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Loading...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 census that Caesar Augustus had established so that “the whole world” would be registered. They had to go to Bethlehem because Joseph was descended from King David, and that’s where David had come from. While they were there for this short trip, Mary just happened to go into labor and so Jesus was born in Bethlehem (as, of course, the prophet Micah indicates: the ruler of God’s people will come from Bethlehem; Micah 5:2), even though he was from Nazareth.
So the question is – was Luke recalling this event because that’s how he remembered it based on stories he had heard? Or is he making it up? My view is that there is no way to know. For all sorts of reasons that I’ve given on the blog before I think it’s safe to say the story didn’t happen the way Luke described. In my judgment it *did* happen in very, very broad outline something like that: Jesus was really born, his mother was someone named Mary, his father was someone named Joseph, and she did go into labor sometime during the reign of Caesar Augustus. But the entire business of a trip to Bethlehem to register for a census is an invented tradition. It’s not what happened.
And so, some of my interlocutors would say that if Luke made it up then Jesus wasn’t being remembered this way. Luke
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Since there is absolutely NO evidence for such a census, and that Luke could reasonably be expected to KNOW that there was no such census, It is not unreasonable to conclude that Luke was making things up. But it brings up the question of how much anyone would be likely to know about even relatively recent events, in the absence of wide spread literacy or “news outlets”. Most people must have lived in a world of rumor and fantasy, with nothing to put a constraint on even the wildest ideas. Hard to imagine such a world.
Are the accounts that Jesus was buried, and that an influential and/or rich man facilitated the burial, gist memories too?
As an atheist who has come to regret my earlier trolling, I see characters (like John Crossan) as *not unhappy* about provoking a reaction by stating Jesus rotted on the cross.
And the evidence for this assertion of Jesus rotting on the cross is “because that is what happened most of the time” (the potential for a latinesque governor to be influenced by a rich/influential man in some cases, and the finding of Yehohanan ben Hagkol’s ossuary in a tomb, not withstanding).
I supposed they are gist in the sense that Jesus’ remains must have been disposed of and someone must have done it.
I’ve heard you say that
1. this is your best book that nobody has read, and
2. most New Testament scholars are unfamiliar with the psychological and sociological literature on memory.
I’m curious to know what feedback and objections you’ve gotten from Christian scholars on this book and what you make of them.
Most scholars don’t bother to read trade books in their field! So I haven’t gotten feedback.
Interesting. When I first started reading you in 2012, you wrote a blog post called “Crucified Bodies and Scavengers”
(https://ehrmanblog.org/crucified-bodies-and-scavengers-for-members/), which described Crossan’s “argument that rather than being properly buried, Jesus’ body may have been eaten by scavenging dogs.”
Anyone with experience with scavenging dogs would realize the potential for no-burial-at-all… pieces get dragged off into the brush and there is frequently nothing left of a carcass to dispose of.
It is weak to insist on Jesus rotting on the cross and his remains being dispersed by scavenging dogs, solely on the basis of “that is what happened most of the time.” Especially given that at least some crucified individuals were in fact buried (like this individual from Roman Britain, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/first-physical-evidence-of-roman-crucifixion-found-in-britain-180979190/).
There are multiple attestations that Jesus was buried, and that a rich and/or influential Jew facilitated this. Yet, the gospels (especially with time) show the crowd of Jews as bloodthirsty in demanding Jesus’ death, in order to make the Jews look bad.
If Jesus burial was contrived, is curious that all the accounts are of an influential Jew caring to have Jesus properly buried…
Let’s ignore all that in favor of Crossan’s simplistic-assertion scavenging-dogs ATE Jesus because “that is what happened most of the time.”
No one is saying that the remains were not buried. (Or at least no one that I know of). The questoin with both him and the fellow found in Britain is how long after death were they disposed of. The point is that Romans did not dispose of the bodies at the time of the crucified’s death, but days or even longer later.
Matthew 27:53. If Matthew is right then the other gospels are wrong and Paul’s theology wouldn’t agree either. False memory or invention?
Could be a false memory of someone else’s invention 🙂 (as one of the many options.)
Hi Bart. My name is Steve. I’m from Palmerston North, New Zealand. I was raised a Catholic. I am extremely grateful for the education you are giving me and others about all things biblical. Thank you. Could you please tell me what Mark 6: 14-16 says about Jewish understandings of the resurrection of the dead, because I thought they understood it as an end-times event. Also, these verses seem to be a precedent for the resurrection of Jesus, as if Jews, including Herod, believed that a bodily resurrection could occur. Or is the resurrection of Jesus a radical departure from Jewish belief ( at least in first-century Palestine)? These questions in relation to these verses from Mark have been nagging at me for a long time. Kind regards, Steve.
Good question. If these verses reflected an event that actually happened in Jesus’ life in the 20s, it would make for a particularly interesting problem. Usually it is thought, though, that the passage is a later formulation. Elijah, of course, never died and was expected by some to come back before the end (Malachi 4); if someone thought John had been raised from the dead, it would be more like a resuscitatoin (e.g., like Lazarus or Jairus’s daughter), not a “resurrection” in the fully apocalyptic sense that he had been raised as an immortal being never to die again. Jesus’ own resurrection is unusual, though, since the main category was a resurrection of *all* the dead. That’s why Christians thought of him as the “first” (or as Paul says, the first-fruits of the resurrection): everyone else was soon to follow.
Why does the Bible record that Elijah never died?
It’s trying to show his superior holiness before God.
Interesting! I will read the Elijah story. Where does the Hebrew Bible record his story?
This kind of thing is very easy to find these days: just google something like “Elijah going up to heaven” In this case it’s in 2 Kings 2.
Doesn’t the term “false memory,” at least as used in psychology, imply eye witness recall error? Why wouldn’t “embelishment” be a better term to describe apologetic inventions from gist strata? I think your interlocutor are just wanting to convey the difference between humble miss remembering by eye winesses vs innocent accrued telephone game type embelishment vs deceptive wholesale apologetic invention.
Not necessarily. You can misremember a story I tell you about someone else, and when you do, that too is a false memory — just a different kind from a false memory of something you yourself experienced. Or you could consciously embellish a story you’ve heard: but then when people hear that and think about the person the story was told about, they in another sense are “falsely” remembering her when they think of her.
Bart, was Micah saying Jesus would be born in the town of Bethlehem or be from the clan of Bethlehem — in other words be a descendant of King David? I’ve seen Jewish scholars make a strong case for the latter and was interested in what you thought. If so then both Matthew and Luke went to extraordinary links to contrive the fulfillment of a prophecy that never existed
Bethlehem was the name of a small town. I’m not sure what the “clan” of Bethlehem would be? Are they thinking of the Ephrathites, the clan from Ephrath that allegedly founded Bethlehem? Either way, in Matthew the verse is referring to the place of Jesus’ birth, showing his connection with David.
Thanks Prof Ehrman for these ongoing & interesting posts re memory. It’s a classic case where we all have trouble being objective since every person is affected by memory (we ARE the guinea pigs)! As I often reflect – we can never escape or be outside of our own limits of biology or psychology, and I hope we would not want to be.
From the logistics you detail of the problems relating to claimed recorded memory (especially by the inerrantists & fundamentalist-types who insist all biblical narratives must be accurate history – they simply have to!) springs my objection to extended monologues such as the Sermon on the Mount, Matt 25, John 17. From a single hearing the author could recall & record verbatim decades later? That’s just nonsensical.