Frontline books

As atheists rage, some good treadmill reading about Christianity | Marvin Olasky

Books by atheists are hitting the best-seller lists, but defenders of the faith should not miss other new books that are flying in under major media radar. One outstanding scholarly work, Richard Bauckham's Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony (Eerdman's, 2006), concludes that "the Gospel texts are much closer to the form in which the eyewitnesses told their stories or passed on their traditions than is commonly envisaged in current scholarship."

Bauckham, a professor at St. Andrews in Scotland, even argues unfashionably (within academia) that Mark's Gospel is indeed largely Peter's eyewitness account and John's is also from an eyewitness. One of Bauckham's techniques is to look at the psychology of remembering: He shows that unique, consequential events in which an individual is emotionally involved are those most likely to be remembered well. Along the way he criticizes the theories of James Dunn and others that the Gospels are the result of oral tradition and collective memory-of-sorts.