The Authenticity of the Apostolic Eyewitness in the New Testament with Professor Richard Bauckham

Richard Bauckham's first session at the public lecture held at Laidlaw's Henderson campus on Thursday 7 August 2014.

[@davidarcudi230]

There are only four Inspired Gospels because they truly were written by Mathew Mark Luke and John. I came to The Faith at 22 based on scholarship. This professor gets it right.

[@VIV-Official]

lol

[@therottingstench]

@@VIV-Official fortnite hamburger

[@michaelbrickley2443]

One thing for sure, once you’ve met the real Jesus thru the power of the Holy Spirit, you can be sure of their truth and not be worried about the 100% accuracy or the discrepancies that skeptics love to point to. Shalom Aleichem

[@michaelbrickley2443]

@@VIV-Official skeptic? Or troll?

[@VIV-Official]

@@michaelbrickley2443 neither

[@markspassion2064]

Dr. Richard Bauckham has made a valuable contribution to our understanding of the origin of the written Gospels. The concepts about Mark, Matthew and Luke that I learned while studying for my MDiv degree left me with as many questions as answers. Then, in 2006 when I ran across Bauckham's book, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, it was like someone handed me a golden key that opened up the windows. The eyewitness testimony was there to be beheld, if only we understood how it was passed from Peter to Mark and thus to Matthew and Luke.If you would like more on this topic, you may wish to read my historical novel, Mark's Passion, which tells the story of Mark the Evangelist and the challenges he faced as he put the Gospel in writing. Gene Vanderzanden, author of Mark's Passion.

[@peachjwp]

This is a thoughtful critical analysis of Form Criticism of the Gospels. Form critics treat the Gospels as folk literature. That is to say events of Jesus' life were simply passed down by the early faith community with little regard to historical accuracy. In contrast Dr. Bauckham reveals a different view of how oral tradition may operate, based on contemporary research, than the original form critics in the 1920's presumed.

[@jetlinux]

It’s interesting when reading the critics and looking at what the actual evidence is and separating the facts from their various theories. I’ve found Richard Bauckham’s books extremely helpful in understanding the weaknesses of the critics and the strength of the eyewitness accounts.

[@jetlinux]

Reminds me of evolution, where man is supposed to have arisen from a primitive life form with all these supposed transitional forms that no one is able to locate except in the imagination of those who put forth the theory. Thank you Dr Bauckham for researching and enlightening many of us with the weaknesses of the form critics theory.

[@terryjones8471]

Evolutionary theory is fact and IS visible at the genetic level. I spent 35 years of my working life cloning genes and analysing gene expression. My work would have been impossible if I hadn't based my experimental design on evolutionary 'theory'..... The privilege in it is thinking God's thoughts after him - what we can see in nature cannot just be wished away but is a part of this wonderful world we live in determined by the Mind of God!

[@patrickpittorino7032]

Yes I think evolution is real. Look at all of the dog species around now and we can see it in practice. What I cannot see any evidence of is a dog turning into a cat because it eats a lot of tuna. Show me evidence of any animal jumping to a new species and then perhaps you have a case that man was descended from a fish that got stranded on land. Ps not a scientist but not an idiot either.

[@paulallenscards]

I’ve noticed a typo in your comment. You wrote “no one is able” when you ought to have written “I am not able”

[@paxnorth7304]

@@terryjones8471 Well, emergent 'fact' surely. And just as Newton laid the grounds for and gave way to Einstein (without invalidating Newton) likely many expansions of this theory and framework will emerge over the coming centuries, and add to our dim appreciation of the love and works of our Maker

[@chriswilcocks8485]

Some good content. He puts a lot of trust in papias who was not considered by some to be a trustworthy witness.

[@thiccmcchicken550]

Maybe some modern scholars but general I don’t think the arguments made against Papias are that good

[@retribution999]

The Gnostics and mystics knew and saw, they didn't need theological detective work and scholarship which will never be able to prise open the door to the divine.

[@retribution999]

Why would they care? They thought the world would end within their lifetime.

[@kenbomar375]

Is there someone among those critically analyzing these works who can do it without resorting to adjectives that indicate bias. Please allow me to conclude my own opinions rather than suggesting that i should follow yours. Let the arguments stand or fall on their own merits.

[@nutellasandwhich3532]

check out the channel HeIsSailing. he's critically analyzing the book in its entirety

[@rursus8354]

Yes, I found one after years of searching. Here: kzbin.info/door/VwCY48hLPbFbUw-gj6DOBA

[@TheWolfgangfritz]

It's a question of "authority". If Jesus was "God in the flesh", and if he in fact really rose from the dead, he then has the authority to be believed. "I am THE WAY, THE TRUTH AND THE LIFE"! He apparently said. So he was either a liar, a lunatic or he was LORD! C. S. Lewis had said. So it's up to us to try to make sense of this. Did God have a redemptive purpose since time immemorial? Or is all of this man made nonsense. Its up to us to figure this out. Is there a holy almighty god who cannot have fellowship with sinful mankind on man's terms and therefore his intervention is required. It's a huge topic. As for your opinions having equal status, I'm afraid we lose out because all we are is sinful, and morally corrupt. We do not have a "divine spark" within us (that's a Buddhist concept which is not found in Judeo-Christian teachings), we are dead spiritually and need a "savior". So "our opinions" don't "cut it".

[@chriswilcocks8485]

Richard has good content but sadly he is not an accomplished presenter. See his discussion on u tube with bart ehrman. Whatever you think of bart. He can put his point across

[@VIV-Official]

Totally true. This is why everyone should buy his books.

[@michaelbrickley2443]

@@VIV-Official buy whose books? Evil Bart?

[@retribution999]

The truth is that no one really knows what Jesus actually said. I put my money on the Gospel of Thomas as being most authentic.

[@DeepJiesel]

You gotta be kidding. Nearly all sayings in the gospel of Thomas are found in the canonic gospels, and the misogynistic ending is clearly not of Jesus but gnostic.

[@retribution999]

@@DeepJiesel Jesus was Gnostic

[@DeepJiesel]

@@retribution999 LOL!

[@gordonblanchard8003]

Richard keeps looking skyward looking for guidance.

[@Johlibaptist]

Yes, he does.

[@gergelybakos2159]

Great lecture, meticulous schoralship.

[@vejeke]

*There is not a single eyewitness account of Jesus' life.* Flavius Josephus was not even born when Jesus was already dead. Paul did not give a personal testimony of Jesus' life and there is no evidence in the Pauline epistles to suggest that he met Jesus during his earthly life. The authors of the gospels do not identify themselves or claim to be eyewitnesses. They wrote in the third person except when the author of Luke says in the first person that what he is going to do is to tell what others have told him. *eyewitness* a person who has seen something happen and can give a first-hand description of it. *hearsay* information received from other people which cannot be substantiated. *There is not a single eyewitness account of Jesus' life.* That is a *fact* that most Christians either ignore or deny.

[@keng8894]

Multiple independent sources corroborating the events of Jesus are more reliable than eyewitnesses who could have been biased in either direction. Plenty of people claim to have eyewitness accounts of many fantastic events, but the inability to corroborate them leaves those claims flat. Anyways, there are claimed eyewitness accounts such as the blatant one in Gospel of John or the traditional belief that Matthew’s writings inspired the Gospel of the same name. Anyways, it’s not up for debate that Jesus existed, only the miraculous elements of his life. Paul definitely does add some credence to the miracles aspect though

[@Thomas-lu8mp]

-John the elder who's writing is dated to the late 1st century testifies on the authorship of Mark -Papias writing who's writhing is dated to the early 2nd century testifies on the authorship of Mark, Matthew, and John -Clement of Alexandria who's who's writing is dated to 200 AD testifies to the authorship of all 4 Gospels St.Irenenaes (in against Heresies) who's writing is dated to 174-189 he testifies to the author ship of Mark Mathew Luke and John -The Acts of Peter and the 12 dated to about 200 AD seem to tell us that the beloved diciple whom near the end of the gospel according to John is stated to be the one writing John is John. -Theophilus of Antioch whose writing is dated to 180 AD testifies to the authorship of John -Polycrates whose writing is dated to the 190 AD says testifies to the authorship of John Apollinaris whose writing is dated 175 AD testifies to the authorship of Mathew Acts of John which is dated between 150-200 AD testifies to the authorship of John -The Muratorian fragments dated to the late 2 century testify to the authorship of Luke and John -Ptolemy dated to 150-175 AD testifies on the authorship of John -I believe Tertulian whose writing is dated to 200 AD testifies to the authorship of Mathew. Mark, Luke, and John Now there are more ancient sources but I want to adress your point on the Gospel authors supposedly not claiming to be Eyewitnesses and writing in 3 person. Firstly John near the end (the last few verses) he seems to tell us that a Diciple of Jesus wrote John. Even if the Gospels didn't testify to be Eyewitness accounts that doesn't mean they aren't, in the documents we have that existed around the time of the Gospels according to Mathew, Luke, Mark, and John usually don't have the name of the author in their main body of writing, they usually had external identifiers. And regarding the writers writing in third person, that was very common at that time, we see this in numerous ancient texts. It's also unlikely the Gospels would have been circulating around without names. Plus all the manuscripts that we have (of Mark, Mathew, Luke, and John) that have the names of the writers say the name of the person that the writing is attributed to. Now some may try to say the writers were illiterate, but Mathew was a trained and educated tax collector so he would have likely had to keep Greek records for Rome. So he probably knew Greek, Mark was the Greek interpreter and scribe of Peter so he probbably would have known Greek, Luke was a Greek Physician so he may of known Greek, and the Dead sea Scrolls show us that Jewish girls were encouraged to learn to learn Greek, and girls at that time didn't receive the best education so imagine how much more they did for boys. Even if the writers didn't know Greek they could have just saved money to hire a scribe.

[@vejeke]

@@Thomas-lu8mp _"-John the elder who's writing is dated to the late 1st century testifies on the authorship of Mark"_ We do not have the writings of John the elder, not even the writings of the person from whom we know of his existence (Papias). What we have are the third and fourth century texts of people who said that Papias said that John the elder said... The text that in the second half of the second century began to be called the Gospel of Mark is a Greek text, written anonymously, in the third person and which ends as if it were a story in all the oldest copies available to us. I can go on and on. I have heard and read practically everything that the apologists (whose only interest is to defend their religious beliefs rather than the truth) and bible scholars like Richard Bauckham have said about it. I have double checked every claim they have made. There is not a single eyewitness account of Jesus' life. Literally all we know about the guy is hearsay.

[@DeepJiesel]

Paul said himself that he never met Jesus in person. That's your first straw man. Of course information from 2,000 years ago is mostly hearsay. Just as well, no one has found the remains of Hannibal's elephants. Oh, and no one has any written record from Homer himself... Or from Platon, Aristotle, Thukydides ... I could go on. With your approach, you can throw nearly all of ancient history in the bin.

[@edwardtbabinski]

Bauckham, a once born Christian, raised Anglican, stayed Anglican, and has been attempting ever since to discover ways to defend whatever naive, narrow, and comforting theological views he first fell in love with at his mother's knee or his clergyman's knee. His sermons which were posted on his personal website are repetitive and boring, hypnotic repetition, drumming ideas into the ground, which makes me wonder just how self-hypnotized he has been by his childhood religious ideas, the very sound of such theological sayings and terms, which makes him feel that they mean so much more than any other religion's ideas, or even more than secular ideas of tolerance, freedom, equality, and common sense. I like his love of his fellow man and of the planet, but lots of people share such love in many religions and even non-religions. But Bauckham is unwilling to state outright that they have as great a chance at heaven as "Christians" do. The Gospel writers were eyewitnesses? In the earliest Gospel strata we have is Mark (as Bauckham agrees) and Q. But the message of Jesus' death and resurrection was not central to Q. While Mark ends merely with the tale of an empty tomb, and no post-resurrection appearance stories. I guess Mark thought those stories of "Peter" [sic] were not worth incorporating. In the three later Gospels is where we see stories of Jesus' post-resurrection appearances and even a growth in the number of alleged words and sermons delivered by the post-resurrected Jesus, from Matthew (some sentences, but more than in Mark which had none) to Luke (tremendous growth, along with a bodily ascension tale) and John (also a lot of words given the added ending to John): edward-t-babinski.blogspot.com/2010/03/word-about-growing-words-of-resurrected.html One might add the late addition of alleged words spoken by the post-resurrected Jesus to the end of the Gospel of Mark, based apparently on those other later additions in Matthew and Luke-Acts. Bauckham's mathematical ability is as questionable as his reasoning. Prof. Goldacre and his blog commentators pointed out a statistical error Bauckham made when calculating the frequency of some names, fascinating little read: ntweblog.blogspot.com/2011/03/how-likely-is-it-that-jesus-sisters.html To which I would add that based on the list of names of Jews living in Jewish communities scattered throughout the whole Roman Empire there is the question of how quickly or slowly the frequencies of such names changed each century and in each location. Some names maintained a relatively stable frequency over a long period of time in specific locations, from 330 BCE to 200 CE, a 530 year period. For instance, one report said we possess 247 names of Palestinian females from the 530 year period just mentioned. That's on average only 2.1 names per year that we know about during a 530 year period. We also know that during this 530 year period the names of Mary and Salome remained among the most popular, and scholars have even supposed that the popularity of Mary and Salome may be due to their being the same names of members of the famed Hasmonean royal house that ruled the "holy" land after the Greek overlords were kicked out. So anyone familiar with the long popularity enjoyed by some names in Palestine would be likely to include them in their story. And as one reviewer summed things up: Many will remain unconvinced by the alternative model of a “Formal Controlled Tradition” that Bauckham proposes in this book... The evidence fails to sustain Bauckham’s hypothesis of a fixed body of Jesus tradition formulated by the Twelve in Jerusalem and mediated directly to the author of Mark through the apostolic preaching of Peter. Without accepting Bauckham’s dubious claim that Peter’s appearance at the beginning and end of Mark represents a literary device for identifying the work’s authoritative witness, it is very difficult to affirm the other alleged indication of the author’s reliance on Peter’s testimony, which are ambiguous at best. Equally questionable are the historical conclusions Backham draws from Paul’s Letters about the formal transmission of Jesus traditions. The level of institutionalization thus ascribed to the Jesus movement in the earliest stages of its development strains credibility. Likewise, Bauckham’s hypothesis about the Beloved Disciple as the eyewitness author of the Fourth Gospel will not convince many. Often resting on unproven assumptions, the argument frequently invokes highly conjectural explanations of textual evidence that are not easily affirmed. For examples, most will find fanciful the attempt to account for the infrequency and obscurity of references to the Beloved Disciples by appealing to the author’s need to establish his credibility as a perceptive disciple before disclosing his identity as the actual author of the Gospel. Even if we were to accept as probable many of the conclusions Bauckham draws from the Gospels, there still remains a larger question that weakens the argument of the book. If it is true that the Evangelists attached such importance to eyewitness testimony, then why are indications of this not more obvious and explicit? In response, Bauckham claims that ancient readers would have expected the Gospels to have eyewitness sources and so would have been alert to the subtle indications provided by the text. This explanation ascribes to the Evangelists and their readers a full measure of literary sophistication and an informed familiarity with the canons of Greco-Roman historiography. But this seems to far exceed what we can claim to know about the first eyewitnesses and those who listened to their testimony. [Dean Bechard of the Pontifico Instituto Biblico, Rome-final paragraph of his review of Richard Bauckham’s, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses. Review published in Biblica, v.90, fasc.1, 2009, p. 126-129.]

[@edwardtbabinski]

It is an unproven assumption that Mark's beginning and ending were lost. Mark starts out fine, and also ends as one might expect based on the author's negative views of how thick headed the apostles were, including the women. It is far more likely that Matthew and Luke added beginnings and endings to Mark than that Mark's was lost, in a similar fashion a popular movie gets sequels and prequels added to it to flesh out the story more.

[@edwardtbabinski]

"The early church" was not as monolithic as you suppose, and Mark certainly seems to portray Jesus as receiving a special calling and the spirit at his baptism, not at his conception.

[@thrutch599]

+Edward T. Babinski It would seem that a strong bias permeates your writing, as well. Perhaps the problem is not our biases, but what evidence we allow to inform them.

[@thrutch599]

+Edward T. Babinski Isn't Q intended to be primarily a collection of sayings, by the way? And surely you are aware that Mark is not the earliest tradition we have about Jesus.

[@thrutch599]

+Edward T. Babinski 1 Corinthians, Galatians, 1 John, and 2nd Peter all shed light on the early understanding of the eyewitnesses. I would argue the latter do so regardless of their authenticity. But hey man, you've gotta do what you've gotta do. Obviously you've spent a lot of time thinking about this.

[@marklim6452]

I just wasted an hour of my life.

[@pantherbane78]

Is that your fault or his?

[@rursus8354]

OK, so he succeeded to prove that the personage in the Gospels existed, and now he claims that every reason to be critical to some events described becomes illicit. Not explicitly, but implicitly he does. And so the resurrection must have occurred according to what the Gospels say ... Yeah, and Jesus walked on water, was born by a virgin and did everything that the Gospels literally claims, including the contradicting ones. Stupid!

[@davidarcudi230]

You can't prove a contradiction