You stress the importance of memory. But don’t some scholars question the reliability of communities to transmit accurate information from generation to generation?<\/p>\n
First, studies show that predominantly oral societies have ways of preserving accurately those traditions they wish to preserve, even across many generations. In this respect, they treat different sorts of traditions differently, and the question is: Did the early Christians want to preserve testimonies about Jesus faithfully?<\/p>\n
Second, in the case of the Gospels, we are not really talking about traditions passed from generation to generation like folklore. The Gospels were written within living memory of the events. They are what historians in the ancient world regarded as the only sort of history that should really be written, that done while eyewitnesses were still accessible. They are what modern historians call oral history. The central thread through my book is my attempt to put the eyewitnesses of Gospel events back into our picture of how Gospel traditions reached the evangelists. The eyewitnesses (many of them, certainly not just the Twelve), I suggest, remained the authoritative sources and guarantors of the traditions they themselves had formulated. This is one way the transmission of the traditions was controlled, and it’s a key factor in the origins of the Gospels themselves.<\/p>\n
Is there any possibility that the “eyewitness accounts” of the Gospels are merely a literary technique of the evangelists?<\/p>\n
It’s not impossible. If you have conventional techniques for indicating sources, they can be used fictionally as well as authentically. But in this case, we can, as I’ve mentioned, test the authenticity of names and the way they occur in the Gospels. Random invention wouldn’t account for the specific names we have. Also, the naming of witnesses is more occasional and unobtrusive than we would expect if the device were used fictionally. Some of the later apocryphal Gospels (Gospel of Peter, Protevangelium of James) appeal to eyewitness testimony fictionally, and the ways they do so are blatant and obvious.<\/p>\n
I was especially concerned to counter the common scholarly view that the Synoptic Gospels don’t indicate their eyewitness sources and thus are not concerned about eyewitness testimony. I wanted to show that they do have ways of indicating the eyewitness origins of their traditions.<\/p>\n