death, and resurrection, Jesus proved the source of salvation for the world and the basis of Christian identity (Acts 4: 10–12; 28: 31).
John’s Gospel emerged from decades of prayerful, theological contemplation, which took Luke’s work a stage further by merging two horizons: the memory of Jesus that the author recalled from a past which ended with Good Friday, Easter Sunday, and the appear-ances of the Risen One, and his continuing experience of the exalted Lord through to the closing years of the first century. In a lifelong process of understanding and interpretation, the author of the Fourth Gospel gained deeper insights into the meaning of the events
4 See R. Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2006). Mark, Matthew, and Luke are called ‘Synoptic Gospels’, because, when they are printed in parallel columns, one can see at a glance how they frequently match each other.
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in which he had participated, which had deeply formed him, and which he reflectively remembered. Like some wonderful modern paintings, his portrait of Jesus plays down some features in Jesus’
activity (e.g. the preaching of the kingdom, his parables, and the exorcisms) and develops other features (e.g. Jesus’ encounters with individuals, his questions, and his self-presentation). The master-piece which is the Fourth Gospel brings out what was to some extent implicit in the life of Jesus and displays for readers the deep truth about him.5
According to the standards of the ancient world, the four Gospels counted as biographies.6Even so, obvious limits should be recalled.
Unlike his near contemporary Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 bc), Jesus left no letters or personal documents that biographers could quote. The only time he was recalled as writing anything came when he ‘wrote with his finger on the ground’ (John 8: 6–8). This was in response to some scribes and Pharisees who had caught a woman in the act of adultery and wanted Jesus to agree to her being stoned.
According to several later manuscripts, Jesus wrote on the ground nothing about himself but ‘the sins of each of them’.7Jesus did not bequeath to his followers any written instructions, and he lived in almost total obscurity, except for the brief period of his public ministry. According to the testimony provided by the Synoptic Gospels, that ministry could have lasted as little as a year or eighteen months. John implies a period of at least three years. Even for the short span of the ministry, much of the chronological sequence of events (except for the baptism of Jesus at the start and his passion at the end) is, by and large, irretrievably lost. Moreover, the fact that explicitly and, for the most part, Jesus did not proclaim himself
5The terminology of ‘explicit’ (John) and ‘implicit’ (the Synoptic Gospels) Christology distinguishes between a clearly stated version of Christ’s divine identity and one that, for the most part, remains implicit. This distinction, which merely addresses the manner of saying something, is not equivalent to the distinction between high and low Christologies (which recognize or fail to recognize Christ’s divinity, respectively). A truly high Christology may remain (largely) implicit.
6See R. A. Burridge, What are the Gospels? A Comparison with Graeco-Roman Biography (2nd edn. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2004); and Keener, The Historical Jesus of the Gospels, 73–84.
7On the controversy over the woman caught in adultery, see Lincoln, Gospel According to John, 524–36.
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but the kingdom of God makes access to his interior life difficult. In any case the Gospels rarely mention his motives or deal with his states of mind. These sources make it difficult (yet not impossible) to penetrate his inner life. But they do allow us to reconstruct much of the message, activity, claims, and impact of Jesus in the final years of his life, as well as glimpsing every now and then his feelings and intentions (e.g.
Mark 3: 3; 6: 6; Luke 19: 41–4).8
In drawing on the Gospels, I use the widely accepted scheme of three stages in the transmission of testimony to Jesus’ words and deeds: the initial stage in his earthly life when his disciples and others listened to him, saw him in action, spoke about him, repeated to others his teaching, and began interpreting his identity and mission;
the handing on by word of mouth or in writing (including the use of notebooks) of testimony about him after his death and resurrection;
and the authorial work of the four evangelists later in the first century.
In sifting through the relevant texts in search of authentic sayings and doings of Jesus (stage one), we use at least five primary criteria developed by twentieth-century scholars: (1) embarrassment (what created difficulty for the early Church), (2) multiple attestation (material found in several independent traditions), (3) discontinuity (items that are not characteristic either of Judaism or early Christian-ity, or even of both), (4) coherence (what corresponds to items already established as authentic through other criteria), and (5) deadly opposition (that led to Jesus’ crucifixion). Secondary criteria include traces of Aramaic (especially in Mark’s Gospel) and details about the Palestinian environment and Jerusalem that we know from other sources and turn up in the Gospels (e.g. the pool with five porticoes in John 5: 2). Let us see how the primary criteria apply.
8 On the history of Jesus, see K. Bailey, The Middle-Eastern Jesus (London:
SPCK, 2008); J. H. Charlesworth, The Historical Jesus: An Essential Guide (Nash-ville: Abingdon Press, 2008); J. D. G. Dunn, Christianity in the Making, i: Jesus Remembered (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2003); P. R. Eddy and G. A. Boyd, The Jesus Legend: A Case for the Historical Reliability of the Synoptic Jesus Tradition (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2007); M. Hengel and A. M. Schwemmer, Geschichte der fru¨hen Christentums, i: Jesus und das Judentum (Tu¨bingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2007); Keener, The Historical Jesus of the Gospels; J. P. Meier, A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus, 3 vols. (New York: Doubleday, 1991–2001), 4th vol. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).
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As regards (1), some embarrassment was felt over the fact that Jesus submitted to baptism at the hands of John the Baptist. Along with its positive aspects, this act clashes with the Church’s tendency to keep John subordinated to Jesus and would have embarrassed early Chris-tians in any debates with those who remained disciples of John and did not move quickly to faith in Jesus (see Acts 19: 2–3, and the history of the Mandeans, a group faithful to John right down to the twenty-first century9). Moreover, different traditions in the New Testament (e.g. John 8: 46; Heb. 4: 15) witness to the conviction that Jesus led an utterly sinless life. How then could he have accepted
‘a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins’ (Mark 1: 4)? His baptism by John was a doubly embarrassing matter (e.g. Matt. 3: 14).
This embarrassment suggests that the followers of Jesus did not make up this episode: at the start of his ministry Jesus was baptized by John. (2) There is multiple witness for the conclusion that during his ministry Jesus, from the wider ranks of his disciples, called a core group of twelve and gave them some kind of authoritative office and leadership role. Mark attests the original call (3: 13–19) and subsequent trial mission of the Twelve (6: 7–13); Q reflects the existence of this core group (Matt. 19: 28 = Luke 22: 30). Then they are ‘in place’ as the key group to receive a foundational appearance of the risen Christ, a fact first attested by a preaching formula quoted by Paul (1 Cor. 15: 3–5), and subsequently narrated in various ways by the Easter chapters of the Gospels. In its own different and less than enthusiastic way, John’s Gospel confirms the existence of the Twelve (John 6: 71).10
(3) In his preaching Jesus persistently presented himself as the Son of Man, a title with a striking range of meanings. There was some Jewish background to Jesus’ Son of Man sayings (e.g. the Book of Ezekiel and Dan. 7: 13–14), but scarcely any follow-up in the emerging Church. The designation was not useful in preaching the good news, and does not appear in creedal or liturgical formulas (which pre-ferred the titles of ‘Christ’, ‘Lord’, and ‘Son (of God)’. It was too flexible and even vague, ranging from the mysterious, heavenly being in Daniel 7 to simply serving as a circumlocution for ‘I’ (e.g.
Matt. 8: 20 = Luke 9: 58). The discontinuity between Jesus’ frequent
9 On the Mandeans, K. Rudolph, ‘Mandaeism’, ABD iv. 500–2.
10 See Lincoln, Gospel According to John, 239.
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use of this designation and its almost total absence in the language of the early Church encourages us to conclude that the Son of Man sayings derive from ‘stage one’ and Jesus himself. (4) We find the parables of the lost coin and of the lost (prodigal) son in only one source, the Gospel of Luke (15: 8–32), but they correspond extremely well with Jesus’ special concern for sinners. That is attested by accounts of his eating with such people and by sayings criticizing him for doing so (e.g. Matt. 11: 19 = Luke 7: 34).11Hence we may confidently accept these parables as coming from Jesus himself. (5) The fifth criterion aims at excluding versions of Jesus which portray him simply as a teacher of Gnostic wisdom or as a wandering holy man. Such portraits cannot account for the deadly opposition on the part of religious authorities that led to his death. Why would anyone, whether Jewish priests or Roman prefect, want to do away with such a harmless character? One accounts for the opposition that built up against Jesus and led to his execution by recognizing that there was a historical core to the charges brought against him: of violating the Sabbath, working wonders through diabolic power, challenging purity regulations, acting as a false prophet, and even making blasphemous pretensions of being on a par with God and sharing the divine authority to forgive sins.
The five primary criteria help us to establish particular sayings and doings as authentically derived from Jesus. When I draw on the Gospels, I will indicate whether I judge that some passage testifies to what Jesus said or did at stage one, or whether the passage seems to reflect what a particular evangelist at stage three (and/or the tradition at stage two) understood about Jesus’ work and identity. Only occa-sionally will I stop to justify why I hold some saying or deed to have its historical origin in what Jesus said or did. But I will attribute to him only examples where such justification in possible.
Eyewitness testimony offers a more general argument for historical authenticity. Richard Bauckham (see n. 4 above) has argued persua-sively that the four Gospels provide a credible means of access to the historical Jesus, since they derive from the testimony of eyewitnesses (both major ones like Peter, the Twelve, Martha, and Mary of Bethany, and minor ones like Bartimaeus in Mark 10). For decades
11 On this verse, see J. A. Fitzmyer, The Gospel According to Luke1–X (New York: Doubleday, 1981), 680–1; J. Nolland, Luke1–9: 20 (Dallas: Word Books, 1989), 345–6.
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some or even many scholars imagined stage two to be a long process of anonymous, collective, and mainly oral transmission that sepa-rated the original witnesses from those who wrote the Gospels.
Bauckham points out that the period between Jesus and the final composition of the Gospels (stage three) was spanned by the continuing presence and testimony of those who had participated in the story of Jesus: namely, the original eyewitnesses. Until the final years of the first century, those authoritative, living sources continued to provide first-hand witness to Jesus.
Bauckham proposes that many of the named characters in the Gospels were eyewitnesses and were known in the circles in which the traditions about Jesus began to be transmitted. They included Mary Magdalene, Joanna (one of the particular sources for Luke), and Cleopas (of the Emmaus story in Luke 24). Some, like Jairus (Mark 5: 21–43) and Simon of Cyrene (Mark 15: 21), could well have remained eyewitness sources for specific stories. The Twelve were especially qualified to testify to the public history of Jesus, since they had participated in it from its early stages to the end and beyond (in the Easter appearances).
Bauckham produces plausible (internal and external) evidence to rehabilitate the case for Simon Peter being the major eyewitness source behind the Gospel of Mark. The naming of Peter creates an
‘inclusion’ which holds that Gospel together from 1: 16–18 right through to 16: 7. Readers can share the eyewitness perspective which the testimony of Peter embodied. Bauckham identifies the anonymous disciple of John 1: 35–40 with the beloved disciple of John 21: 24, the ideal witness to Jesus who was with him ‘from the beginning’ (John 15: 27). This establishes the major ‘inclusion’ in the Fourth Gospel, even though an ‘inclusion’ involving Peter is not abandoned. He is present from Chapter 1 to Chapter 21, yet within the wider involvement of the beloved disciple. That disciple spent hours with Jesus before Peter ever set eyes on Jesus (John 1: 35–42).
Bauckham makes a strong case for the author of the Fourth Gospel being the beloved disciple, who is not to be identified with John the son of Zebedee or any other member of the Twelve. He was an individual disciple, a close follower of Jesus, and not to be dissolved into a merely representative figure.
Bauckham defends all four Gospels as being close to eyewitness reports of the words and deeds of Jesus. Between the earthly story j e s u s t h e f u l l n e s s o f r e v e l a t i o n j 103
of Jesus (stage one) and the writing of the Gospels (stage three), the original eyewitnesses played a central and authoritative role in guiding the transmission of the traditions about Jesus (stage two).
Bauckham’s book should help put an end to the unfounded impres-sion that a long period of creative, collective development of the Jesus traditions preceded the work of the evangelists.
For many years one objection to the notion of a community
‘creatively’ making up Jesus traditions has struck me as persuasive.
Paul’s letters and the Acts of the Apostles indicate a vigorous contro-versy in early Christianity about the possible obligation of Gentile converts to practise the Jewish law. In particular, did male converts need to be circumcised? It would have been tempting to credit the earthly Jesus with some precise instructions in this area. Mark’s Gospel reports some pronouncements from Jesus about food laws and washing (Mark 7: 1–23) but simply nothing for or against the obligation of circumcision. Despite pressing interests in this matter, neither Mark nor the traditions on which he drew felt free to invent and attribute to Jesus some clear statement that circumcision was no longer obligatory.
Besides supporting the conclusion that the Gospels prove to be substantially reliable guides to the history of Jesus, or at least to the final years of that history, Bauckham’s landmark volume illuminates the obvious differences between the Synoptic Gospels and John. Not having been eyewitnesses themselves, the first three evangelists re-mained close to what the original eyewitnesses told them of the sayings and doings of Jesus. Mark, Matthew, and Luke allowed themselves only a small degree of creative interpretation. The Fourth Gospel, however, offered an extensively interpreted version of the story of Jesus. Through a more delineated plot, greater selectivity of the events recorded, and the fashioning of lengthy discourses and debates, this Gospel became a strongly reflective interpretation of Jesus’ mission and identity. That was the way in which one central eyewitness understood what he and others had personally experi-enced. When testifying to the history of Jesus in which he had participated so closely, the beloved disciple allowed himself a greater degree of interpretative appropriation precisely because he himself had been an eyewitness.
Finally, in putting the case for some reliable access to the historical Jesus through the Gospels, we should not neglect what has already been 104 j jesus the fullness of revelation
indicated about experience and interpretation (Chapter 3 above). The pursuit of the historical Jesus (stage one) should not lead us to foster the illusion that our research could yield some nuggets of original
‘facts’ about Jesus, historical data that somehow preceded all later beliefs, doctrinal interpretations, and affirmations about him. Human experience and, indeed, all personal knowledge are never like that. No one (and no instrument, not even the most sophisticated camera) can ever record and communicate the non-interpreted, unmediated ‘hard’
reality of somebody (or, for that matter, of something). Historically there never was a non-interpreted, ‘non-theological’ Jesus. Here, as elsewhere, there never was a ‘view from nowhere’, a ‘given’ that had not yet been interpreted. ‘Fact’ and interpretation are inseparable.
Right from their first encounters with him, the beloved disciple, Peter, Mary Magdalene, Joanna, and others among the first followers necessarily interpreted Jesus and their experience of him. When the evangelists came, decades later, to put the testimony and traditions into Gospel shape, they handled material in which, so to speak, the input from Jesus himself and various responses to him were inextri-cably intertwined. It cannot be otherwise with our human experience of a historical figure. Not even the most detailed oral reports from the very first meetings with someone can ever give us the ‘pure’ story of that person, free from any significance that becomes attached to him
Right from their first encounters with him, the beloved disciple, Peter, Mary Magdalene, Joanna, and others among the first followers necessarily interpreted Jesus and their experience of him. When the evangelists came, decades later, to put the testimony and traditions into Gospel shape, they handled material in which, so to speak, the input from Jesus himself and various responses to him were inextri-cably intertwined. It cannot be otherwise with our human experience of a historical figure. Not even the most detailed oral reports from the very first meetings with someone can ever give us the ‘pure’ story of that person, free from any significance that becomes attached to him