Jesus and the Eyewitnesses Quotes

“Testimony should be treated as reliable until proved otherwise. “First, trust the word of others, then doubt if there are good reasons for doing so.”
― Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony

“Young scholars, learning their historical method from Gospel scholars, often treat it as self-evident that the more skeptical they are toward their sources, the more rigorous will be their historical method. It has to be said, over and over, that historical rigor does not consist in fundamental skepticism toward historical testimony but in fundamental trust along with testing by critical questioning…”
― Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony

“This means that “meeting the current toward elimination of names is the counter current of late development, which . . . gave to simplified matter the verisimilitude of proper names.”
― Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony

“However it—or the kind of extreme individualistic epistemology it embraces—can lead historians to an overly skeptical approach particularly to those sources that were intended to recount and inform events of the past, that is, testimony in this restricted sense. Particularly in Gospels scholarship there is an attitude abroad that approaches the sources with fundamental skepticism, rather than trust, and therefore requires that anything the sources claim be accepted only if historians can independently verify it…”
― Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony

“However it—or the kind of extreme individualistic epistemology it embraces—can lead historians to an overly skeptical approach particularly to those sources that were intended to recount and inform events of the past, that is, testimony in this restricted sense. Particularly in Gospels scholarship there is an attitude abroad that approaches the sources with fundamental skepticism, rather than trust, and therefore requires that anything the sources claim be accepted only if historians can independently verify it…..”
― Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony