How Accurate are Eyewitnesses? Bauckham and the Eyewitnesses in the Light of Psychological Research

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.1 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.2 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."3 Bauckham suggests that this is not so. Basing his premise on Samuel Byrskog's work on the historical methods of ancient historians such as Herodotus, Thucydides, and Tacitus, he asserts that historians of the time used eyewitness testimony as the preferred source of information for their histories and that the Gospel writers would have looked for eyewitnesses to the events that they recorded rather than simply recording community traditions.4 He says that the eyewitnesses "remained the living and active guarantors of the traditions" in whose name they were transmitted, and that "[t]estimony offers us ... a theological model for understanding the Gospels as the entirely appropriate means of access to the historical reality of Jesus."5 He also argues that research into oral transmission shows that custodians of oral tradition are able to transmit large blocks of material very accurately over time.6 Thus, Bauckham suggests that we can be (significantly) more confident than form critics suggest about the historicity of the Gospel accounts. I will not attempt here to evaluate the technical aspects of Bauckham's argument about which parts of the Gospel are likely to be eyewitness accounts or close to eyewitness accounts and who the eyewitnesses might be. These aspects have recently been evaluated effectively by a number of scholars in the Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus (JSHJ) and the Journal for the Study of the New Testament (JSNT).7 Rather, I pose this question: What consequences does accepting (parts of) the Gospels as eyewitness accounts have for biblical studies? In doing so, I ask: * What light does psychological research shed on the extent to which information obtained from eyewitness accounts could be considered to be accurate information about the historical Jesus?8 * What consequences does this have for the way biblical scholarship might treat eyewitness accounts? In the course of answering these questions, there is a need to move somewhat beyond what psychologists define as eyewitness testimony to include an examination of research into retelling stories. Psychology would not consider this to be eyewitness testimony, because the events being recounted in the story are not part of the lived experience of the person telling the stories. In the context of Jesus' teaching, however, the content of the story is as important as is the fact that he told it, so a faithful eyewitness testimony needs to include the content of the stories, even if they are fiction rather than fact. Thus, any consideration of eyewitness testimony to Jesus' ministry also needs to include what might be termed "earwitness" testimony- how people reported Jesus' words. I. EYEWITNESS TESTIMONY IN PSYCHOLOGICAL RESEARCH Most people perceive eyewitness testimony to be accurate, presumably because the eyewitness was present when an event occurred and therefore must know what happened. There are, however, a number of court cases where someone has been wrongly convicted on the testimony of an eyewitness despite the availability of conflicting evidence from other sources.9 In research published in 1904, William Stern demonstrated that eyewitness testimony is not necessarily accurate. …