jesus and the eyewitnesses the gospels as eyewitness testimony

And John’s Gospel also makes the claim to being an eyewitness account: “This is the disciple who is bearing witness about these things, and who has written these things, and we know that his testimony is true” (John 21:24). We know Luke went to eyewitnesses because of his introduction (Luke 1:1–4). This suggests that Mark used the eyewitness testimony of Peter to compose the Gospel of Mark. After Jesus, Peter is mentioned more times than any other named person in the Gospel according to Mark, and Peter’s name appears at the beginning and end of the Gospel (Mark 1:16 16:7 p. That eyewitness testimony lies behind the Gospels provides a clue not only to the historical transmission of the Gospel traditions about Jesus but also, as Richard Bauckham argues in Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, the theological mode of communication. The answer is that eyewitnesses of Jesus would commit their memories to writing to preserve the history of Jesus for future generations. How would later generations hear the story of Jesus? Yet the disciples of Jesus, although numbered in the hundreds, eventually would die out. And Christian communities sprung up across the Empire (and beyond).

The apostle Paul began writing letters to churches about two decades after the death of Jesus. Christianity from its start was a bookish religion.

Jesus and the eyewitnesses the gospels as eyewitness testimony