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Loading...It has become clear to me, in seeing a number of responses to my posts on memory, that I’m not quite explaining myself clearly enough to get my point across to everyone. So, well, what else is new?
When I have mentioned “false memories” in the Gospels – that is, recollections of Jesus that are not true to what really happened – some readers have pointed out that these may not be memories at all, but they may simply be what the Gospel writers made up for their own reasons. In that case Jesus isn’t being “remembered” in these ways. Someone’s just making up stuff.
In response to that view, let me make two points, the second one of which is the the most relevant and important. The first, though, is that in most cases I don’t think there is any way to know whether a non-historical tradition in the Gospels is something that the Gospel writer inherited from others before him or invented himself. Take Luke’s story of how Jesus came to be born in Bethlehem.
In Luke, and only in Luke …
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I may be jumping the gun, but I can’t help asking, are you ultimately going to argue that stories always change in predictable ways? (I’m remembering your saying names were typically made up for people whose names weren’t originally known.) With the corollary that it’s possible to work backwards, and determine what a story originally was – not necessarily the “truth,” but at least, the core of the story?
No, I don’t think there’s is any predictability about how stories might change — since people telling them are always so different from one another themselves!
Well, expressing ideas clearly and logically is not one of your problems. Indeed, you have an amazing “gift” for thinking and expressing ideas clearly and concisely and have shown tremendous courage, which I deeply respect, in expressing these ideas.
The example that most intrigues me is the one in Matthew about Jesus riding on both a donkey and a colt. Various discussions of this passage often end up sounding like the author of Matthew, or someone else who influenced the author of Matthew, just added or made up the “colt” part to fulfill an Old Testament prophecy which the author of Matthew apparently misunderstood.
To me, it makes a very big difference whether these stories are historical, thought to have a historical or “gist” core although distorted by substantial oral storytelling, or were actually knowingly made up by the authors to illustrate a theological point or maybe just to tell a fictional story. Surely, the author of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas knew he was telling a fictional story and probably the same could be said about the author of the Gospel of Peter regarding the talking, walking cross?
I don’t know! One wonders if Matthew really thought that people came out of their tombs and started walking around Jerusalem when Jesus was raised from the dead!
Professor, Along that line and something I’ve wondered about since reading “How Jesus Became God” … what was the state of belief in ghosts mid first century?
I suppose it depends on what we mean by ghost! If you mean intangible appearances of dead people, then yes, these are attested.
So if ghosts (particularly lifelike ones such as Mrs. Muir’s Captain Cregg) were not out of the ordinary a vision of Jesus wandering around Galilee would not be either. Certainly it would not constitute a Messiah. Hence the need for the Gospels after Mark to make the point of a bodily resurrection (reanimation) which of course then led to an ascension lest having to explain where is he now, did he die again etc… I can almost see a back and forth between the Jesus Movement and Jews with Christian claims ever ratcheting up to counter doubts.
Or maybe there were very deep reasons for needing to make up this story and add it in. Maybe it is being put in there so that only a certain few would see behind, beneath the apparent intentions. I’ll end this comment with puzzling words that just don’t seem to have a reason to be here. Asellus australis and Asellus borealis. The better question might be who in the hell named these things and in what year? BEFORE or AFTER Matthew?
@RGM-ills “maybe there were very deep reasons for needing to make up this story and add it in.”
Could be or maybe there’s a very deep reason to make such a claim without any evidence.
Incidentally Mike Licona got himself into some hot water with literalists when he described the whole saints
ressurrection story as poetic rather than historical.
After reading this post i retract my comment in your “My Original Interest in Memory” post about remembering events from my own life clearly. I know sit here wondering how much of what i do recall is really accurate, misremembered or indeed a false memory.
A point very well made sir!
I was born in March of 1963. I have NO memory of the JFK assassination. Later after I learned to speak and listen, read and write, I learned of the event. I still have no memory of it. I CANNOT remember it. It is possible for me to remember what I have read about it, heard about it, watched about it, but it is NOT a false memory of the death of JFK. Is everything I read about JFK truth? Certainly not. Has anything been made up or invented about it? Certainly. Can I tell the difference? No. Can I eventually, as I grow older and more fuzzy with my memories one day think I remember the JFK assassination? It’s possible, but as long as I can do math and know my birthday and the date of the event, I should be able to determine that I really can’t remember it. I think you should re-phrase your thread to be memories of False Stories, not False Memories. Thank you for your attention.
To “remember” something simply means to call it back to mind (see the dictionary!). You don’t need to experience something personally to bring it back to mind!
I am not afraid to argue with the Dictionary either. “Call it back” and “bring it back” implies it was there before, and I can accept that definition, but I believe it leaves out something though, called INPUT. The INPUT mechanism has to distinguish how accurate the data can be and the accuracy assessment determines how trustworthy the memory is or is classified. (probability of actual history or probability of pure analogous metaphor, or the probability of a mixture of both)
But I understand you are stylizing collective memory here of a society, which ambiguates (don’t care if this really isn’t a word) the dangers of trust in information and/or indirectly memory. Surely we don’t want to fuel future generations into venerating a character named “Sponge-bob Square-pants”.
A creative story about a pebble’s journey through the sand, around sea shells, leaving a path in the sand as waves push it farther inward on the shoreline, experiencing an odyssey, meeting interesting clumps of algae, dueling a side-stepping crab, etc. CAN offer a value for communicating information or concepts, but should never be trusted to become a memory of anything other than an instrument or device, societal or otherwise.
Your topic is false memories, and I think your point is how do all the inputs of memory from experience, and from shared information get intermingled to form false memories perceived later as from experience memory alone.
See today’s post and see if that helps.
It does. Thanks. It would still be of interest to know if the various flavors of false memories (gnostic, orthodox, etc) were intentional or simply just collective horseshoes.
You beat me to the punch! I was going to ask about the whole passion story precisely because it seems there’s little if any way his followers would know what actually happened.
Bart, I think people might be confused by your definition of false memories. In the medical, psychological and legal literature, false memories are defined as BELIEVED-IN MEMORIES OF PERSONAL EXPERIENCES that are false or are falsely remembered by specific persons. Beliefs ,stories, narratives, myths, folklore and conspiracies that are false but are circulating in a community or culture are not considered false memories by memory experts since these are not claimed to be first-hand memories of personal experiences.
For example, a false memory can be created in the mind of Bill that he was abducted and probed by space aliens after he is hypnotized and presented with leading questions. After hypnosis, Bill would believe his false memories of alien abduction were real personal experiences from his past. But the fact that a fifth of the U.S. population believes that Bill was abducted by space aliens after his story was publicized is not considered to be a false memory by experts who study false memories. That would be a collective false belief. If Bill willfully fabricated/hoaxed his alien abduction story to fool people that also would not be considered a false memory by memory experts. Bill knew he fabricated the story and did not personally believe it to be a real personal experience from his past. Anyone who believes BIll’s hoax to be a real event would simply have a false belief about Bill being abducted by aliens and not have a false memory about Bill.
See the PubMed database published by the U.S. National Library of Medicine for thousands of studies and reviews about false memories.
Hobart
See today’s post!
To the question: “Can A Made-Up Story Be A False Memory?”, I think that the answer is: How it can not?
Could the very early creeds (like Phil 2.6-11) be examples of the propagation of false memories? (That creed seems to relay the memory/false-memory/legend of pre-existence.)
I’m not sure if that’s a memory or not — I suppose by a loose definition it would be.
With Luke’s birth story for Jesus, some people will twist, reinterpret, and make stuff up so that *somehow* that birth story might be true. But when someone has to put the Bible thru that many contortions, hopefully it will occur to them, “maybe it’s just more likely that the story isn’t true”.
I’m not totally sure I’m following, here. From a psychological standpoint I would argue that I can’t possibly have a false memory of Jesus, since I don’t have a memory of Jesus at all. I could falsely remember once having been told something about Jesus, and someone who knew Jesus could have a false memory of something that he said or did. But it’s not clear to me that a “false memory” in the sociological collective memory sense is the same as a “false memory” in a psychological sense (although presumably the latter could play a contributing role in creating the former).
Yes, I would differentiate between what psychologists say about personal memory and what sociologists say about collective memory. You can’t personally have a false memory of your experience of the historical Jesus. But you could have a false memory based on what you’ve *heard* about Jesus (you could misremember what you heard), or you could participate in a false collective memory of Jesus. In my opinion!
Paul’s writings are supposed to pre-date the Gospels. So why is his belief about the resurrection sequence noted in 1 Cor. 15 not reflected in the later Gospels?
I would suppose they come from different streams of tradition!
Hmmm. I am going to ask an acquaintance of mine that has a Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (HSAM) about how reliable people’s memories are compared to his and if we tend to create false memories. If anyone would know, he would.
I havent read Richard Carriers “Historicity of Jesus”, where I beleve he denies Jesus existed at all.
I am very intersted in the Roman records of Jesus existence, and wondered as a biblical scholar, as I am certain you have dug into the history – if you could direct me to any journals on Roman history in regard to Jesus interactions with Pontius Pilate?
There are no records of this in any Roman sources. And, in fact, no mention of Pontius Pilate in any non-Christian/non-jewish sources. Then again, there aren’t references to *most* people, even important people, in any Roman sources…
Since it’s a given that so many or all of Jesus’ followers were peasants and therefor illiterate (as so much of that culture was), how could they have even written down anything remembered. Obviously, the gospel writers were educated folks who lived after the actual witnesses were gone.
For some years, I had a false memory *of a certain thing’s being my very first memory of anything in my life*. What I thought was my very first memory: seeing a huge American flag outside my school! (We were heavily indoctrinated with “patriotism,” as well as religion. There was a time when I believed *neither* Jesus nor Abraham Lincoln could be depicted in a movie.)
But eventually, I did recall many earlier things. The earliest probably being a very young child’s memory of the fascinating movements of tiny (possibly reddish?) things we see with our eyes closed, when those eyes are extremely *new*.
When you use the term “false memories”, you give the sense that it is our memory that is at fault. As far as the birth narratives go, I don’t think that’s the case at all. It’s possible that our story tellers are just accidentally adding false details over the years until we end up with a whale of a tale, but it seems much more likely that someone along the line just told a big fat lie (though we can’t be certain whether it’s Luke or L who’s telling the fib).
Dr Ehrman
DO most scholars agree that jesus’ predictions about his death were made up by later christians?
will jesus’ predictions be covered in your book?
No, I won’t be coveroing them. Predi ctins about his own deathand resurrection are widely seen as later words put on his lips.
when we see jesus rebuking peter
quote :
31He then began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and after three days rise again. 32He spoke plainly about this, and Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him.
33But when Jesus turned and looked at his disciples, he rebuked Peter. “Get behind me, Satan!” he said. “You do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns.”
this could really be christians rebuking jews for thier interpretation of messiah?
so jesus = christians and peter = jews
is this possible?
i was just wondering whether the quote from mark was created out of arguments between jews and christians
My sense is that it is trying to correct a misinterpretation of what kind of messiah Jesus was, held by those who could not see that he was one who had to suffer and die for others.
I am having the same difficulty as some others on this thread, and I think it has to do with terminology. My initial puzzlement was that I don’t actually remember Jesus’ birth, but I do remember what I read about Jesus’ birth. I think you clarified a little when you distinguished between psychological memory and sociological memory. However, Your point seems to be that when we believe (or participate in, as you put it) a made up or just wrong story( or collective memory), that is a false memory. For example, if I told you that my oldest son is 15 and his name is Jake, you would probably agree since you don’t care one way or another. But, if later you’re remarking to your class about this idiot on your blog who made a comment and used an example about his 15 year old son Jake to bolster it, you would be falsely remembering. I do, indeed have an oldest son, but he is not 15 and his name is not Jake. This makes it sound like anything we say if not objectively signified in history is a false memory. I am sure I’m missing something.
See today’s post and see if that works better for you.
Regarding the very basic fact of Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem, we find such statement – in a very concise and direct way – also in Matthew. Couldn’t it be part of “gist” memories as well?
In my opinion it’s quite unlikely that Luke *and* Matthew made-up such memory independently. There must be (likely) a common tradition underneath. Maybe a false memory from tradition, maybe a “gist” memory..
It’s true that Bethlehem is the perfect candidate for a “theologumena” for davidic lineage, but it’s also true that Jesus is actually remembered as “son of David” almost everywhere .. Any “gist” memory at play?
I guess there are scenarios where it’s hard to decide, beside the criteria we apply. So my questions are two:
1) Is there any probability of “gist” memory for Bethlehem/son of David?
2) Should memory studies replace traditional criteria (e.g. multiple attestation, etc.), or should they be complementary?
Thank you!
It certainly could be. The question is whether it is!
I know your loyal blog and book readers are grilling you on this syntactical fine point, but better now before less friendly critics attack in fora in which you are not allowed to clarify (like radio, tv, etc).
I don’t know about the scientific or academic terminology, and what I’m about to say would probably be too clumsy to freight your book with throughout, but my term for what you are describing is a “false memorialization” or “false memorial”, that I either remember accurately (a true memory of a false memorial) or I myself misremember (a false memory of a false memorial).
Yeah, I’m a bit uneasy about “memorial” and its cognates: it sounds too much like a physical structure that is erected to recall something in the past (the Viet Nam Memorial in Washington, e.g.)
All this discussion of memory, Bart, has reminded (lol) me of Faulkner’s lawyer in Chapter 8 of Absolom! Absolom!, a character first brought to my attention by the wonderful historian C. Van Woodward in a seminar on the history of the antebellum South that I took with him forty years ago.
As Quentin and Shreve try to piece together the story in their Cambridge dorm room a half century later, they posit (on grounds that are not clear) the existence of a lawyer:
“Or maybe she was so busy grooming him that she never thought of the money now, who probably never had had much time to remember it or count it or wonder how much there was in the intervals of the hating and the being mad, and so all to check him up about the money would be the lawyer and he (Bon) probably learned that the first thing: that he could go to his mother and hold the lawyer’s feet to the fire anytime, like the millionaire horse has only to come in one time with a little extra sweat on him, and tomorrow he will have a new jock.”
By the end of the chapter, this vaporous lawyer has murdered his client and ridden off to Texas with her money:
“He did beat me while he—he—(“Listen,” Shreve said, cried. “It would be while he would be lying in a bedroom of that private house in Corinth after Pittsburg Landing while his shoulder got well two years later and the letter from the octoroon (maybe even the one that contained the photograph of her and the child) finally overtaking him, wailing for money and telling him that the lawyer had departed for Texas or Mexico or somewhere at last and that she (the octoroon) could not find his mother either and so without doubt the lawyer had murdered her before he stole the money, since it would be just like both of them to flee or get themselves killed without providing for her at all.”)—Yes, they knew now.”
Without doubt, indeed, lol!
Thanks so much, Bart, for stirring *my* imperfect memories! 🙂