It has already been reviewed, by no less a reader than the Archbishop of Canterbury. And then there is this excellent multimedia treatment by Chris Tillig, with replies by the author. But we sally forth anyway...

Richard Bauckham is a NewTestament scholar retired from teaching at the University of St. Andrew’s, in Scotland. In this book, published in 2006 by Eerdmans, he argues that eyewitness accounts of various kinds underlie the Gospels. Matthew, Mark, and Luke, he posits, are collections of various materials, including eyewitness testimony relayed to the evangelists. Standing alone is the Gospel of John. Basing his thesis on a closely-argued analysis of the historical references to the writing of the Gospels, Bauckham concludes that John the Elder (not to be confused with John, one of the “Sons of Thunder”) composed the Gospel of John. This John, writing as the “Beloved Disciple,” created in his old age the spectacular account of the life of Christ that has inspired billions of people for two thousand years.

Convincing? Well, read the book. While I am not 100% convinced, I can’t say why, other than the habit of thinking of the Gospels in terms of the Documentary Hypothesis: Mark wrote first, after 70 AD, when the Temple was destroyed; MAtthew and Luke wrote around 80, and used Mark, a second unknown source of sayings they have in common beyond Mark, (called “Q” from the German for “source”—Quelle), plus their own particular materials; and finally, John, written after 90 by several hands.

Without dismantling the DH, Bauckham pushes back on the dating of the three synoptics. No problem. He also reminds us that Bishop John A. T. “Honest-to-God” Robinson (as my professor Reginald Fuller called him) shocked the New Testament world by arguing that John wrote well before the Temple’s fall, and that his Gospel contains early material, an argument which I accepted in my studies under Dr Fuller years ago.

But to go from there to accepting the Gospel as the creation of one disciple writing in his old age? What does it mean, in terms of my preaching and teaching, which I try—as must all preachers and teachers of the Word—to be as faithful to the Scriptures as I can be?

When I first became acquainted with Kenneth Bailey’s work (which Bauckham quotes extensively), I had to change signficantly the way I understood the parables (and I strongly recommend his books). Bailey argues at great length for the reliable oral transmission of gospel materials from Jesus‘ teaching to the texts.  But he discusses John much less than the other three Gospels.

If we are to accept that one writer, the BD, is at the origin of John’s Gospel, then we have to consider that several of the wonderful accounts in which Jesus is seen in private moments with someone—the Samaritan woman, the man born blind, Mary Magdalene in the Garden, Peter on the shore of Galilee, for example—were collected from others, and worked into the framework of the Gospel in that elliptical style characteristic of this text. Well, I suppose if we can and should accept Bailey’s thesis of the reliability of oral transmission, and the BD is a contemporary of these people, then it stands to reason that these are also eyewitness testimonies. With the distinctive Johannine stamp.

And then we have to ask what the difference is between the public teachings of Peter that underlie Mark’s Gospel (and I Peter), and the perspective of the BD? You will remember, Gentle Reader, how the BD always seems to get things right before old Peter. He even beats him to the tomb in a footrace (John 20:4)! As Bauckham points out, it means that there is an alternative source of Jesus materials that is as reliable historically as the Petrine materials.

To put it another way: it is of fundamental importance to me that we should emphasize the obvious, namely, that we are Christians and followers of Jesus for only one reason. That is that, in some sense or another, we trust the original disciples’ accounts, however we believe they are transmitted to us. Our faith is based on that trust. Our moral responsibilities as Jesus’ disciples rest on what they said. Without their testimony, our faith is null and void.

The Gospel of John was pushed to the bottom of the pile in terms of reliability by earlier New Testament scholars. Rudolf Bultmann, for instance, called it a “late Hellenistic romance” in his commentary, even re-ordering the gospel narrative, which to him seemed to have been mistakenly put together, as if its pages had been blown about by a breeze in the evangelist’s study. The work of many people since Bishop Robinson, and now Bauckham, have put John back on top.

So accepting the thesis of the BD’s eyewitness biography of Jesus, written by John the Elder, means that the theological point of view of the Gospel needs to be restored in its importance, as well. The German scholar Ernst Käsemann posited in his 1968 Theology of the New Testament that John’s theology is an antidote to the “early catholicism” of the Petrine school. The BD—a Lutheran? Time to rethink all that—and much much more.

Read Jesus and the Eyewitnesses for yourself, Gentle Reader, and see what you think. In any event, in its very careful approach to sources, close argumentation, accounting for other perspectives, and philosophical grounding, it is an antidote to a lot of the second-rate stuff filling the bookshelves in seminary libraries and clerics’ studies. Whether Bauckham is right or not, that alone is precious.

And there is the word of the BD himself: “These things are written that you might believe…” (John 20:21). So—do I? Believe him? Do you?