Eyewitness Testimony and the Characters in the Fourth Gospel

'No character in a book is a real person. Not even if he is in a history book and his name is Ulysses S. Grant' or she is in a history book and her name is Margaret Thatcher. It is, however, clear that some characters are pure fiction, some are quite accurate representations of reality and others still are somewhere in between. This essay examines the contributions made by theories of character and characterization and the work of psychologists on eyewitness testimony and human memory to our understanding of where along this continuum the characters in the Gospel according to John might fall. It is clear that the author of the Fourth Gospel is a much more gifted storyteller than are the authors of the Synoptics. In its pages, characters come alive. We are not just told that the man born blind had an encounter with the Jewish authorities. We learn that he had a mischievous sense of humour that caused him to ask them 'Why do you want to hear it again? Do you also want to become his disciples?' (9.27). Martha tells Jesus not just that her brother has been dead for four days, but 'already there is a stench' (11.39). The Fourth Gospel contains the claim (in 21.24 and slightly more obliquely in 19.35) that its author is the disciple Jesus loved, an eyewitness to the events it sets out, and that his testimony is true. If we accept this at face value, what does it mean? A recent article by James Charlesworth demonstrates that there is a returning confidence among scholars that the Fourth Gospel contains historically accurate material as well as theological reflections about Jesus.4 Richard Bauckham says that the eyewitnesses to Jesus life and ministry 'remained the living and active guarantors of the traditions' in whose name they were transmitted, and that '[t]estimony offers us ... a theological model for understanding the Gospels as the entirely appropriate means of access to the historical reality of Jesus'. This essay looks at what level of historical reality of Jesus we might access through the Fourth Gospel. In doing so, it will examine the depth of characterization and purpose of the characters in the Gospel; first-century understandings of historical method and how the Fourth Gospel fits with them; eyewitness testimony as an accurate tool for understanding events; and the possible role of eyewitnesses in early Christian communities.