Great interview with British NT scholar and theologian Richard Bauckham at the blog Chrisendom discussing Bauckham’s new book Jesus and the Eyewitnesses.

The book, in a nutshell:

The historical argument (most of the book) is that the eyewitnesses of the events of the Gospel history remained, throughout their lives, the authoritative sources and guarantors of the traditions about Jesus, and that the texts of our Gospels are much closer to the way the eyewitnesses told their stories than has been generally thought since the rise of form criticism. I also argue that the Gospels have ways, largely unnoticed before now, of indicating their own eyewitness sources, and I present new evidence for believing Papias’ claim that Mark’s Gospel was based on Peter’s preaching. Although the book’s conclusions support rather traditional views of the Gospels, much of the argument is quite fresh. The book also breaks new ground in Gospel studies by engaging with modern psychological research on eyewitness memory.

The theological argument is that the category of testimony offers a category for the Gospels that is both historiographically and theologically appropriate, and a way beyond the dichotomy of the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith. Jesus as presented by eyewitnesses participants in his history, for whom empirical fact and meaning were interrelated from the beginning, are the kind of access to Jesus that Christian faith requires.

Sounds really interesting! Earlier this fall I read Bauckham’s God Crucified (review here), where he makes a somewhat similar argument that the earliest Christology was also the highest Christology. Rather than positing a long process of development from seeing Jesus as a Spirit-filled man or adopted Son of God to the full blown incarnational Christology of Nicea and Chalcedon, Bauckham argues that early Christians were able to combine a high Christology with rigorous Jewish monotheism. Bauckham uses the category of “divine identity” to show how a high Christology can exist without employing the metaphysical categories that have long bedeviled these discussions. He contends that this is what early Jewish Christians did by attributing to Jesus the very attributes which are unique to the divine identity.