Posts made in April, 2007

Jesus and the Eyewitnesses

Posted by on Apr 30, 2007 in Blog | 12 comments

Very likely the best book written in New Testament studies in 2006 is Jesus and the Eyewitnesses by Richard Bauckham. In this magnum opus Bauckham argues persuasively that the Gospels reflect (named) eyewitness testimony. According to Bauckham, the ideal source in ancient Greco-Roman literature was not the dispassionate observer, but the eyewitness. The written Gospels, so Bauckham, contain oral history related to the personal transmission of eyewitness testimony, not merely oral tradition which is the result of the collective and anonymous transmission of material. On page 93 of his book,... Read More

The Apocryphal New Testament

Posted by on Apr 18, 2007 in Blog | 3 comments

Recently the world-renowned text critic J. K. Elliott delivered a guest lecture in the Ph.D. seminar I am teaching this semester on Current Issues in New Testament Studies. Elliott is also the author of The Apocryphal New Testament (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993; paperback edition 2005), which is the standard compilation of NT apocryphal literature in the field. What follows is a succinct digest of this lecture in order to highlight the significance of the study of the NT apocrypha for NT studies. Elliott provided an eminently sober-minded assessment of the value of this highly amorphous body of... Read More