Richard Bauckham Richard Bauckham Richard J. Bauckham (born 22 September 1946) is an English Anglican scholar in theology, historical theology and New Testament studies, specialising in New Testament Christology and the Gospel of John. He is a senior scholar at Ridley Hall, Cambridge. In 2006, Bauckham published "Jesus and the Eyewitnesses," described by many scholars as a paradigm shift in Gospels study. In this book, Bauckham argues that the Synoptic Gospels are based "quite closely" on the testimony of eyewitnesses, while the Gospel of John is written by an eyewitness, against the current scholarly consensus that the Synoptic Gospels are closer to
New Testament by saying "The more often you have copies that agree with each other, especially if they emerge from different geographical areas, the more you can cross-check them to figure out what the original document was like. The only way they'd agree would be where they went back genealogically in a family tree that represents the descent of the manuscripts. In attempting to determine the original text of the New Testament books, some modern textual critics have identified sections as additions of material, centuries after the gospel was written. These are called interpolations. In modern translations of the Bible, the results