Richard Bauckham

Richard Bauckham (b. 1946) is a British New Testament scholar and Anglican theologian, Emeritus Professor of New Testament Studies at the University of St Andrews and Senior Scholar at Ridley Hall, Cambridge. Educated at the University of Cambridge, he taught at the University of Manchester before his long tenure at St Andrews. His scholarship spans New Testament historiography, early Christology, biblical theology, Jewish apocalyptic literature, and the theological reception of Scripture. His most influential intervention, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses (2006; expanded 2017), argues that the canonical Gospels preserve testimony traceable to named eyewitnesses, challenging the dominant form-critical assumption of long anonymous oral transmission. The thesis has been received as a major counter-proposal to the legacy of Bultmann and reshaped debates on Gospel reliability, though it has drawn substantive criticism from scholars such as Judith Redman, Jens Schröter, and Dale Allison concerning the reliability of eyewitness memory and Bauckham's reading of Papias. In Jesus and the God of Israel (2008), he develops a "Christology of divine identity," arguing that the earliest Christians included Jesus within the unique identity of the God of Israel without compromising Jewish monotheism—an alternative to evolutionary models of high Christology associated with Bousset and Casey. Bauckham also writes on ecological theology, the theology of Jürgen Moltmann, and biblical eschatology.