Bauckham's new chapter on the matter in a certain sense marks the crescendo for his sustained critiques of both form and redaction criticism.Ĭhapters 19 and 20 are best situated within this sustained critique.

This form-critical understanding of course was the foundation for the decision of redaction critics to treat each gospel as embodying the Geistof distinct Christian communities, an understanding that Bauckham had already subjected to fatal critique in his 1998 edited volume, The Gospel for All Christians. Bauckham had already argued in the first edition that the relevant data simply could not confirm but in fact demonstrably refuted form criticism's understanding of the Jesus tradition as circulating predominantly if not exclusively among now-unknown figures who should be understood in terms of a Christian Volk. This legacy is precisely what Bauckham challenges in chapter 21, and this confirmation of form criticism's end is a fitting end for the second edition. The legacy of form criticism has rendered New Testament scholars almost allergic to the proposition that when discussing the Jesus tradition we can identify named tradents through our data. Jesus and the Eyewitnessesexemplifies such a movement.Ī disciplinary resistance to thinking in terms of real, concrete persons is on display among the critics to whom Bauckham responds in each chapter. It becomes history when we move from the study of texts to the study of people: real, concrete, even if now deceased people.

As is the case with probably most New Testament scholars, many of his critics received primary training in the analysis and interpretation of texts, but as much as such work might constitute a necessary antecedent to history, it remains something that is not quite history. Bauckham's primary training is as a historian, and it is as a historian that he writes. Bauckham's frustration with such failure is at times quite palpable. In large part, this consists of Bauckham demonstrating that his critics had failed to apprehend his arguments. The final three chapters are wholly new material: 19, 'Eyewitnesses in Mark (Revisited)' 20, 'Who Was the Beloved Disciple? (Continued)' 21, 'The End of Form Criticism (Confirmed).' This review will focus its limited word count upon this new material.Įach new chapter responds in main to criticisms of the first edition. The first eighteen chapters reproduce the entirety of the first edition, without change and retaining the original pagination. This volume is the second edition of Bauckham's highly influential 2006 work, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses.

Jesus and the eyewitnesses