Eyewitnesses And Servants Of The Word

Owing to the influence of [Rudolf] Bultmann, it has become a "basic article of belief" with most form critics that "the Gospel tradition owed the form in which it reached our evangelists almost entirely to community use and its demands, and hardly at all to direct intervention or modification on the part of eye-witnesses." Appeals to eyewitnesses found in the Gospels, and especially the epistles, usually have been understood as apologetic fictions.

To be sure, some of the earliest form critics - most notably Vincent Taylor and Martin Dibelius - diverged from the Bultmannian perspective and insisted that the disciples of Jesus must have played some regulating role in the oral transmission of the Jesus tradition....

Vincent Taylor even more emphatically states the case in his now-famous words: "It is on this question of eyewitnesses that Form-Criticism [e.g., as approached by Bultmann and company] presents a very vulnerable front. If the Form-Critics are right, the disciples must have been translated to heaven immediately after the Resurrection. As Bultmann sees it, the primitive community exists in vacuo, cut off from its founders by the walls of an inexplicable ignorance. Like Robinson Crusoe it must do the best it can. Unable to turn to anyone for information, it must invent situations for the words of Jesus, and put into his lips sayings which personal memory cannot check....However disturbing to the smooth working of theories, the influence of eyewitnesses on the formation of the tradition cannot possibly be ignored. The one hundred and twenty at Pentecost did not go into permanent retreat; for at least a generation they moved among the young Palestinian communities, and through preaching and fellowship their recollections were at the disposal of those who sought information....When all qualifications have been made, the presence of personal testimony is an element in the formative process which it is folly to ignore"...

The last several decades have seen a renewed emphasis on the need to understand Jesus and early Christianity within a first-century Jewish context. In this light, it is significant to note that - beginning with its Scriptures - the Jewish tradition as a whole put strong emphasis on the role of eyewitnesses. Only by appealing to credible eyewitnesses could one certify a claim as factual (e.g., Jer. 32:10, 12; Ruth 4:9-11; Isa. 8:2). Correlatively, bearing false witness was considered a major crime in ancient Judaism. Indeed, this was one of the explicit prohibitions of the ten primary stipulations of the Sinai covenant (Exod. 20:16). The Jewish law of multiple witnesses reflects the life-or-death importance of this command (Deut. 17:6-7; Num. 35:30).

It seems that this emphasis on the importance of eyewitnesses was quite explicitly carried over into the early church. The Sinai principle regarding multiple witnesses was retained (Mark 14:56, 59; John 5:31-32; Heb. 10:28) and made the basis of church discipline (Matt. 18:16; 2 Cor. 13:1; 1 Tim. 5:19). More broadly, the themes of bearing witness, giving a true testimony, and making a true confession are ubiquitous in the tradition of the early church (e.g., Matt. 10:18; Mark 6:11; 13:9-13; Luke 1:1-2; 9:5; 21:12-13; 22:71; John 1:7-8, 15, 19, 32, 34; 3:26, 28; 5:32; Acts 1:8, 22; 2:32; 3:15; 5:32; 10:37-41; 13:31; 22:15, 18; 23:11; 26:16; Rom. 1:9; 1 Cor. 1:6; 15:6; 2 Cor. 1:23; Phil. 1:8; 1 Thess. 2:5, 10; 1 Tim. 6:12-13; 2 Tim. 2:2; 1 Pet. 5:1; 2 Pet. 1:16; 1 John 5:6-11; Rev. 1:5; 2:13; 3:14; 6:9; 11:3; 17:6). As Robert Stein observes, the sheer pervasiveness of these themes in the early church testifies to "the high regard in which eyewitness testimony was held."

More specifically, certain key individuals are singled out in the New Testament for their roles as faithful witnesses, teachers, and preservers of the Jesus tradition, for example, Peter, James, and John, as well as James the brother of Jesus (e.g., Acts 1:15, 21-22; 2:14, 42; 3:1-11; 4:13, 19; 5:1-10, 15, 29; 8:14; 12:2; 1 Cor. 15:1-8; Gal. 2:9; Eph. 2:20). This emphasis on key individuals is not only consistent with ancient Judaism, but it is precisely what we should expect, given what we have learned from orality studies about the central role individual tradents play in orally dominant cultures.

It is difficult to explain this common appeal to eyewitness testimony in the New Testament if it is not rooted in historical fact. It seems we must accept as fact that "Jesus gathered around himself a group of committed disciples, some of whom were also prominent in the early church." This conclusion would suggest that mechanisms were in place in the early church that would naturally limit the amount of legendary material that was introduced into the Jesus tradition....

For many scholars, it seems that we have a very convincing reason for not accepting the early Jesus tradition as rooted in eyewitness recollection - namely the ubiquitous presence of supernatural and miraculous elements. Long ago, Julius Wellhausen made this often hidden presupposition quite explicit when he wrote, "The miracle stories in the form in which they are presented in Mark are most resistant to being attributed to the most intimate disciples of Jesus," and therefore "none of them may come from an eyewitness." Here, we submit, a historical decision about eyewitness influence upon the Jesus tradition is being decisively influenced by a metaphysical conviction about the possibility of supernatural occurrences....

Building upon some of the insights of [Samuel] Byrskog, [Richard] Bauckham offers several additional lines of evidence for the presence and importance of eyewitness testimony in the early church....

Bauckham has delivered a number of papers on this topic in recent years and has just released a full-scale study on the phenomenon of eyewitness testimony in the early Jesus tradition, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), that will likely serve as a landmark statement on this topic. Given that we were in the later stages of the publication process when the book was released, we were unable to incorporate it within the body of the text....

In conclusion, given that the first-century Jewish world of the pre-Gospel oral Jesus tradition highly valued eyewitness testimony, we find it far more plausible that the early church valued and preserved the essence of the personal remembrances of Jesus's original disciples than that they neglected the actual eyewitnesses, only to manufacture fabricated testimonies at a later date. At the very least, we can now conclude that the standard form-critical arguments against the presence of a significant amount of eyewitness testimony within the oral Jesus tradition are deeply flawed. (Paul Eddy and Gregory Boyd, The Jesus Legend [Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 2007], pp. 269-270, n. 2 on p. 270, 286-287, 290, n. 78 on p. 290, 291)