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Is there any possibility that the "eyewitness accounts" of the Gospels are merely a literary technique of the evangelists?

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.

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.

You devote a significant amount of time to the Fourth Gospel. If it is an ideal example of eyewitness testimony, though, why is the Gospel's principal eyewitness anonymous? Plus, isn't your confidence in this Gospel a major reversal of what scholarship has traditionally said about it?

My view is that the author of the Gospel was a disciple of Jesus who was not, like the Twelve and others, well known in the early Christian movement. He does not, as Mark does, transmit the authoritative tradition of the Twelve. So he has to establish his credentials. He has to convince his readers that, although the way he tells the story is rather different from the traditions they know, he really is in a good position to know what he says about Jesus. So he introduces the Beloved Disciple gradually, building up a picture of a disciple who is ideally situated to write a Gospel, and only, right at the end, does he reveal that this disciple (himself) actually did write the Gospel.

Of course, most scholars in the last several decades have not thought the Gospel could be written by an eyewitness. One reason for this is the considerable differences between it and the other Gospels, including the fact that it is a much more strongly interpretative Gospel. I think some of these problems are solved if we recognize that the author was not John the son of Zebedee, but a disciple who was outside of the Twelve and close to a different circle of disciples from those the Synoptic traditions came from. I also think the author was a creative and idiosyncratic thinker who spent a lifetime trying to deepen his understanding of the events he remembered. He wrote a very different sort of Gospel, but it was precisely because he had been close to Jesus that he thinks himself authorized to interpret Jesus and his story so extensively.

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June (Web-only) 2007, Vol. 51