In his controversial 2006 publication 'Jesus and the Eyewitnesses', Richard Bauckham outlines his theory that accounts of Jesus' life and ministry that appear in the NT are eyewitness testimonies or very close to eyewitness testimonies. In saying this, he opposes the generally accepted view of form critics that the Gospels are records of collective communal traditions that were in circulation in the early church for quite some time before they were written down, and that in the process of transmission and recording they were redacted to serve the theological purposes of the different communities from which they arose. Based on this more generally accepted understanding, scholars who have looked at what we can know about the historical Jesus from the Gospels have generally decided that the answer is "not much?" |
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