His principal source on orality studies is Jan Vansina, whose Oral Tradition as History (1985) has rightly been hailed as a pioneering work. Bauckham does not take his readers to the core problem of form criticism: designed to come to terms with speech and oral tradition, it remained patently culture-bound and captive to the print mentality of a post-Gutenberg intellectualism. To the extent that Bauckham acknowledges tradition at all, his key designation for its operation is “control.” Tradition is a matter of memorization, and memorization is essentially an exercise of control by individuals. But can one now replace oral tradition with eyewitnesses?
His judgment is widely shared, although a systematic reflection on the rise and fall of form criticism is still lacking. Bauckham identifies the beloved disciple as John the Elder, whom Papias mentioned but did not explicitly link with John’s Gospel.īauckham is entirely correct in pointing out the shortcomings of form criticism.
The Gospel of John, according to its own affirmation, was written by the “beloved disciple,” an eyewitness and intimate of Jesus. Mark, relying on the eyewitness Peter, wrote the earliest Gospel. Principally Bauckham asserts that the three synoptics embody the shared eyewitness testimony of the Twelve, plus additional attestation from female disciples, from people who experienced Jesus’ healings and from anonymous individuals mentioned in the Gospels.
Bauckham’s theory concerning the assignation of eyewitnesses is not a new one, but essentially a replay of the thesis advocated by Bishop Papias of Hierapolis in Asia Minor (d. Jesus and the Eyewitnesses deals primarily with the Gospels of Mark and John and only tangentially with Matthew and Luke. Instead of postulating a lengthy process of anonymous oral transmission preceding the formation of the Gospels, as form criticism does, Bauckham situates the Gospels in close proximity to those who witnessed the events they recounted: “Not oral tradition but eyewitness testimony should be our principal model,” he writes.īauckham’s book raises major theoretical issues related to form criticism, external versus internal evidence, Gospel narrativity, and testimony versus memory. Andrews, Scotland, poses a severe challenge to form criticism, the highly influential 20th-century methodology that deals with the oral transmission of the biblical stories. Richard Bauckham, professor at the University of St.
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