This probably needs its own thread, if there is more to say. I'll tackle the subject of eyewitness testimony from a different angle.

Since 1980 I have kept a diary of events, and it has been maintained ever since. We are talking about at least a page a day of A4 with few exceptions, and every day with no exceptions, with perhaps 10 or 20 entries the next day only. The books are piled up now, spilling about, and some were once largely washed out thanks to the ink during a flood from a ceiling.

I've kept the same small bunch of close friends all this time, and they even visited and I did while I lived in (Manchester and) Derbyshire from 1989 to 1994. You could subdivide the friendship into certain long, dominant, grand-narrative periods according to times of activity. For example, from 1980 on is the encounter with a Methodist Fellowship and Youth group, at which one of us was touched by religion but avoided it, and extracted a girlfirend into a wife, when another was purely social and retained his secularity and I treated it critically and went into religion via university. Two of us were persistently students or unemployed, and the other had his academic future ruined by his father and went into the family shop. The friendship later has a different phases, one who got a low job is single and hasn't moved for years, the other is family man and effectively businessman too and then me, mainly academic and mainly unemployed, who did marry and then it faded away. There is now another phase, of comparative ill-health.

Now I can go back to my writings and find out by careful reading what we did and our motivations. But I could do something else. I could go and find all the people involved, and hear how they talk about the 1980s as a group. I could listen as much as interview. I could then put the whole thing together and get a narrative stream from it, or perhaps four or five.

There will be no doubt that events recalled will be wrongly recalled, if still authentic. But what will really be different is the context. The past and present won't be unrelated, indeed quite the opposite, but the framing will be very different. It may also be that sons and daughters and friends have heard about these times - our newer friends have. And if that past is significant, they will also generate a context for it. Many memories will then follow the context, and indeed if the context is significant then the memories will alter.

For example, from the perspective of ill-health will come the amount that used to be drunk in pubs in the past. I bet it has gone up. Beer was much cheaper then - sure but there was less in the pocket. There was hardly anything in mine, and still the same. We would drink like fishes. I wonder. I know that, from an earlier phases, the stories told of encounters with females are just overdone. They are not true. The evidence is one of frustration all round - unmet longings.

So whether there are named individuals or not, remembering the past or not, or groups of highly charged communities, the way a memory develops (and especially one that expects something to happen in the near future) and the way stories are retold makes them highly variable and context driven. The emphasis has to be on what is this community about and where does it want to go.

So on this I stay with anthropologists, the various warnings from historiographers, and selected theologians of various challenges - like Mark Goodacre and Larry Hurtado. With Bauckman I just wonder what difference it makes - he makes many assumptions, but then so do many. I'm saying a religious incentive does bend and twist things out of shape, but I'm also saying what happens if there are scattered and even gathered eyewitnesses to past decades.

"a religious incentive does bend and twist things out of shape"

Pluralist I agree with this sentence, what i am wondering is how you feel it does.

I also have kept journals since i was a teenager, i keep them in a different way and coded somewhat but i know as you say which period of history they relate to then, i also know who they relate to and how. But central to most of them was the triangular relationship of God Me and the Other/s Others God and Me  Me God and Others. I am still waiting for my Bauckman book, so i dont know how he analizes it.

The Eye witness to the whole picture, were probably nil they did not exist, But there were different eye witnesses to partial pictures. I think that this is how the bible is. The bible is a collection of eye witness accounts but it also has the element of each eye witness having their own perspective, from their own needs and motivations and realisations.

For me though , what the most important thing is , what was Jesus motivation? I want to believe, that it was to end the human stae of affairs which was is and probably will be to come in the future, Bent twisted and out of shape. As humans we are not as easy to mould into shape as inanimate objects, because the moulding process begins in the mind, the mind is bombarded with so many opinions and consquences of, that even if we empty it and fill it with Jesus everyday eventually our thoughts would become distorted about Jesus.  Back to the old faithful "balance" pluralist, that is difficult to because our humanity causes us to seek that which makes us feel good and sometimes some people feeling bad makes them feel good. Jesus motivation was pure we can not all state that. Jesus sees the full picture when it comes to our lives.

Angela

Thanks, Pluralist, for a useful post and thread.  I understand you to be saying that because indeterminacy is an inherent property of historical narrative, indeterminacy (hence, for some purposes, "unreliability") would also be a property of the gospel accounts of the Resurrection. To show that such indeterminacy is inherent in all historical narrative, and is not overcome by any amount or quality of evidence, you imagine diverse accounts of your life with your friends since 1980 that could vary widely despite copious and rather good contemporaneous records. The reason you seem to give for that hypothesised indeterminacy is that the "horizons" within which your actions might be interpreted are bound to change from time to time and narrator to narrator.

Readers of Richard Bauckham and Tom Wright could probably find your analogy helpful in understanding why these scholars have framed their arguments as they have done. Both believe that there there was a Resurrection, that there were eyewitnesses to it, and that what these persons saw is in the accounts that we have received, but neither argues that the Resurrection narratives are verbal videos. They seem to meet you halfway, but from different directions.

Bauckham describes the gospels as literary biographies written according to an epistemologically sophisticated practice attested in early Christian writings and known from other ancient sources. Because this practice privileged direct testimony, distrusted rumour and hearsay, and had scarcely any archival evidence of the modern sort, we might think of such biographies as "accounts of eyewitnesses," rather than as "eyewitness accounts." Obviously, Bauckham regards this view as more current than the early 20th C hypothesis we learned at university that the gospels are the final redactions of oral folk traditions. Does Bauckham meet your argument that the horizons of interpretation necessarily shift with time and narrator? You could see for yourself, of course, but he seems to argue that the practise of biography privileged the perspective of the witnesses.

Wright argues that the horizon within which the Resurrection was re-presented in the gospels was both given in and transformed from the beliefs of the Second Temple Jews who became the first Christians. The historical question that he asks is-- what changed ordinary Jewish belief in resurrection (e.g. Pharisees, but not Sadducees) into Christian belief in the Resurrection, which differs in seven significant ways from all prior belief? Whatever historical cause one posits as an answer has to account for these rapid, startling innovations, and is, in turn, characterised by them. Something caused--

(1) Unanimity within the Christian movement about the Resurrection of Jesus. One might have expected some division of opinion about that.

(2) The Resurrection of Jesus to be so central to Christian teaching that even pagans like Galen know them by it. After all, they might instead have seen it as merely a miraculous personal characteristic of Jesus.

(3) Consensus among Christians on the properties of the spiritual body. Again, one might have expected some division of opinion about any belief so novel.

(4) Belief that Jesus had been raised from death in the middle of time, rather than at the end of the age with the rest of the righteous. The latter was the standard expectation among Jews who believed in resurrection.

(5) Belief that the Resurrection empowered Christians to contribute together to God's new creation. They might have believed that Jesus had been favoured with early resurrection without seeing in this an event in cosmic and covenant history.

(6) Ethical norms to be inferred from the Resurrection. Again, they could have believed the ethical precepts that Jesus had taught without accepting further precepts that are inferred from the fact of his Resurrection.

(7) An association of messiahship with Resurrection that is not known from Jewish messianism. Several others, after all, were followed as messiahs and killed, but Jews did not expect them to rise from the dead.

Framing the matter this way, the empty tomb and the appearances of the risen Jesus become the explanans rather than explananda. This inversion enables Wright to use them to explore early Christian life as we find it in the apostolic and subapostolic writings.

Does Wright meet your argument that the horizons of interpretation necessarily shift with time and narrator? Yes, in the sense that a transformation of horizon is precisely what he means to explore. However, because this change occurs within Second Temple Judaism and is unintelligible apart from it, the salience and meaning of resurrection phenomena remain stable in the relatively short time from the event to its recollection.

In closing, I should note that, whilst both of these scholars have been careful to engage the Form Criticism etc we learned in school, their primary concern is to reopen the gospel narratives to a searching study that was long deflected by the idea that they reflect the communities in which they were composed more than the events recounted in them. Their arguments may overcome some scepticism, but to use them only for apologetics is to miss their most interesting insights into the coherence of the apostolic faith.

All I've done so far is tackled the what if of eyewitnesses giving accounts. I've not actually addressed the gospels or New Testament. Bauckman isn't new on this. I have Dennis Ninemam looking via two chapters and taking the eyewitness people head on, set against that of form critics. He's sceptical, and so am I, but he did take them head on. The point there is that even if there is eyewitness material in there, it has become formed to make a theological point within the context of the community.

I'm not sure he does meet my argument. He seems to be saying that the biography improved with Matthew and Luke, which strikes me as near bonkers, given Matthew's concern to produce a Church document and Luke to address Gentiles. I'm saying as time moves on different concerns strike eyewitnesses who bend their stories to fit the context and rather tell things in new ways - I haven't got to the point about how then other people use the retold stories, nor any practice of claiming authorship in a kind of 'I was there' way.

There were different views about resurrection. One was spiritual and the other was body, though the language was originally body (a spiritual body as in Paul is like having a square circle) and difference of emphasis and probably timing. And it actually lacks explanation and description. The resurrection belief doesn't become some sort of middle belief until a lot later, it was always a beginning of the end. The Church is a substitute, a waiting room, short at first but an ever longer one as the original view faded, for the Kingdom.Messiahship was part of resurrection: you get one and you get the other pretty quickly because it is all of one outcome. What is different about Christianity is not resurrection but second coming, and second coming changes resurrection.

Even so, this is all a set of quickly changing supernatural beliefs of people who believe in that sort of thing. I don't. I believe people have the capacity to believe all sorts of things and see things too. Even now we evidence in terms of people saying they've seen a dead loved one at the end of the bed in a kind of waking dream. We have people who see from above when they are going through a death-like stage. But we also have biology and science and anthropology, and the dead have brains that become incapable at high speed. Once you are dead, you are very dead.

I don't agree with you about Jesus, Waterangel: the point about history is that we do not have the information that can lead people to say that someone has a pure intent or round view. As an assertion it can only be a statement of dogma, and I don't believe it. I think he was ethically as limited or capable as anyone else - the evidence, if it is evidence, is the lack of pastoral skills when it came to how he addressed some Gentiles. He had to revise his own stance.

Again Pluralist i find myself agreeing with one statement which you make.

This time it is the statement "i believe ethically he was as limited as anyone else, this showed when he addressed the gentiles"

I think you are right so far as in at the point of addressing the gentiles he was human, and the "working out" of the spirit was yet to come. As you say nothing can be proved 100% we can get as near as possible and understand intention.

It was Jesus intention to save nations from themselves by creating a new message to that,  we had previously seen in the old testament. We see a bit of this today the worst atrocities in the world are commited by men its usually men as they come from patriarchal societies of belief systems, who defend thier violent acts towards others from the old testament view of religion.

After the crucifixion though such limitations were removed and we see the "working out of the spirit" begin.

Jesus was the catalyst for that. Dont you just wish sometimes pluralist that intellect did not get in the way of faith, do you think it would make life easier or harder?. I used to joke that i thought life was hard because i didnt understand, then i understood and it was more difficult because i understood.

Ie When you dare not to bother whether you agree or disagree or not, understanding is clearer. Jesus did not ask us to agree with him he asked us to hear him.

Angela

Pluralist,

Consider Luke. do you accept that he was a traveling companion of Paul and that in Acts he continued the story from the gospel in the same manner. Is the account of the hearing before Aggripa and the shipwreck on Malta an eyewitness account? How much of the earlier part of Acts stories he heard Paul tell many times. He was also an eyewitness for the council of Jerusalem. This time in Jerusalem gave him the opportunity to hear the first hand story from the Apostles and the "women" The stories of the dispute on who was the greatest and Peter's denial must have come from the disciples. why were they told other than that they were true?

Dave

Pluralist-- At which understanding of the Resurrection are you flailing away?

ohhh why did i not think of that dave?  on previous post i have quoted malta having been there several times to follow it up. But i guess that again what pluralist is getting at is pauls interptetation of what he saw as much as anything else. He is saying we cannot prove intention. But i think Jesus words clearly state the intention that he instructs people to love one another, and he allowed his self to be crucified because he wanted people to believe they did not need to be judge and jury, the ascention , and ressurection was a way of displaying the spirit. pluralist will tie me up in knots now because i havent explained it as well as i would like. But i think that there is little divide between mind and spirit and they both affect each other, Jesus had a mind that thought peace, and shared how he felt it could be achieved and then showed that people were capable of murdering innocent people for wanting peace. Through all of this the spirit is an experience , it is something you cannot quite identify but fully understand. Jesus has to be more than just an historical figure, just like the spirit no we can not quite identify why but we fully understand the impact.

Angela

What I know is that the accounts of Paul and accounts of Luke do not match, and that Luke is principally being theological to his audience but using the means of eyewitness form to add to the attempt to convince. The point is that the resurrection account, and indeed the account of spiritual accompaniment, is an internal one, and not one wider known beyond the community, so the pressure is to tell it, but Luke-Acts is the afterwards polished result. We don't kow what happened to Paul or indeed to Peter.

Anyway, as a matter of request, I read the shipwreck account neatly, via NRSV, and ther eason it doesn't strike me as historical is in the soldiers' plan to kill the prisoners and then a centurion wanting to save Paul. It doesn't sound historical to me, and a historian would want to know more.

All the stories of resurrection look theologised and unhistorical to me. It doesn't follow that what is theologised has to be unhistorical, but none of them look like a real event but a told event. There might be some core somewhere.

What we never really get is the primitive Jewish Church, the one closest to Jesus after his death, but this Paul as a cusp culture person and Luke in particular. Mark is too rough and John is on another planet.

Pluralist - most of these comments are based on very dated, liberal assumptions ('the assured results of critical scholarship') that have been convincingly challenged by more recent work. I don't want to be rude but having challenged you to read Richard Bauckham, I think that based on your comments I need to challenge you to read anything written in the last ten or fifteen years.

To take one point, a crucial feature of the resurrection stories in the gospels is their very lack of theological development, certainly when compared to the earlier sections of the gospels. Yes there is the odd bit that looks like this (perhaps the dead rising from their tombs in Matthew) but very little compared to the earlier sections of the gospels. They instead read like carefully preserved accounts of what happened (or if you prefer what the original eyewitnesses claimed had happened). In the light of this the earlier parts of the gospel do read like more theological accounts (although no less historical for that) seeking to explain why the resurrection of Jesus happened. But the resurrection accounts themselves are remarkably unvarnished theologically (eg very little if any scriptural back up from the Old Testament) suggesting that they are based on primitive accounts preserved before the theological shape of the rest of each gospel was constructed to lead the way to them. A key question is how do we explain the prominence of the women in the stories (very carefully listed at the crucifixion, burial and then empty tomb) if they are later inventions? Why would anyone make that up in an age when women possessed such little status and were regarded as so unreliable? And why also were these Christians going to their deaths within a very few years stating their belief in something that they knew (or at least large numbers of them knew) was completely untrue? All of these factors need much more convincing historical explanations than your reconstructions provide.

And surely Matthew, Mark, John and even Luke do represent thoroughly Jewish Christianity. As does Paul. Even if Luke was a Gentile, like all of these writers his gospel is simply seeping with Old Testament quotations and allusions that he/she clearly understood back to front. Yes Paul's opponents in Galatians were more anti-Gentile but that is quite different from seeing Paul and the Gospel writers as less Jewish. The New Testament is thoroughly Jewish theology but recast around the realisation that Jesus was the fulfilment of the hope of Israel.  

How on earth is a conversation about not seeing, that ends with the resurrected man disappearing when they 'see' at a eucharist, be anything other than a story with theological meaning. It is obviously not a normal event. As for the women, it runs both ways, and one way it runs is the story how the community did not hear of a tomb as reinforcement for so long, set against appearances, when the story says that the women were told not to tell anyone? So, yes, it can be used as the perverse use of apparent unreliable witnesses, but suggests why a tomb didn't feature when the language of resurrection was supposed to be bodily and yet the core was apparent experiences that we would call subjective.

I have read material through the years, and I don't think Bauckman has changed the landscape (from what I see); where I have changed my opinion is in the speed that the early Christians added titles to Jesus once they expected him (and not anyone else) to return as messiah.

The problem with these evangelical assumptions is a simple one. If it was all so convincing, then all it would take is any reasonably intelligent person to read the accounts and come to the obvious conclusion of eyewitness sufficiency as support for the theology so that the resurrection is history. But this does not happen. Indeed, theologians, biblical specialists, read the accounts and do not all come to the obvious conclusion. There must be a good reason for this, and the best one is that it didn't happen in the historical sense.

What did not happen was that a man, with his inner consciousness, died and then that same consciousness lived again in some restored form of body, went around visiting former colleagues and then rose up to some literal space (literal enough for a restored body to respiritualise) called heaven. It is a myth about how in a situation of charismatic belief a belief gets changed about as one religious tradition in a moment of excitement becomes a new religion. People believe all sorts of things, but they believed an awful lot of them.

We have a bunch of bishops today who are called 'out of touch' by many, and yet in our country a chap called Bede could refer, in historical terms, to a bishop who carried out miracles as a measure of his authority. People like that don't exist today, and they didn't then.

There are other examples in the world of fast religious change where the history is more accessible, such as the Shia Islam excitement that became Babi and later Bahai. That happened also with an escalation of titles and also rapid changes among supporters to get a new definition of what they were about. And such also involved belief in the return of Jesus Christ, as it happened!

The point is that to overcome the biological objection, you have to have historical access, and there isn't. What you get is patterns of believing, by individuals and groups (especially groups) that get put into narratives, that generate stories of being with you, directing the traffic and handing out authority and legitimacy. That's what it looks like, and as it looks like that it's almost certainly what it is.

David Jenkins the bishop who believed in resurrection and the biblical witness said he could not believe that God would leave us moderns without the same kind of evidence. But that was the point, because for the non-believer there is consistency about the naturalness of all human beings.

But another support of all that is the passion trial narratives that don't add up, and then before the theologised biography the birth narratives in two gospels that are completely made up but made to look biographical.

There is no reliance, therefore, on the final, last miracle, the one where a person who actually died actually started directing the traffic again for a short period before respiritualising from a spiritualised apparently recognisable state. I would rather watch something like Dr. Who for my myth making.