The problem of ‘eyewitness’ testimony
Bauckham (2006) argues that all the Gospels incorporate substantial eyewitness testimony, with the Gospel of John actually written by an eyewitness, whom he identifies not with the apostle John but with a much less familiar figure, John ‘the elder’, mentioned by Papias. He bases his arguments on patristic materials, on recent work on the nature of oral ‘testimony’, especially by Byrskog (2000), and on other evidence (personal names and a proposed ‘inclusio’).
His case is argued with clarity, thoroughness and ingenuity, but cannot win full conviction. Bauckham places an excessive reliance on patristic sources as part of a philosophical conviction concerning ‘testimony’, which he describes as a ‘reputable historiographic category’ (2006, p. 5; cf. pp. 472−508). But ‘testimony’, whether applied to the Gospels or the Church Fathers, is not a literary genre: it is a fluid term covering many different types of witness, and cannot be naively accepted without prior investigation (cf. Lincoln, 2000, pp. 340−53; Vansina, 2006, esp. ch. 4). The Fathers were moved by doctrinal, apologetic and polemical considerations, and a view of the inspiration of Scripture which fostered imaginative reconstruction to harmonize Gospel differences. This means that their statements on matters of Gospel composition and authorship need to be carefully assessed on their own merits. As was seen in Chapter 3, there are major problems over Papias’ statement on the ‘elder’ John, and there is an inherent improbability in the hypothesis of two eyewitness disciples named ‘John’, one of whom left so little trace in the ancient sources. We here concentrate on the evidence adduced by Bauckham and others in favour of the idea that John’s Gospel incorporated eyewitness materials rather than the idea that it was composed as a whole by an eyewitness.
Personal names
Bauckham shows that the names that appear in the Gospels for the most part match what is known about the popularity of Palestinian personal names from epigraphic and literary sources. But this does not prove very much. The lexicon he used (Ilan, 2002) covers a longer period than our Gospels (330 BCE−200 CE). When Bauckham wrote, there were no ‘control’ lexicons of non-Palestinian Jewish names of this period, though there was some evidence that there were differences between Palestinian and Diaspora usage. Since he wrote, more volumes of Ilan’s Lexicon have become available (Ilan, 2008, 2011). These reveal a complex pattern of usage: for example, Martha, which Bauckham mentions (2006, p. 89) as the fourth most popular Jewish female name in Palestine, is the joint most popular female name in the Eastern Diaspora (Ilan, 2011, p. 47). Nicodemus, though attested in the form Naqdimon at Jerusalem (Bauckham, 1996), is found, in its Greek form as in John, occasionally for Jews in the Western Diaspora (Ilan, 2008, pp. 342f.) and is enormously popular for non-Jews in both East and West (Fraser et al., 1987−2010, over 200 examples). On the other hand Nathanael, meaning ‘God gives’ or ‘gift of God’ (listed by Bauckham, 2006, p. 87, as the joint fiftieth most popular male name in Palestine with seven examples), does not appear among Diaspora Jews, though the shorter name Nathan does (Ilan, 2008, pp. 141f.) as well as Nathanael’s Greek equivalent Dositheos − enormously popular in the Western Diaspora among both Jews (Ilan, 2008, pp. 250−6) and non-Jews (Fraser et al., 1987−2010). Malchus, with seven Palestinian examples (Bauckham, 2006, p. 87), also occurs in Palmyrene and Nabatean inscriptions, and is the name of two Arab rulers in Josephus (see further Brown, 1966, p. 812; Keener, 2003, p. 1083; Ilan, 2008, pp. 674f.). With its meaning ‘king’, it seems an odd name for the Jewish High Priest’s slave (John 18.10).
A particular problem concerns the name Lazarus, which Bauckham lists as the third most popular male name among Palestinian Jews (2006, p. 85). In fact, Lazarus is very rarely attested for Jews in or before the first century CE, though the Hebrew equivalent Eleazar is common. Lazarus never occurs in the Septuagint; it appears only once in Josephus (BJ 5.567), whereas Eleazar appears for over 20 different individuals. In the NT Lazarus occurs only in Luke 16 in the well-known parable (Matt. 1.15 uses the form Eleazar in Jesus’ genealogy). ‘Lazarus’ seems to be a truncated Galilean dialect form, attested in later sources (Vermes, 1983, pp. 53, 190f.; cf. Fitzmyer, 1985, p. 1131, citing inscriptions from Beth She’arim, and the Talmud). The fact that the form Lazarus is Palestinian could help Bauckham’s case, but one cannot build too much on the frequency of the name.
In practice, the evidence of personal names is fraught with difficulties. Some occur in variant forms (e.g. Malchus, Malichi, Malchion, Malkiah, Eimalkouai), which makes it hard to determine when we are speaking of the same name or a different one; many inscriptions are of uncertain date; it is not always clear which individuals are Jewish. Moreover, we are mostly dealing with very limited statistics, and it cannot be certain that names of a group found in a family tomb (for example) are typical of the population as a whole. It should be stressed that the Gospels themselves nowhere indicate that the figures in question are being named because they are eyewitnesses. Some of them may have been; other names may be invented or added from those known from other contexts. If the Evangelists were competent writers, they would be likely to pick suitable ones (see further Byrskog, 2008; Schröter, 2008, with Bauckham, 2008a, b).
Oral transmission, memory and ancient historiography
It is true that many ancient authors preferred a ‘living voice’ to written sources. But recent work on ‘memory’ has shown that eyewitness testimony can be far from reliable (Redman, 2010; Foster, 2012; Kloppenborg, 2012, discussing work by DeConick, 2008; McIver, 2011; and others). Memory is influenced by social factors and context; stories can be reinterpreted in the light of a new situation, transferred to a different time or person, or expanded to add colour. Byrskog himself recognized that what he calls ‘autopsy’ (i.e. eyewitness) is affected by conscious and subconscious ideological factors; he also noted the influence of rhetoric and potential ‘interplay between interpretative and narrativising procedures’ (2000, pp. 145, 199, 203). It may be true that in oral societies, where writing is unknown, people have better memories than today (though this has been disputed); but the society in which Jesus lived was not a simple ‘oral society’. The transmission of Gospel stories is likely to be very different from that of the Homeric poems, with which it has sometimes been compared (see e.g. Foster, 2012, pp. 204−6, on the use of Milman Parry’s and A. B. Lord’s work by Mournet (2005) and others). The great epics attributed to Homer (the Iliad and Odyssey) were composed in a fixed poetic form, the hexameter, and made extensive use of formulaic expressions. The Gospels were composed in prose. While there are some repeated expressions and examples of Hebraic-style poetic parallelism, there is nothing remotely like the Homeric ‘formulae’. In any case there is still much uncertainty about the manner of composition and transmission of the Homeric poems (and even more over how far Homer actually preserves historical material).
By the time the Gospels were composed writing had long been in use. Bauckham recognizes this in that he makes much of ancient historians to support his view of the Gospels. Thucydides, Polybius and Josephus all participated in some of the events they describe. But taking part does not guarantee accuracy. Josephus is notoriously partisan in his Jewish War because he is keen to justify his own siding with the Romans, while in his Jewish Antiquities (a history of the Jewish people) he confidently describes events going back to King David, the patriarchs, and even the Creation of the world. In this he patently incorporated legendary and interpretative material. It is reasonable to suppose that even if the Gospel writers had been eyewitnesses they would have incorporated elements from hearsay and imaginative reconstructions of dialogue.1 So even if John and the Synoptists were aiming at writing history (which is doubtful), or the closely allied genre of biography, we would expect them to include non-factual material. In fact all four Evangelists wrote to persuade people to believe, and John makes this quite explicit (20.31). As we saw in Chapter 4, even explicit claims to eyewitness testimony cannot always be accepted at face value: they may be placed at strategic positions in a text for rhetorical purposes, to gain the confidence of readers (cf. Byrskog, 2000, pp. 214f., on Josephus, Strabo, Plutarch and Lucian).
Memorization by disciples?
Some scholars have supposed that the Jesus traditions were at least partly memorized, and this could have helped preserve them accurately. This was substantially the view of the Scandinavian scholars Riesenfeld (1957) and Gerhardson (1991, 1998), and is supported by Byrskog (1994, 2000), who writes from the same scholarly tradition. But evidence is lacking for disciples memorizing long speeches such as we find in John (Keener, 2003, p. 61) or for Jesus operating a rabbinic style ‘school’.2 Bauckham (2006, pp. 93−113, 403) suggests that the ‘college’ of the Twelve would have acted as guarantors of the tradition, but evidence for this is flimsy; John does not even list their names. The idea of more informal group control of accuracy also seems questionable (see Kloppenborg, 2012, pp. 112−16, criticizing Bailey, 1991). This is not to suggest that all the Jesus traditions are inaccurate, but rather to stress the difficulty of determining which ones are.
‘Inclusio’ of eyewitness testimony?
Bauckham claims a significant ‘inclusio’ in the witness of the ‘beloved disciple’ at the beginning of John’s Gospel and its end, paralleling a similar ‘inclusio’ of Peter’s ‘testimony’ in Mark (2006, pp. 127−9, 390−3). This supposed ‘inclusio’ of the ‘beloved disciple’s’ witness framing John’s Gospel (a) means ignoring the Prologue (John 1.1−18) and the explicit ‘witness’ John (the Baptist) at its start (1.7, 15, 19, 32, 34); (b) assumes that the reference to the ‘beloved disciple’ as witness in John 21.24 is written by the same author as the rest of the Gospel, which many have doubted; and (c) involves identifying the anonymous disciple who appears in John 1.35−42 as the ‘disciple whom Jesus loved’ who appears first in the Passion Narrative. But this identification is implausible. If the author had intended readers to understand the anonymous disciple of John 1 as the ‘beloved’ disciple, he would surely have made this clear. The unnamed disciple is one of a pair, the other being Andrew. But the witness of the anonymous figure is in no way flagged up. Thus John’s ‘inclusio’ of eyewitness testimony appears illusory.3
Conclusion
This discussion in no way precludes that John included eyewitness testimony. What it shows is the difficulties in proving the case. It also perhaps demonstrates that even where eyewitness testimony may have been included one cannot simply assume that it will be historically accurate.