(Papias’ testimony was once written off, and then overlooked, by most Biblical scholars but, Bauckham argues, this is based on a misunderstanding. One of them is the work of Papias, an early Christian, whose work we only have fragments of, but through whose work we can see that the Christians of the generation after Christ placed great value, not on generic, anonymous, Jesus “traditions”, but on the testimony of specific, named eyewitnesses. Sometimes an argument turns on a specific phrase which has (Bauckham argues) been widely misinterpreted, and so Bauckham will spend many pages on the meaning of one or two Greek words to dispatch the many opposing arguments and get the sense just right.īauckham adduces several pieces of evidence for his central claim. This is a heavy tome of scholarship, not for the faint of heart, and many readers will find it hard not to skip a few pages. This is contrary to the assumption of most New Testament scholarship, drawn from the form criticism of the early 20th century, that the Gospels are works of oral tradition, in other words collections of anonymous traditions passed down through many iterations between the actual witnesses and the writers of the Gospels. In a word, the book argues that the Gospels are books of oral history in other words, that they are based on the direct accounts of specific, named eyewitnesses to the life and ministry of Jesus.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |