Are Gospel traditions connected to eyewitness names who were thereby cited?

  • Historians

    There is a large scroll with writing on it in the background. Two pairs of eyes are looking at the scroll and two arrows are coming from the eyes to different words in the text.

    • H. H. Drake Williams: “Other significant minor characters are also named within the gospels. These include Bartimaeus, the blind man who was healed during Jesus’ journey to Jerusalem; Simon the Cyrene, who carried Jesus’s cross after all the disciples had left; Joseph of Arimathea, who offered his tomb for Jesus’ burial; and Cleopas, who met the resurrected Jesus on the road to Emmaus. These likely all joined the early Christian movement and were well-known in the circles where their stories were shared, as a number of scholars have proposed.” {Cf. Williams, Other Followers of Jesus, 153; Meier, A Marginal Jew, 2:687-90; Theissen, Gospels in Context, 101, 176-7; Brown, Death of the Messiah, 13, 1223-24; France, Gospel of Mark, 641; Gundry, Mark, 1:26; Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, 45-55.} By representing these people by name, the canonical gospel writes support the validity of their writing by appealing to these other witnesses. [Jesus Tried and True (), 45]
    • Michael Bird: “[o]ral traditions of the sayings and deeds of Jesus were attached to specifically named eyewitnesses.” [“The Purpose and Preservation of the Jesus Tradition: Moderate Evidence for a Conserving Force in its Transmission” in Bulletin for Biblical Research 15:2 (2005), 176.]

    Witnesses guarded the truth/tradition
    • Richard Bauckham: “[i]n the period up to the writing of the Gospels, Gospel traditions were connected with named and known eyewitnesses, people who had heard the teaching of Jesus from his lips and had committed it to memory, people who had witnessed the events of his ministry, death and resurrection and themselves had formulated the stories about these that they told. These eyewitnesses did not merely set going a process of oral transmission that soon went its own way without reference to them. They remained throughout their lifetimes the sources and, in some sense that may have varied for figures of central or more marginal significance, the authoritative guarantors of the stories they continued to tell.” [Jesus and the Eyewitnesses (Eerdmans, 2006), 93.]
    • Martin Hengel: “This personal link of the Jesus tradition with particular tradents, or more precisely their memory and missionary preaching, on which more or less emphasis is put, is historically undeniable” [The Four Gospels and the One Gospel of Jesus Christ (SCM, 2000), 143.]

    Tradents in general
    • Martin Hengel: “memory lasts for years, and the memory of ancient people was also better than that of people today who suffer from constant information overload and stimulus satiation. Even today, however, one often remembers after many years the person from whom one heard a certain anecdote (for example, about a certain scholar). Without being committed to writing, such anecdotes can be kept in the memory for a lifetime; the wording can change slightly in the narration with the point remaining the same. Also the names of tradition-bearers can be kept in the memory.64[ For example, characteristic anecdotes about A. Schlatter (1852–1938) are widespread. An anecdote about the later career of F. C. Baur (d. 1860) was related to me by my teacher, O. Bauernfeind (1889–1972); he heard it from his teacher Eduard von der Goltz (1870–1939), and he, in turn, from his father Hermann von der Goltz (1835–1906), who attended Baur’s Tu ̈bingen lecture on the book of Revelation. He is reported to have commented with reference to the number 666 in Rev 13.17: ‘And Hengstenberg in Berlin [the leader of the strict conservatives, 1802–69] says that’s me.’ I could narrate numerous anecdotes that reach back eighty to a hundred years and are based on controlled tradition.] In Mark, there are some references to individual names as possible guarantors of memory, e.g., Simon of Cyrene, the father of Alexander and Rufus, who were evidently still known to the Roman community at the time of Mark. [“Eye-witness memory and the writing of the Gospels” in The Written Gospel, ed Bockmuehl & Hagner (Cambridge, 2005), 86]

“Yes, after all…

  • There are several examples of this

    Some examples of the names arguably cited in this way include:
    • Simon of Cyrene, the father of Alexander and Rufus
    • Joseph of Arimathea; Simon the leper in Bethany; the healed blind man Bartimaeus (and Luke’s Zaccheus) in Jericho; the synagogue official Jairus and the tax collector Levi, the son of Alphaeus, in Capernaum et al.
    • Mary Magdalene
    • Salome
    • Cleopas

    They would get cited via odd inclusion in the narrative, or arguably through what Bauckham calls an "inclusio" (e.g. he argues Mark's gospel does this with Peter's name).

    Early Christian sources which seemed to cite witnessesincluded the Jerusalem church (e.g. in the 1 Corinthians 15 creed and the gospel stories it propogated). We see this in the Gospels, as Greco-Roman biographies. We also knoew that Paul cited names (e.g. through the 1 Cor 15 creed, while adding “some of whom remain”).

    For more: Papias says the apostle's proteges still teach in their name. (James Dunn: “R. Bauckham, …, deduces quite fairly from Papias that ‘oral traditions of the words and deeds of Jesus were attached to specific named eyewitnesses’; [On History, Memory and Eyewitnesses: In Response to Bengt Holmberg and Samuel Byrskog. Journal for the Study of the New Testament, 26(4) (2004): 473–487. ]

    We see the Gospels doing this with some regularity in how the appeal-cit to witnesses, which its a common feature in Greco-Roman biographies like the Gospels. For example, there is an argument that stories with named witnesses happen to be the most vivid stories (e.g. the story of the rising of Jairus's daguther, of Zacchaeus, of Cleopas and his companion, and the healing of Bartimaeus), and the correspondence is unlikely to be a coincidence. In fact, it makes best sense if the named witnesses were the regular 1st hand tellers and tradents of the story they witnessed, a model with a lot of independent support.