Richard Bauckham on "The Gospels as Histories" (2013 Julius Brown Gay Lectures at SBTS)

I recently finished listening (grabbing a few moments when traveling here and there) to the four-part Julius Brown Gay lectures which NT scholar Richard Bauckham presented in April 2013 at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.  The series was titled "The Gospels as Histories:  What Sort of History Are They?"

 

In the first lecture, Bauckham rehearses a lot of the material from his celebrated book Jesus and the Eyewitnesses:  The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony (Eerdmans, 2006), which challenged the assumptions of modern form criticism and argued that the canonical Gospels are reliant on eyewitness testimony.    He notes in particular the ancient literary use of the testimony of eyewitnesses who were contemporary participants in the events described.  This was part of the "best practices" of ancient historiography.  He notes that he would still classify the Gospels as being of the genre of ancient biography but that they are close to ancient historiography especially in their use of "testimony" (listen starting c. 40.00 for his discussion of this).

 

In the second and third lectures, Bauckham discusses the Gospels as "History from Below," making application of the contemporary historical "history from below" ("people's history") method popularized in the 1960s by E. P. Thompson and others.  Here he notes, in particular, how unlike most works of ancient biography (like Apollonius of Tyana) and history the Gospels give great attention to characters from the lower classes and common people.

 

In the final lecture, "The Gospels as Micro-History and Perspectival History," he applies another modern historical method (the "micro-history") to the Gospels, noting again the tendency of the Gospels to focus on the lives of ordinary people, rather than on macro-events.  He also interacts in this lecture with post-modern approaches to the Gospels.

 

Worth hearing.

 

 

Bauckham on Enlightenment influenced skepticism toward Gospel historicity

Note:  In the conclusion of his book Jesus and the Eyewitnesses:  The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony (Eerdmans, 2006), in which he challenges the approach of form criticism by arguing that the Gospels are based on authentic eyewitness testimony, Richard Bauckham offers the following analysis of how “Enlightenment individualism has led to postmodern skepticism”:

“However it—or the kind of extreme individualistic epistemology it embraces—can lead historians to an overly skeptical approach particularly to those sources that were intended to recount and inform events of the past, that is, testimony in this restricted sense.  Particularly in Gospels scholarship there is an attitude abroad that approaches the sources with fundamental skepticism, rather than trust, and therefore requires that anything the sources claim be accepted only if historians can independently verify it…..

Young scholars, learning their historical method from Gospel scholars, often treat it as self-evident that the more skeptical they are toward their sources, the more rigorous will be their historical method.  It has to be said, over and over, that historical rigor does not consist in fundamental skepticism toward historical testimony but in fundamental trust along with testing by critical questioning….” (p. 486).