Most biblical scholars consider that Gospel material was for decades transmitted by anonymous persons, in an uncontrolled way, before it reached written form. In a concerted attack on this assumption, Bauckham says that in the Gospels we have materials based on the eye-witness testimony of named individuals, transmitted in their names.
He starts from the importance for ancient historians of eyewitness testimony, as the proper foundation for their work. In a fresh examination of material from Papias, he demonstrates Papias’s focus on eye-witness testimony at a time when the Gospel eyewitnesses were dying out ”” drawing out the likeness to present-day interest in oral history.
Bauckham suggests that the presence of named persons in the Gospels often marks that individual as the source, and even guarantor, of that piece of the tradition. The names of the Twelve are preserved, he argues, because they were the official eyewitnesses and guarantors of the core of the Gospel tradition.
–John Nolland in a Church Times review of Richard Bauckham’s Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as eyewitness testimony (Eerdmans, 2006)