Richard Bauckham, in Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, argues that these assumptions are highly unlikely, because good historians in the ancient world ordinarily interviewed eyewitnesses and documented it by naming them in their work. This is exactly what the Gospel writer Luke claims at the beginning of his work to have done. He says that he is recounting the events “just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses” (Luke 1:2).15 Bauckham and others show how often the names of eyewitnesses—Simon of Cyrene, his sons Rufus and Alexander, Cleopas, Malchus, and
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