How Accurate Are Eyewitnesses? Bauckham and the Eyewitnesses in the Light of Psychological Research (Richard Bauckham) (Critical Essay‪)‬

In his controversial 2006 publication Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, Richard Bauckham outlines his theory that accounts of Jesus' life and ministry that appear in the NT are eyewitness testimonies or very close to eyewitness testimonies. (1) In saying this, he opposes the generally accepted view of form critics that the Gospels are records of collective communal traditions that were in circulation in the early church for quite some time before they were written down, and that in the process of transmission and recording they were redacted to serve the theological purposes of the different communities from which they arose. (2) Based on this more generally accepted understanding, scholars who have looked at what we can know about the historical Jesus from the Gospels have generally decided that the answer is "not much" (3) Bauckham suggests that this is not so. Basing his premise on Samuel Byrskog's work on the historical methods of ancient historians such as Herodotus, Thucydides, and Tacitus, he asserts that historians of the time used eyewitness testimony as the preferred source of information for their histories and that the Gospel writers would have looked for eyewitnesses to the events that they recorded rather than simply recording community traditions. (4) He says that the eyewitnesses "remained the living and active guarantors of the traditions" in whose name they were transmitted, and that "[t]estimony offers us... a theological model for understanding the Gospels as the entirely appropriate means of access to the historical reality of Jesus."s He also argues that research into oral transmission shows that custodians of oral tradition are able to transmit large blocks of material very accurately over time. (6) Thus, Bauckham suggests that we can be (significantly) more confident than form critics suggest about the historicity of the Gospel accounts.