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Loading...Here I continue thinking about memory in relation to Jesus by dealing with an obvious objection to the idea that Jesus’ followers, and those who heard the stories about him, were prone to misremember what they saw and heard — these were SPECTACULAR events. Aren’t spectacular events and stories far more likely to be remembered accurately than the everyday stuff we forget all the time? Here’s how I discuss the issue in my book Jesus Before the Gospels (HarperOne, 2016).
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One of the scary things about memory is not not simply that we forget things over time or don’t quite remember things correctly. Sometimes we actually have “distorted memories,” that is, recollections – often quite vivid – of things that did not happen. One of the fairly recent discoveries in the field is that distorted memories can be implanted in people’s minds, for example, by hearing distorted information about a past event and then remembering it as part of the event. That can happen even with respect to events of one’s own personal history. Psychologists have long known this is true of children: adults can be made to think that as a child they were once lost in a shopping mall, or that they accidentally but disastrously overturned a punch bowl at a wedding. Now it is known that distorted memories can be inadvertently planted or created in adults as well, as Daniel Schacter and others have strongly argued. [1] In addition, as leading expert Elizabeth Loftus has forcefully stated “once activated, the manufactured memories are indistinguishable from factual memories.”[2]
Many people will agree that this sort of thing happens on occasion, but as a rule we are reluctant to think it happens a lot, or at least (for most of us!) that it happens a lot to us in particular. We especially tend to think that our most vivid memories – precisely because they are vivid – are the most reliable. That turns out
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The “most amazing deeds and remembrances,,,well at least some of which has to be among the seven ‘signs’ attributed to Jesus in the Gospel of John. Even though I find them amazing, and I even could label them truth (for me), but still I do not believe that they (most of them in the way it is written) happened historically. There are numberous reasons, even within the text itself, why I (I am not a scholar), don’t think they are not historically accurate, but I think of them to give an an elevated portrayal of Jesus as the Son of God or Christ. Regardless of it is written in flawless Greek, and incorporating various Hellenistic motifs such as the ‘logos I lean to it was speaking to a Jewish-Christian audience using a “mystical” language and symbols. Jesus emphasizes the concept of being born of the spirit, the indwelling of Jesus/Christ, accessing celestial realm(s), possessing eternal life, and undergoing human exaltation and transformation, perhaps leading to unity with Christ. To convey this portrayal of Jesus as the Christ, stories of amazing “signs”/deeds are being used.
The question should not simply focus on “remembering” a histoically biographical Jesus, but rather on understanding the authors’ intentions to portray Jesus as the Christ within a religious context.
Wooooooow, what an interesting series of articles !!!
Having worked for more than 20 years in the same firm I always found it amazing the fact that we “the old colleagues” remember in such a different way many events from the “old times”. On one occasion one of my colleagues remembered a supposed argument between (say) Paul and John ….it turns out that Paul joined the firm after John left it , how could he “remember” something that could never happen?? And he swears that he remembers it !!! (I still remember the shock on his face when he confronted the records… or is it also a false memory?)
Also the events related to “hard times” were the ones that were most “recorded” in different ways and when the memories could be confronted to data records none of us could remember the exact details, but we all were sure that we were right!!!
Your colleague is probably remembering a real argument but misremembering one of the participants. Memories can get mixed up with other memories. For example, in his June 7th blog, Bart mentioned the crash of a 707 into an apartment building in 1992. People’s memories of it are going to include memories of how the story was covered on television, including any animations of the crash that are often provided, and discussions and videos of other such disasters. Those things could easily be misremembered as an actual video of the crash. In fact, there were quite a number of airline disasters in 1992 and 1993 and memories of any of them could be easily confused with the specific disaster that people are trying to remember. And with something like the Challenger disaster, people are going to have a hard time with accurate memory due to strong emotions and the fog of confusion that surrounds such emotions. People are going to hear the “breaking news” more than once as the story is retold and new information becomes available. All of this is bad news for people who want to insist that the gospel accounts are reliable.
My greatest problem is the alleged fulfilment of prophecies.This strongly suggests to me that much of what was told was ” so that prophecies” may be fulfilled,literally.Invented stories clothed the out-of-context prophetic lines. It could also be said that the mere fact of deriving contemporary truth from cherry-picked prophecies betrays an insecurity about those stories.
First,when did this obsession with fulfilled prophecy begin?
The Tanakh ,as I remember,doesn’t relay the fulfillment of prophecies.The prophecies remain open,seemingly forever,as ominous utterances understood,at least by Jews,in hope,inspiration and sometimes fear.By secular Jews,many prophecies are clearly understood to be after the fact.Even Isaiah’s “Suffering Servant” refers to the sufferings of the people Israel.
Secondly,is there any Hebrew Bible hero whose coming was prophesied?
David and Solomon(Sons of God),Cyrus of Persia,all Messiahs (anointed, as was King Charles),or Bar-Kokhva;each was “a Messiah” or even “the” Messiah in their time,”the one” sent to defend and liberate Israel from its enemies each and every time.
None of their reigns was said to have been ” prophesied “.
I see this extreme,illegitimate overuse of Hebrew Bible prophecies as attestation of a lack of real foundation for most of the Christian story,or at least a pronounced apologetic anxiety on the Evangelist’s part.
I agree Gisele!
I guess the under riding big question is ” how did Jesus become the *Jewish* *rejected* Messiah? As per the Hebrew Bible, Jews never rejected those that God anointed. Even a fraudster such as Shabbetai Zvi was accepted as Messiah.
How did Jesus become the ” forever”, “one and only” Messiah,when Jews accepted and reverently remembered each and every one of their Messiahs, and the reason for their praying one such would come to save them from the Romans?
He was the “rejected Messiah” only because his followers believed he was the messiah and realized that most other Jews did not. He was the “accepted” messiah by *them* (his followers) of course just as Shabbatai Zvi was by his followers.
Prof. Ehrman, I’m looking for a French translation of the Bible, and I really like The New Oxford Annotated Bible in English: do you know if there’s a French equivalent? In essence, I’d like to get my hands on something that aligns with modern scholarship. Your help is greatly appreciated. All best!
Off hand I don’t know, but I bet there is!
Thanks for your reply. I’ll continue to look into it.
Has anyone proposed that the miraculous stories of the gospels may not necessarily be miracles performed during Jesus’ life so much as teaching stories written by later Christians to contest the doctrine of competing sects of Christianity?
If you interpret the parable of the wheat and the tares as Jesus originally sowed good seeds in the world in the form of good Torah-abiding disciples, but after he “slept” (died), imposters – in the form of tares – entered and contaminated the field, then we have a pretty decent candidate as to who the wicked one refers to. Given that the parable openly pronounces the tares to be those who “practice Torahlessness” (Matthew 13:41), you can make the case that the gospel author was referring to Paul and his followers, as Paul waived the Mosaic Law for his congregation.
The question remains, how faithfully did the Jewish Christians wish to record Jesus’ life for a Gentile audience? Matthew openly declared “Do not give what is holy to the dogs [a Jewish curse word for Gentiles], and do not throw your pearls before pigs [another curse word]”. Their motives would have been geared far more towards containing budding heresies than writing biographies.
In my book I argue that the miracle stories are later legends from after jesus’ death; if so, they could well have function in a variety of ways. And I think the gospels themselves had multiple functions, not just one thing (opposing heresies, teaching correct ethics, inspiring believers, etc.) Matthew, btw, ends his Gospel precisely by having jesus instruct his followers to go and “make disciples of all the nations (=gentiles).” His point is that the movement started *out* as only for Jews but then, after jesus was rejected, went to all peoples.
In the Clementine Homilies, the Jewish Christians declared that the “true Gospel must be secretly sent abroad for the rectification of the heresies that shall be” (Homily II, Chapter XVII). Given that the teachings of a 1st century rabbi were considered Oral Torah and forbidden to be writen down, the gospel of Matthew was – arguably – written purely to combat heresies. If you perform a thought experiment and read the Synoptic gospels not as a biography of Jesus’ life but as an overlay of the journey of the religion founded in Jesus’ name, with the various heresies depicted as leprous, blind, deaf, and non-ambulatory individuals whose heresies could be healed through faith involving observance of the Torah, then a very different picture emerges.
Matthew 28:19 was probably a later addition to the gospel. You can tell which sayings originated from the Jewish Christians because their Jesus spoke only in parables (Matthew 13:34). For example, Matthew 27:46 does not say My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me? Phonetically in Hebrew, the short form of Elijah is Eli. Jesus’ final words on the cross were Elijah, Elijah, why have you forsaken me? (See Matthew 11:11-14.)
I”m not sure where you’re getting the idea that Jesus was considered a rabbi whose oral Torah could not be written down.
Other scholars have argued that Matt 28:19 is an addition to the Gospel, but there’s no real evicdnece for it and it’s never really caught on very widely.
I”m not sure where you’re getting the idea that Jesus was considered a rabbi whose oral Torah could not be written down.
Other scholars have argued that Matt 28:19 is an addition to the Gospel, but there’s no real evicdnece for it and it’s never really caught on very widely.
Well both John 20:16 and Mark 10:51 have individuals referring to Jesus as “Rabboni”. Given a rabbi means teacher in Hebrew, every single incidence of the word “Teacher” within the gospels is someone referring to Jesus as a rabbi (Matthew 22:36, Luke 20:39, Mark 10:20, etc). A lawyer – an expert in the Mosaic Law – deferred to Jesus’ interpretation of the greatest Mosaic commandment in Matthew 22:35-36. The prohibition on writing down the oral Torah was not broken within Jewish circles until the turn of the third century when Judah HaNasi compiled the Mishnah. Were the early Jewish Christians inclined to break taboo? They would have been your only eye witnesses.
Ancient Hebrew was a word poor language, the Hebrew word for nations, can also be translated as Gentiles. Matt 28:19 is probably better translated as “make disciples of all Gentiles, baptizing them…” In contrast, the Jesus of Matthew 10:5 tells his disciples: “Don’t take the road that leads to the Gentiles, and don’t enter any Samaritan town”. It’s quite hard to make disciples of and baptize all Gentiles if Jesus’ followers aren’t even supposed to approach Gentiles. Like Mark, Matthew may have textual additions appended near the end.
The point most interpreters make is that everything, for matthew (written in Greek, not Hebrew), changes after the rejection of Jesus in Jerusalem and the crucifixion/resurrection. NOW the message is to go to the “nations/gentiles”. “To the Jew first and then also to the Greek,” as Paul puts it.
But Irenaus noted “Matthew, indeed, produced his gospel written among the Hebrew in their own dialect” (Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History V 8,2) – as did St. Papias and Origen. The Gospel of Matthew survived in Greek manuscripts, but it was originally written in Hebrew. There are a lot of Hebrew idioms in Matthew. In Matthew 16:19, to bind and loose means to forbid and permit respectively in Hebrew. In Matthew 6:22, a good eye refers to someone who is generous and a bad eye refers someone who’s stingy. A native Greek speaker wouldn’t use such terminology. There is stoichiometric evidence of textual expansion: “Niceophorus, Patriarch of Constantinople from 806-818, counted 2200 lines of texts in the Hebrew Matthew and according to his computations was 300 lines shorter than our Biblical Matthew” (Missick, Stephen). The Epistle of Peter to James records Peter as saying ” I beg and beseech you not to communicate to any one of the Gentiles the books of my preachings”. James is writing only to the “twelves tribes” (James 1:1) of the diaspora. That doesn’t sound like the Jewish sects were cued to go converting all Gentiles.
There are solid linguistic reasons for thinking that our Matthew was not written in Hebrew; for one thing, it has extensive word-for-word agreements with Mark, in *Greek*. That couldn’t happen if it was a translation from Hebrew. That doesn’t mean that the sayings of Jesus recorded in matthew were all originally Greek — some definitely go back to Aramaic sayings But the author composed in Greek.
It doesn’t appear that Papias is referring to *our* Gospel of Matthew. He never quotes it (so we can’t see if what he has in front of him is what we have), but more important the one substantive thing he says about the Gospel that he is calling Matthew is not a description of our Matthew: he says it was a collection of sayings. Our’s isn’t that (Thomas is, and presumably Q was, but not Matthew. By the third century or so everyone assumed Matthew was written in Hebrew, but they had no independent evidence of it — they were just passing along the traditoin that everyone held….
Furthermore, Epiphanius, the bishop of Salamis (b. 310 AD), noted that the Hebrew version of the Gospel of Matthew in circulation within Jewish Christian circles was “not, however, full and complete, but spoiled and cut down” (Adversus Haerses 30.13). Though nothing is definitive 2 millennia afterwards, you can make the case that Matthew 28:19 may not have been original to the Gospel of Matthew and that conversion of Gentiles only began once Paul started his ministry years after Jesus’ crucifixion.
If you’re interested in seeing how complex the traditions are about “Jewish Gospels” I’d suggest checking out the classic by Klijn and Reininck, Jewish Chritian Sects, or Klijn’s Jewish Christian Gospel Traditions
I will definitely look into it. I explored the Judaic roots of Christianity because it was highly helpful in comprehending the message of the New Testament authors. If you redefine the word glory according to the secondary word meaning in Hebrew (kavod – a radiant physical manifestation of a divine body, ex: Exodus 40:34, Ezekiel 11:23), you see that Paul also uses the word glory in the Hebraic sense, see 1 Corinthians 15:39-41. Paul’s baptism was a death baptism, where the soul/spirit died and was resurrected (born again) by the permanently indwelling Spirit of Christ, seeding the transformation of a mortal body into a celestial body, and granting access to the mind of Jesus: Romans 6:3-4, Galatians 2:20, 1 Corinthians 6:15, 1 Corinthians 6:19-20, 1 Corinthians 12:13, 1 Corinthians 3:16, 1 Corinthians 2:16, 1 Corinthians 15:42-49, II Corinthians 4:10-11,II Corinthians 13:5. Paul promised his followers divinity. Jesus was the firstborn of this celestial race, but definitely not the lastborn: Romans 8:29, 1 Corinthians 6:3, Romans 8:15-17. The Gnostics called it hidden knowledge, but it’s more like it’s lost in translation.