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Eyewitnesses and Guaranteed Accuracy
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Eyewitnesses and Guaranteed Accuracy

Historical Jesus, Memory Studies

Eyewitnesses and Guaranteed Accuracy

In my book Jesus Before the Gospels, I discuss how “memories” of a famous person based on eyewitness testimony can be easily distorted. Among other examples I use, is a famous miracle-working holy-person from outside the Christian tradition that is in many ways strikingly similar to the situation with Jesus (there are obviously big differences as well). Here is what I say about it in my book: ****************************** To sum up the situation, consider the words of one of the world’s leading experts on false memory, Daniel Schacter: “Numerous experiments have demonstrated ways in which imagining events can lead to the development of false memories for those events.”[1] Does such research have any bearing on the memories about Jesus, a great teacher and miracle worker, by eyewitnesses or by those who later were told stories by eyewitnesses – or even those told stories by people who were not eyewitnesses? Can imagining that a great religious leader said and did something make someone remember that he really did say and do these things? It might be [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:02:57-04:00June 6th, 2023|Historical Jesus, Memory Studies|

Being Realistic about How Stories about Jesus Spread before the Gospels

In my previous post I showed how Christian missionaries – the vast majority of them not companions of Jesus or eyewitnesses to his life – were telling stories about Jesus as they moved around in the empire spreading the gospel in the early decades, before the Gospels were written (think Paul and his missionary companions, Timothy, Silvanus, etc – none of them from Israel, none of them having laid eyes on Jesus before his death). The problems of word-of-mouth traditions are even more complicated than I’ve so far discussed, however. Here is how I go on to discuss the matter in my book Jesus Before the Gospels (HarperOne, 2016). ****************************** It was not only these missionaries who were converting others, however. The converts they made were themselves converting people. Take another hypothetical but completely plausible situation: suppose I’m a worshiper of the traditional Roman gods, living in the town of Colossae in, say, the year 50 CE. The missionary Epaphras comes to town and I meet him at his place of business. I’m a highly [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:02:57-04:00June 4th, 2023|Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus, Memory Studies|

Who Was Spreading the Stories about Jesus Before the Gospels?

Here I continue my reflections on how stories about Jesus were floating around the Mediterranean world *before* the Gospel writers wrote their accounts (based on these stories). I pick up here with the final paragraph of yesterday's post, again taken from my book Jesus Before the Gospels (HarperOne, 2016). ****************************** In other words, a story does not have to be written in the newspaper or broadcast on the evening news or even on modern social media to get around, very widely and very quickly. Moreover, the vast majority of the people telling the story – just within three days – are people who were not eyewitnesses and did not get their information from eyewitnesses. What do you suppose happens to stories when they are told, remembered, retold, and then remembered again, just within three days? Or three years? Or, as in the case of Jesus, 40-65 years? How many changes would be made in them? One important issue, of course, involves the storytellers themselves. Who was actually telling the stories about Jesus? To [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:02:57-04:00June 3rd, 2023|Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus, Memory Studies|

Jesus, Eyewitnesses, and Stories Floating Around….

I return now to questions about how early Christians “remembered” Jesus as they told and retold stories about him. People often claim that the Gospels must be accurate because they are based on eyewitness testimony that was carefully guarded to ensure its accuracy. But let’s think about that for a bit in realistic terms. Here is how I discuss the matter in my book Jesus Before the Gospels (Harper One: 2016). ****************************** If during the 40-65 years separating Jesus’ life and the surviving Gospels, his sayings and deeds of Jesus were not memorized by his followers and then passed down, verbatim, through the church, and if they were not circulated accurately within informally controlled settings, how were they being told and retold? One obvious point to stress, which has not occurred to everybody, is this: stories about Jesus were circulating even during his lifetime. Moreover, even then they were not being told only by eyewitnesses. When someone who saw Jesus do or say something then and told someone else who wasn’t there, it is impossible [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:02:56-04:00June 1st, 2023|Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus, Memory Studies|

Are Groups of Story Tellers (Think: Ancient Followers of Jesus) More Likely to Preserve Traditions Accurately than Individuals?

This post will conclude my mini-thread trying to show that modern practices of story telling in the Middle East, during a community ritual called the haflar samar, in which groups of knowledgeable people ensure that stories are never significantly changed, has no bearing on the question of whether ancient stories told about Jesus were preserved accurately over time. Here I take on a bigger question, as addressed in in my book Jesus Before the Gospels: Does this group context for telling the stories ensure that they are accurate? Actually, modern psychological studies suggest that just the opposite is normally the case. Cognitive psychologists have studied the phenomenon of “group memory” and have reached several very important conclusions that might be surprising. One is that when a group “collectively remembers” something they have all heard or experienced, the “whole” is less than the sum of the “parts.” That is to say, if you have ten individuals who have all experienced an event, and you interview the ten separately, you will learn a good deal about what [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:02:56-04:00May 28th, 2023|Historical Jesus, Memory Studies|

Do Modern Mideastern Story Tellers Show How the Ancient Traditions of Jesus Were Circulated?

In my previous post I discussed a seemingly-plausible explanation for how modern ways of telling stories in small communities in the Middle East today can show that the Gospels may well represent literal word-for-word depictions of what Jesus said and did. Here I show why in fact the theory does not work, as laid out in my book Jesus Before the Gospels (Harper, 2016) ****************************** As we have seen, Bailey argued that modern tellers in the Middle East today work in a small community context, where the stories of a village's past (its key figures, its main events) are circulated in group meetings in the presence of others who observed the events as well and make sure to correct what a particular story teller says when he gets a detail awry. That, Baily argues, is what happened in the ancient world as well -- so stories about Jesus were preserved intact through the presence of others who knew them and could provide checks and balances for accuracy. The problem is that this claim (whether or [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:02:56-04:00May 27th, 2023|Historical Jesus, Memory Studies|

Do Modern Mideastern Customs of Story Telling Show that the Gospels Are Accurate?

I've been discussing modern explanations of how the traditions about Jesus found in the Gospels could in fact be historically accurate even if they were passed on by word of mouth over the years and decades before anyone wrote them down. The natural suspicion is that stories that get told and retold by different story tellers in different times and places year after year will change, somewhat significantly, and that some tales and sayings attributed to an important figure will be invented, with no historical basis at all. It happens all the time. It probably has happened to you. Someone says you did or said something and it’s just not true. Most of them time when you find out about it you are not amused – especially if it’s someone who actually knows you. At other times you might think it is indeed amusing. But isn’t it different with the ancient world, and especially with stories being told about Jesus? In my previous posts I talked about the theory of a New Testament scholar (Gerhaardson) [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:02:38-04:00May 25th, 2023|Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus, Memory Studies|

More Problems with Thinking Jesus’ Followers Memorized the Stories about Him

In my previous post I began to explain the problems with the idea that Jesus' followers, like all good students of Rabbis in the Jewish tradition, were trained to memorize what he said and did, so that the Gospels provide us with reliable accounts of his life. This idea was most forcefully promoted by Swedish scholar Birger Gerhardsson and was popular for a while in scholarly circles. But it is widely seen today as problematic. Here is how I continue to explain some of the issues in my book Jesus Before the Gospels (HarperOne, 2016). ****************************** An even bigger problem is that we have clear and certain evidence that Jesus’ followers were not passing along his teachings, or accounts of his deeds, as they were memorized verbatim. This is one of the complaints that other scholars generally lodge against Gerhardsson – he does not engage in a detailed examination of traditions that are preserved in the Gospels in order to see if his theory works. What is the evidence that Jesus’ teachings were preserved word-for-word [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:02:38-04:00May 24th, 2023|Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus, History of Biblical Scholarship|

Didn’t the Disciples Memorize Jesus’ Teachings and Accounts of His Life?
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Didn’t the Disciples Memorize Jesus’ Teachings and Accounts of His Life?

Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus, History of Biblical Scholarship, Memory Studies, Public Forum

Didn’t the Disciples Memorize Jesus’ Teachings and Accounts of His Life?

I've been talking about how scholars began to realize in the early 20th century that the stories of Jesus in the Gospels were based on oral traditions that the Gospel writers inherited decades earlier. But is that really a problem? Here's how I discuss the issue in my book Jesus Before the Gospels (HarperOne, 2016). ****************************** Many people, when they first consider the reality that the traditions in our Gospels must have circulated orally for decades before being written down, come up with a commonsensical response. Surely the sayings of Jesus, and the accounts of his life, were actually memorized by his followers, so that they would be preserved accurately. Aren’t oral cultures known for being able to preserve their traditions spotlessly? After all, since they didn’t have written records to keep their memories alive, people in such cultures must have worked with special diligence to remember what they learned and to pass their stories along seamlessly from one person and one generation to the next. Right? Unfortunately, decades of intense research have shown that this [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:02:38-04:00May 23rd, 2023|Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus, History of Biblical Scholarship, Memory Studies, Public Forum|

Stories of Jesus Passed on By Word of Mouth. When Scholars First Took Oral Traditions Seriously.

I'm discussing how scholars came to realize that Mark our earliest Gospel is not simply a nuts-and-bolts, unembellished, accurate report of what Jesus said and did. This kind of scholarship reached a kind of climax about a century ago with a group of scholars called "form critics." To make sense of what they said and why they said it, I need to start where I left off yesterday -- and so I'll repeat the end of yesterday's post to get us a running start on today's, taken from my book Jesus Before the Gospels (HarperOne 2016). ****************************** Where did the stories found in the Gospels themselves come from? The "form critics" (a term I'll explain below) maintained that they did not come from authors who were themselves followers of Jesus or who acquired their information directly from eyewitnesses. The stories instead came from oral traditions in circulation in the years prior to the Gospels. The authors of the Gospels – all of them, not just Mark – wrote down stories that had been passed along by word [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:02:38-04:00May 21st, 2023|Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus, History of Biblical Scholarship|

Does Mark Present the Bare-Bones Facts about Jesus’ Life?

In my previous post I showed how scholars in the 19th century came to think that our shortest and evidently-least-embelished Gospel Mark gave the accurate account of Jesus ' life, so that any reconstruction of what Jesus really said and did simply could simply assume that Mark provides the essential information. But is that right? It eventually came to be seen as wrong. Here's how I discuss the matter in my book Jesus Before the Gospels (HarperOne, 2016). ****************************** The problem with Mark is that it is so terse that there are huge gaps in the narrative. It is hard to determine what is driving Jesus’ action and what his ultimate objective is. To solve that problem 19th-century scholars writing about Jesus filled in the gaps either with inventive narratives they spun out of their own imagination or with psychological analyses about what must have been motivating Jesus at one point of his life or another.[1] All of these efforts were rooted in the sense that Mark is the earliest and most historical account without any [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:02:38-04:00May 20th, 2023|Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus, History of Biblical Scholarship|

How Can We Get Behind “False Memories” of Jesus to the Historical Facts?

I'm discussing how in both the ancient and modern worlds people have constructed "false memories" of who Jesus really was. In this post I give a brief explanation of how scholars became increasingly aware of the problem and, for a time, thought they had found a solution: Mark's Gospel is the unembellished version and so we need to stick mainly with that! How'd they come up with *that* one? And is it true? This is taken from my book Jesus Before the Gospels (HarperOne, 2016). ****************************** Throughout the history of scholarship, especially since the nineteenth century, scholars have realized that Christians in the early years after Jesus’ death were not only altering traditions about Jesus’ life and teaching that they inherited, they were also inventing them. We do not need to wait for non-canonical Gospels such as the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Peter, or the Gospel of Nicodemus for “distorted” memories of Jesus to surface among authors and their readers. (Recall: by “distorted memory” I simply mean any recollection of the past that [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:02:38-04:00May 18th, 2023|Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus, History of Biblical Scholarship|

Did Early Christians “Invent” Memories of Jesus?

I've been talking about how we remember things -- or misremember things, or make up memories of things -- as a way of getting to the question of how, in our heads, we think about what Jesus said and did. This is all part of my larger project that came incarnated (inletterated?) in my book Jesus Before the Gospels. As I point out early in the book, we remember most things just fine, but we also often get things either partially or completely wrong. Memories can be frail, faulty, and false. And not just our individual memories, but also the “memories” we have as a society. In previous posts I illustrated the point by talking about social memories of Abraham Lincoln and Christopher Columbus. But what about faulty memories of Jesus (see my last post if it doesn't make sense to talk about "remembering" someone we never knew!). To get to this question, in my book, I talk about some of the modern representations of Jesus by current-day scholars and popular authors – for example, Jesus [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:02:37-04:00May 17th, 2023|Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus, History of Biblical Scholarship, Public Forum|

In What Sense is a Made-Up Story about Jesus a False Memory??

In the past, when I've said that the Gospels sometimes contain “false memories” of Jesus people have objected: these may not be memories at all, but simply stories 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 will be the most important, but first things first: 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 we have a specific explanation of how it is that Jesus was born in Bethlehem, if – as evidently everyone knew – he actually came from Nazareth. It is that when Mary was full-term pregnant, she took a trip to Bethlehem with her espoused Joseph in order to register for a [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:02:24-04:00May 13th, 2023|Historical Jesus, Memory Studies|

Does Understanding “Memory” Have Any Bearing on the Study of the Historical Jesus?

In my earlier posts I began to discuss my book, Jesus Before the Gospels, which deals with how understanding how "memory" works can contribute to our assessment of the Gospels stories about Jesus. Long before starting the book I had been intrigued the question of how eyewitnesses would have remembered the Jesus' life, and how the stories about Jesus may have been shifted and altered and invented in later times based on faulty or even false memories. Those questions led me to be interested in memory more broadly. Memory is an enormous field of research, just within cognitive psychology. I spent many months doing nothing but reading important studies, dozens and dozens of books and articles. It is really interesting stuff. Memory is not at all what I started out thinking it was. Like most people I had this vague notion in my head that memory worked kind of like a camera. You see or experience something and take a photo of it and store it in your head. Sometimes the photo might fade, or [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:02:23-04:00May 10th, 2023|Book Discussions, Historical Jesus|

The Naked Man of Mark 14:51-52, the Secret Gospel, and a Pressing Question: Did Jesus Engage in Homoerotic Behavior?

I am providing here a thread of posts on Morton Smith’s discovery, in 1958, of the “Secret Gospel of Mark,” a longer version of Mark’s Gospel in a letter allegedly written by Clement of Alexandria who attacks a group of nefarious Gnostics. Smith argued this really was an authentic letter, that the Secret Gospel really did exist in antiquity, and, yet more intriguing, that IT was the older form of the Gospel of Mark. Our Gospel of Mark *today* is an abbreviated version, edited to rid the Gospel of a couple of potentially scandalous passages. Whoa. Could that be right? Here’s a summary of Smith’s argument: ****************************** There are some interesting features of the shorter version – the one found in the New Testament – that can be explained if the longer version were the original, and this is some of the evidence that Smith and others have adduced for their view. To take the second quotation first. Clement indicates that it appeared after the first part of Mark 10:46: “And they came to Jericho; [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:02:07-04:00April 20th, 2023|Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus|

Why Purgatory Makes Sense

Christians have always had a wide variety of beliefs about the afterlife, and just about everyone (who chooses) is able to find biblical support for their views. The Bible itself has an enormous range of views. Among other things, there have always been Christians who have thought that there must be varying levels of punishment for sinners in the afterlife. The guy on the street who does his best but is not always a very good father surely doesn’t get punished to the same degree as Hitler. Among believers who are convinced that there are different levels of punishment I would certainly class those who believe in purgatory. Even though it is a view almost universally rejected by Protestants, purgatory can make a lot of sense even to some of them. The afterlife is not just black and white, one thing or the other, either/or – it is not either eternal bliss for all the saints and eternal torment for all the sinners. There must be gradations, right? And purgatory is a way of implementing [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:02:06-04:00April 11th, 2023|Afterlife, Historical Jesus|

The Quest for the Legendary Jesus. Platinum Guest Post by Robert Droney

Now *here* are some smart and interesting reflections about a topic most of us think is rather crucial: the quest for Jesus. But which Jesus? And which quester? Here Robert Droney discusses the search for the "legendary Jesus" by one who is questioning his faith. It should generate some feedback! So comment away! ****************************** I “accidentally” listened to the audio book of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. I intended to check out H.G. Wells’ The Invisible Man. My disappointment grew when I realized Ellison’s novel focused on racial issues. Not because I consider racial issues unimportant. Rather, I consider racial issues and racial justice very important. In fact, I believe that, in the same way that the Colosseum stands as an icon for Imperial Rome, slavery and racial tensions will epitomize the American Republic. However, I find the cacophony of ideologies, rhetoric, and the partisan bickering about racial issues in the media tiresome and, in my opinion, these don’t do much to change people’s minds or resolve the problem. Nevertheless, I continued to listen to Ellison’s [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:02:06-04:00April 10th, 2023|Historical Jesus|

What If I Commit the Unforgivable Sin? Can It Be Purged in Purgatory?

In my previous post I discussed one of the passages of the New Testament that has traditionally been used to support the idea of Purgatory, the place that most of the “saved” go after death to be purged of their sins (Matt 5:26 “you won’t get out of there until you have paid the last penny”). In my judgment this passage is not talking about what happens in the afterlife, even though it has been read that way. With another passage, the matter is not quite so clear. In a famous passage, again in Matthew, Jesus talks about the “unforgivable sin”: “Therefore I tell you every sin and blasphemy will be forgiven people, but the blasphemy of the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven; and whoever speaks a word against the Son of Man, it will be forgiven; but whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit it will not be forgiven, either in this age or the ages to come.” As you might imagine, over the Christian centuries there have been numerous interpretations of what that [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:02:06-04:00April 8th, 2023|Afterlife, Historical Jesus|

Was the Roman Soldier Pantera Jesus’ Father? His Cousin? Platinum Guest Post by Omar Abur-Robb
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Was the Roman Soldier Pantera Jesus’ Father? His Cousin? Platinum Guest Post by Omar Abur-Robb

Historical Jesus, Public Forum

Was the Roman Soldier Pantera Jesus’ Father? His Cousin? Platinum Guest Post by Omar Abur-Robb

As many of you know, one of the perks of being a Platinum member of the blog is that members are allowed to submit posts that go only to other Platinum members, and after four appear a vote is taken to see which one of them can go on the entire blog. This time it is a controversial and interesting post by Omar Abdur-Robb. If you have comments / questions, let him know! ****************************** A Summary of an article: Discussing the conclusion of James Tabor related to the relationship between Jesus Pantera and Abdes Pantera, and presenting a new model for this relationship (Jan 2023). Omar Abur-Robb Library: https://omr-mhmd.yolasite.com James Tabor has a conclusion in his informative book “The Jesus Dynasty”. He noticed a reference for a tombstone in Germany that was dedicated to a Roman soldier from Sidon with the name “Abdes Pantera”. This immediately grabbed the attention of Tabor and he started studying it. One of his conclusions in the book was that this soldier might be the true biological father of [...]

admin2025-07-16T17:41:34-04:00March 22nd, 2023|Historical Jesus, Public Forum|

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