Eyewitness Testimony In Ancient Sources

"The ancient historians - such as Thucydides, Polybius, Josephus, and Tacitus - were convinced that true history could be written only while events were still within living memory, and they valued as their sources the oral reports of direct experience of the events by involved participants in them. Ideally, the historian himself should have been a participant in the events he narrates - as, for example, Xenophon, Thucydides, and Josephus were - but, since he could not have been at all the events he recounts or in all the places he describes, the historian had also to rely on eyewitnesses whose living voices he could hear and whom he could question himself...Of course, not all historians lived up to these ideals, and most employed oral traditions and written sources at least to supplement their own knowledge of the events and the reports of other eyewitnesses. But the standards set by Thucydides and Polybius were historiographic best practice, to which other historians aspired or at least paid lip-service. Good historians were highly critical of those who relied largely on written sources. That some historians pretended to firsthand knowledge they did not really have is backhanded support for the acknowledged necessity of eyewitness testimony in historiography....What mattered to Papias, as a collector and would-be recorder of Gospel traditions, was that there were eyewitnesses, some still around, and access to them through brief and verifiable channels of named informants. It is natural to suppose that those who were writing Gospels (our canonical Gospels) at the time of which Papias speaks would have gone about their task similarly, as indeed the preface to Luke's Gospel confirms. For the purpose of recording Gospel traditions in writing, Evangelists would have gone either to eyewitnesses or to the most reliable sources that had direct personal links with the eyewitnesses. Collective tradition as such would not have been the preferred source....In the present chapter we have shown that three of the Gospels - those of Mark, Luke, and John - make use of the historiographic principle that the most authoritative eyewitness is one who was present at the events narrated from their beginning to their end and can therefore vouch for the overall shape of the story as well as for specific key events....these three Gospels use the literary device we have called the inclusio of eyewitness testimony. This is a convention also deployed in two later Greek biographies, by Lucian and Porphyry, which may lend further weight to the identification of the inclusio of eyewitness testimony in three of the Gospels....Thus, contrary to first impressions, with which most Gospels scholars have been content, the Gospels do have their own literary ways of indicating their eyewitness sources. If it be asked why these are not more obvious and explicit in our eyes, we should note that most ancient readers or hearers of these works, unlike scholars of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, would have expected them to have eyewitness sources, and that those readers or hearers to whom the identity of the eyewitnesses was important would have been alert to the indications the Gospels actually provide....Historians in antiquity did not name their eyewitness sources as a matter of course, but in specific cases they did...In their close relationship to eyewitness testimony the Gospels conform to the best practice of ancient historiography." (Richard Bauckham, Jesus And The Eyewitnesses [Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 2006], pp. 8-9, 34, 146-147, n. 35 on p. 304, 310)