Jesus and the Eyewitnesses by Richard Bauckham

By contrast, when you examine the names of characters from the Gnostic Gospels, other than those found in the canonical Gospels, they are invariably names that were uncommon in first-century Palestine. Essentially, he argues that when you combine all the names from the four Gospels and the book of Acts, the ten most commonly used names are strikingly similar to the top ten names of this larger database of some three thousand names from this same time and place.

One fascinating aspect of Bauckham’s work relates to his use of Tal Ilan’s database of Palestinian Jewish names. This truth to the context-correspondence to the historical context at the time in which the stories are set-is a key method that Gospel scholars have neglected. And if you decide that a witness is trustworthy, then you trust them. But what you can do is assess witnesses as either trustworthy or untrustworthy.

The whole point of a witness is that they tell you something you don’t know yourself.

You see, the term “testimony” of course implies that we can’t actually verify independently everything that the witness says. And that I think is one of the most important historical methods of confirming testimony. So that’s one way of verifying that the Gospels are credible from that geographical-historical context that they claim to be about. The gospels are actually full of all kinds of little detail about people and places, and all kinds of stuff about the historical context in which the stories take place. Not long after Jesus and the Eyewitnesses was first released, we had the opportunity to interview Bauckham on White Horse Inn and in that conversation, he laid out his overall approach: In his foreword to this second edition, Cambridge scholar Simon Gathercole acknowledges the importance of Bauckham’s original work in the world of New Testament scholar-ship: “Whenever I have been asked over the past ten years what the most significant recent books in my discipline are, I have invariably made mention of this book” (xi). Last spring, Eerdmans released a new edition with three completely new chapters, a new preface and an updated bibliography. It has been over a decade since Richard Bauckham’s critically acclaimed book Jesus and the Eyewitnesses was first published.

Jesus and the Eyewitnesses by Richard Bauckham