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Another Jewish Miracle Worker

One more post dealing with my memory book before moving on to other things.   I thought readers of the blog might be interested in the following passage, where I talk about a famous Jewish teacher who was known, on the basis of eyewitness reports, to heal the sick, cast out demons, and raise the dead.  No, I’m not talking about Jesus.  I’m talking about the an 18th century holy man, who founded Hasidic Judaism.  Here is what I have to say, in the course of my chapter 3.  (The following is a relatively unedited draft: it is not polished yet for style or typos, so don’t worry about those….  The discussion occurs in the middle of a chapter on the value of eyewitness testimony; I include the preceding paragraph to give some context) *************************************************************** To sum up the situation, consider the words of one of the world’s leading experts on distorted memory, Daniel Schacter, “Numerous experiments have demonstrated ways in which imagining events can lead to the development of false memories for those events.”[1] But [...]

2020-04-03T13:45:48-04:00May 6th, 2015|Book Discussions|

My Memory Book, ch. 3

In my previous post I started to summarize what I will be covering in my new book, which hopefully will be published next spring, possibly under the title Jesus Before the Gospels.   After devoting the first chapter to a demonstration that everyone agrees that some early Christians were inventing stories about Jesus (as seen in the apocryphal Gospels; it should be stressed – those who read and thought about these Gospels “remembered” Jesus in light of the stories they told),and a second chapter to showing how critical scholars, for as long as there have been critical scholars (late 18th century) have argued that also in the NT there are “invented” traditions that also affected how Jesus was remembered, I move on in the next chapter as follows.  (My original plan for this thread was to summarize all six major chapters of my book in one post; then it was to summarize two chapters per post; but I want to devote an entire post to this chapter!  And so it goes….) Chapter three is tentatively entitled, [...]

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