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Loading...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 you might mistake one photo for another, but basically it is all in there in your head.
Since the 1930s, psychologists have realized that it’s not that way at all. When you see or otherwise experience something, you don’t
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Dr Ehrman,
Do you have any comments about how “race memory” fits into this?
I’m afraid that’s an aspect of memory I’ve never studied.
I’m afraid that’s an aspect of memory I’ve never studied.
What role does Gospel authorship play in the memory discussion? For example, I would expect to see more collective memory if they were written a generation later by people not at the events. I know you would argue that even if written by the traditional authors, that wouldn’t guarantee historicity of all events narrated. But wouldn’t that at least decrease the likelihood and quantity of development and collective history taking over the narrative?
Yup, it makes a big difference if an eyewitness is writing what she remembers and if soneone completely unconnected with the events forty years later is.
“These other authors were living later and were recounting stories they had heard.”
I would guess that some of these authors were also making up their own stories about Jesus versus recounting a story that they had heard, correct?
Some people were certainly making up stories. Whether authors were intentionally crating narrative fictoins is an interesting but at this point, and probably eternally, unanswerable.
Much of this post seems to be a carbon copy of the one you posted on May 3, when you began this series of posts on memory (https://ehrmanblog.org/35192-2/). Just pointing that out in case it’s not intentional.
See how bad my memory is?
I wonder whether some additional factor might be at work. Given “mnemohistory” could there be something one might call “mnemotendency”, for lack of a better word? The latter term would refer to specific and characteristic ways that people confabulate, or fill in blanks, to make a coherent narrative out of remembered events.
Yup, there’s a lot of that too.
All those questions about memory are very interesting , but, were the NT writers really interested in telling stories about Jesus received by oral transmission?
Take for instance the forger(s) of the Pastorals.
They were really worried about church management (among other problems, like fighting evil heretics!) , issues like how to choose the right bishop or to “honour widows”.
But from 1 Cor we know that Paul’s worries in running his churches were different, he was expecting the very end of the world,no time for taking care of widows !
In the case of Mark, our first gospel, we don’t have any eyewitness account to contrast with
(as in the case of the Pastorals against genuine Paul’s epistles) but I think Mark’s main goal was to address the problems his community faced and not to inform us, two thousand years later, about what really happened to Jesus.
So his depiction of Jesus’s passion, for instance, could be as far from reality as the depiction of Paul’s churches in the pastorals,not because of issues of memory but because Mark was not interested in telling what really happened.
Most NT authors weren’t interested in repeating oral stories about jesus, no. The Gospel writers definitely were though.
The gospel writers were not the exception, they also wanted to address the problems their communities were facing, it is just they chose a Jesus bio as a frame for their message.
Dr. Ehrman,
Do you think that Acts 7:26 is a good example of how ōphthē can be used in a way that
clearly indicates objective plain sight?
I think that’s what the word almost always means. (Though I’m not sure what “objective” sight would be. As opposed to “subjective”?)