Papias could, therefore, have checked his understanding of Jesus and the Gospels by hearing the testimonies of living disciples of Jesus-likely, he heard from those who heard the disciples directly. Papias, writing from the early 100s about an earlier time period, speaks about two living disciples of the Lord, Aristion and John the Elder. And these disciples served as eyewitness to Jesus. Actually, the Gospels were written while disciples of the Lord still lived. On this reading, the real history of Jesus lies underneath layers of additions made by story-tellers.īauckham challenges the notion that story-tellers developed traditions about Jesus for many years before the Gospels were written. The form-critical school assumed that the story of Jesus was told from generation to generation before, finally, the Gospels were written. Yet the account that I’ve been narrating contradicts the form-critical narrative so common in the 20th century. The answer seems to be that eyewitnesses reported these things and that the Gospel writers incorporated these reports into their writings. It stands to reason that Matthew has done the same.īut is this not plain upon reflection? Who else could have recorded Peter’s three-fold rejection of Jesus, if not Peter himself? And who could have heard Jesus praying in the garden when all the disciples had fallen asleep if not the mysterious figure who later loses his linen cloth and flees naked from the authorities (Mark 14:51–52)? And John’s Gospel also makes the claim to being an eyewitness account: “This is the disciple who is bearing witness about these things, and who has written these things, and we know that his testimony is true” (John 21:24). We know Luke went to eyewitnesses because of his introduction (Luke 1:1–4). This suggests that Mark used the eyewitness testimony of Peter to compose the Gospel of Mark. After Jesus, Peter is mentioned more times than any other named person in the Gospel according to Mark, and Peter’s name appears at the beginning and end of the Gospel (Mark 1:16 16:7 p. That eyewitness testimony lies behind the Gospels provides a clue not only to the historical transmission of the Gospel traditions about Jesus but also, as Richard Bauckham argues in Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, the theological mode of communication. The answer is that eyewitnesses of Jesus would commit their memories to writing to preserve the history of Jesus for future generations.

How would later generations hear the story of Jesus? Yet the disciples of Jesus, although numbered in the hundreds, eventually would die out. And Christian communities sprung up across the Empire (and beyond). The apostle Paul began writing letters to churches about two decades after the death of Jesus. Christianity from its start was a bookish religion.

Jesus and the eyewitnesses