Want to know who the “Real Jesus” was? Ask the people who were there.

As a society, we value first-hand knowledge and experience more than ever. With the ever-expanding immanence of technology, there’s no need to rely on 2nd or 3rd hand accounts of anything. We can connect to someone who was there—is there—through YouTube, Twitter, or Facebook. We don’t trust accounts that aren’t firsthand. We want up close and personal.

It’s Spring, which means three things: flowers budding, students sweating impending finals, and loads of stories about “the real Jesus” in magazines and on TV as we approach Easter. What do we really know about him, and how do we know? Is it possible to get any sense of who he really was? Do we have any first-hand accounts that tell us what we want to know?

I recently got acquainted with Richard Bauckham’s landmark book Jesus & the Eyewitnesses to prepare for a discussion on these very questions at Sojourn, our Thursday night forum for questioning faith and doubt.

I had been hearing about the book for a while now, so I was eager to get a hold of it. While I don’t have the time to write a full review of the book here—that’s already been done in several places, better than I could anyway—I will try to summarize some of what makes the book so helpful.

To understand the value of Bauckham’s contribution to NT scholarship and apologetics, it’s important to understand something of the context. For over 250 years, the “Jesus of Faith” has been pitted against “The Historical Jesus” of Higher Criticism. In other words, we are told that we must choose which Jesus we believe in: either the one we read about in the Gospels, or the “real” one behind or underneath the Gospels, who must be recovered by higher critics and their scholarly methods.

Form Criticism is a branch of Higher Criticism, along with Redaction Criticism and Source Criticism. (Lower Criticism refers to Textual Criticism, the discipline of comparing the thousands of biblical manuscripts and their variants in order to recover the most reliable biblical text). It’s impossible to define an entire discipline of scholarship in a nutshell without being reductionistic, but essentially Form Criticism is the method of classifying units of Scripture by their literary form and their cultural context (Sitz im Leben), in order to determine how the story was originally told. If you took Religious Studies and learned how the Pentateuch is made up of four traditions known as JEDP (aka, the documentary hypothesis), you’ve learned Form Criticism.

One of the central assumptions of Form Criticism—and the one that has arguably had the most sweeping impact—is that the Gospels are derived from several generations of oral tradition, and are therefore less reliable. This is the “Whisper Down the Lane” argument—that whatever was originally said must have been corrupted (and probably intentionally changed) by following generations. (You can partially thank Form Criticism for all those magazine covers and TV specials purporting to have uncovered “the truth” about “the Real Jesus”). The changes over time produce “layers” on top of the original story. Form Critics believe they can strip away these layers (and agendas) to arrive at the kernel of truth or actual event within a given story.

There are several problems with this approach, notably 1) the outright skepticism of the historicity of what we have in the Gospels; 2) the assumption of a lengthy and corrupting oral tradition; 3) the often accompanying anti-supernaturalistic assumptions (since we know Jesus couldn’t have performed miracles, we know those stories must have been added later); and 4) the optimism that their critical method can reconstruct something more accurate and true than the Biblical accounts. It’s important to note that the study of the Bible’s literary and cultural contexts is important and profitable; it’s the accompanying presuppositions of Form Criticism that are problematic.

The most egregious (and admittedly extreme) example of Higher Criticism at work is the infamous Jesus Seminar. This illustrious gathering of scholars (which includes Paul Verhoeven, the director of such cinematic gems as Robocop, Basic Instinct, and Showgirls) has radically redefined what they believe to be the accurate depiction of the real Jesus. By means of voting with four colored beads, they decide which statements are most or least likely to actually have been said by Jesus himself. Among their criteria for inauthenticity is anything self-referential (which would automatically rule out much of the Gospel of John); any “framing” material surrounding an event or story (such as who Jesus was addressing, curiously eliminating the all-important contextual clues); and anything perceived to have a theological agenda (you know, because Jesus himself wouldn’t have had any theological ideas or anything). Not surprisingly, they end up with something like 15-20 “authentic” statements, and a Jesus whom no one would care to listen to, let alone crucify.

Tomorrow, I will outline Bauckham’s response to Form Criticism and how his approach is able to bring together the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith.