Note: In the
conclusion of his book Jesus and the
Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness
Testimony (Eerdmans, 2006), in which he challenges the approach of form criticism
by arguing that the Gospels are based on authentic eyewitness testimony,
Richard Bauckham offers the following analysis of how “Enlightenment
individualism has led to postmodern skepticism”:
“However it—or the kind of extreme individualistic
epistemology it embraces—can lead historians to an overly skeptical approach particularly
to those sources that were intended to recount and inform events of the past,
that is, testimony in this restricted sense.
Particularly in Gospels scholarship there is an attitude abroad that
approaches the sources with fundamental skepticism, rather than trust, and
therefore requires that anything the sources claim be accepted only if
historians can independently verify it…..
Young scholars, learning their historical method from Gospel
scholars, often treat it as self-evident that the more skeptical they are
toward their sources, the more rigorous will be their historical method. It has to be said, over and over, that
historical rigor does not consist in fundamental skepticism toward historical
testimony but in fundamental trust along with testing by critical questioning….”
(p. 486).
Very interisting brother Jeff!
ReplyDeleteI Have already take a brief look on Bauckham's book, but never read. Will you produce a review?
VLB,
ReplyDeleteThanks for the comment. If time allows I hope to offer some sort of summary of the book as a future blog post. It does have a lot of interesting information challenging, in particular, the form critical approach to the Gospels and the life of Jesus. Worth reading but very dense.
JTR
JTR