I am reading with the greatest benefit, pleasure, and admiration, Richard Bauckham’s massive new study, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony (Eerdmans, 2006).

For those who know my own work, and that of Bauckham, this high praise might come as a surprise, since it seems Richard and I are on opposite poles of the earth when it comes to theological perspectives and outlooks. Bauckham is such a thorough and careful researcher and a clear writer, I have benefited greatly from all his works, particularly, what I consider to be his masterpiece, Jude and the Relatives of Jesus in the Early Church.

This latest work is truly monumental and the data that Bauckham collects, as well as his methods and arguments in the work, merit careful consideration by historians of early Christianity. On Bauckham’s central thesis, namely that our N.T. gospels are based on eyewitness testimony of those who personally encountered Jesus, and what he concludes therefrom, I have serious reservations. On the other hand, I do indeed think that our two main narrative sources (Mark and John), and our primary teaching source (Q), are far from theological creations of anonymous communities, significantly removed from the historical Jesus. I also agree that within these sources are embedded something very close to what one might call “eyewitness” material, that is, material that is not simply created out of whole cloth as some type of theological fiction. What I think has to be factored in, however, are the sharp and diametrically opposing theological “camps” that were part and parcel of the first forty years of the movement, namely the views of Paul and those of James and Jesus’ original followers. In other words, the “products” we finally get in our gospels are wholly influenced by the triumph of Paul’s theology and perspective, his “Christ faith,” as Bousset, Reitzenstein, Baur, Bultmann, Schweitzer, Klausner, and others have called it. And the master narrative, really the “only” narrative, in the ears of most of us, is that of Luke’s account in Acts, that I take to be almost wholly contrary to what was actually going on in the Jerusalem based Jesus movement of the Nazarenes before Paul came along. Those issues I will argue more fully in my forthcoming book on Paul, but in this post I wanted to pick up on an aspect of Bauckham’s latest work, namely the carefully work he has done on the proper names mentioned in our gospel sources, that I think is as fascinating as it is valuable for historical purposes.

If we take the names mentioned in Mark and John, excluding public persons such as Herod or Pilate, and the names of the Twelve, we get the following very interesting lists for comparison:

Levi of Alphaeus (2:14)*

Jairus (5:22)

Mary mother of Jesus (6:3)

Jesus’ brothers: James, Joses, Judas, and Simon (6:3)

Bartimaeus son of Timaeus (10:46)

Simon the leper of Bethany (14:3)

Simon of Cyrene and his sons Alexander and Rufus (15:21)

Joseph of Arimathea (15:21)

Mary Magdalene (15:40, 47; 16:1)

Mary, mother of James and Joses (15:40, 47; 16:1)*

Salome (15:40)

Nathanael (1:45)*

Nicodemus (3:1)

Joseph, father of Jesus (1:45; 6:42)

Lazarus, Mary & Martha (11:1)

Malchus (18:10)

Mary Magdalene (19:25; 20:1, 18)

Mary of Clopas (19:25)

Joseph of Arimathea (19:38)

I have put a * by the italicized names of Levi of Alphaeus in Mark, and Nathanael in John, as some traditions identify Levi as the apostle Matthew and Nathanael as Bartholomew, both of the Twelve.

I want to draw out a number of observations about these two lists. First, In terms of the names themselves, notice the following four sharp contrasts:

* Mark mentions Jesus’ mother Mary and the names of his four brothers but never mentions his father Joseph.
* John in contrast, never mentions the names of any of Jesus’ brothers nor that of his mother.

* Mark knows nothing of the family of Lazarus and his two sisters, Martha and Mary, and he has the anointing of Jesus at Bethany done by an anonymous woman in the house of Simon the Leper.
* John knows nothing of Simon the Leper and states that Mary of Bethany was the one who anointed Jesus.

* Mark knows nothing of Nicodemus, involved in burial of Jesus, whom John gives a prominent role.
* John knows nothing of Simon, father of Alexander and Rufus, carrying Jesus cross.

* Mark has a blind begger, Bartimus, healed by Jesus at Jericho and John knows no such person or story.
* John says the man’s whose ear was cut off by Peter at the arrest of Jesus was named Malchus, something Mark does not know.

What stands out here I think is that Mark and John together have precious few names, and the names they have, other than the ones in bold, do not in any way correspond to one another. Mark and John seem to clearly be drawing upon different traditions, given the unique names that each knows, unknown or unmentioned by the other. Also, the named individuals suddenly seem to cluster at the end of each gospel, in contrast to the opening chapters (Mark 1-9 and John 1-10).

In contrast, in terms of who was at the crucifixion scene, and involved in the burial, they suddenly agree on three names: Mary Magdalene, Joseph of Arimathea, and a mysterious “Mary” that Matthew calls “the other Mary,” whom Mark says was the mother of James and Joses, and John says was “of Clophas” (probably, but not certainly meaning “wife of”). I have argued elsewhere, on this Blog and in my book, The Jesus Dynasty, that this “other Mary” is actually the mother of Jesus, married to Joseph’s brother Clophas, but for my purposes here I will not go into this. My point is that in terms of named individuals Mark and John have an impressive agreement about this particular scene in the life of Jesus, and that the roles of the two Marys, and of Joseph of Arimathea are crucial to each of them. This is all the more impressive in the light of the fact, as seen here, that they never share any other of these unique names in common.

I think this supports further the idea I have been discussing in this series of posts comparing Mark and John, that they reflect independent traditions, each drawing upon their separate sources, and here I agree with Bauckham, that eyewitness materials play a part in this process. Both the gospel of Mark and the gospel of John are wholly shaped by theological concerns, there is no doubting that. However, when it comes to these names, various core stories, certain narrative frameworks, places and locations, chronological indications (especially in John), and a basic story flow, I am not convinced we are dealing with materials that are simply “constructed,” as if one is writing theological fiction. The trick is to identify the theologically embellished material and separate it out from its underlying core. I think this can often be done, not perfectly, but with some degree of assurance. For example, we can be quite sure Jesus ate a last meal with his disciples, as both John and Mark report, but whether the words associated with the “bread” and the “wine” that Mark records are historical is quite questionable on many grounds. In the same way, I think we can be quite sure that Jesus was put in a temporary tomb after his crucifixion and that Joseph of Arimathea was involved in that burial, attended minimally by Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James and Joses. In the same way I lean strongly toward accepting the “historicity” of the empty tomb narratives, at their core, with Jesus’ corpse moved to another location for permanent burial, while the accounts of the various “appearances,” first in Matthew, then greatly expanded by Luke and John, are closer to theological/apologetic testimony than history per se. The task of sorting through this material is perhaps more “art” than “science,” but it is not “unscientific,” in that it relies upon the critical methods historians use to evaluate any textual materials.

I find the unique names in Mark and John, with minimal exceptions of Joseph and the two Marys at the cross and burial, to be quite important in support of the position I hold that Mark and John offer us independent traditions and I am grateful to Bauckham for working all this out in the fashion he does in his book with some very detailed charts that include names in all four gospels.

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