Part 5. Memories about Jesus: Memories before Memoirs
Memories about Jesus: Memories before Memoirs
Many ancient biographies depend on earlier biographies or on other written sources closer to the time of the events narrated. Apart from public annals, however, the earliest biographies inevitably depend on memories—those of the biographer, eyewitness interviewees, or those who had heard the stories. I believe that the foregoing research demonstrates that mainstream ancient biographers had historiographic intention. That is, they sought to follow ancient expectations for historiography: despite flexibility in telling their stories, they depended on information for events in ways that novels did not. I have not so far sought to address the question that is much more difficult to answer in the absence of extensive evidence—namely, how reliable were the first-generation memories?
Before memoirs, one must have memories, and the memoirs are only as valuable for historical reconstruction as the memories on which they rest.1 Seeking to create cohesive accounts, ancient biographers sometimes imaginatively filled gaps in their information with plausible guesses, inferences, and the weakest of sources. The preference of mainstream biographers, however, was to adapt genuine information when they had it available. This context raises the question for the Gospels: would the Evangelists, writing decades after the events they narrate, have had access to much reliable information?
The focus of this book is on ancient biographies written within living memory of their subjects. Such biographies do not need to be written by eyewitnesses themselves, but they normally rested, at some remove, on memoirs or memories of those who were (see ch. 9). What might have happened to memories over the course of several decades?
Memory studies emphasize the frailty of human memory, but they also demonstrate that eyewitnesses are normally able to recount many significant episodes from the prime of their life decades after their experiences (ch. 14). Jesus was a teacher, which entails that he taught his disciples. For at least thirty years after Jesus taught them, these disciples remained in prominent roles in the church, respected even in the Diaspora.2 While they did not formally “control” the tradition, they would be the most authoritative sources quoted by others for Jesus stories and would remain the go-to sources for evaluating what stories about Jesus were most reliable (ch. 15).
Could some of their stories, when retold secondhand or thirdhand, become garbled? We recognize even from everyday experience that such distortion happens at times, but granting the possibility of distortion, what measure of distortion should we anticipate? That is the subject of the final memory chapter (ch. 16), which addresses oral tradition and oral history. Studies of oral tradition suggest that over the course of generations collective memory condenses, conflates, and adapts its material, yet it ordinarily preserves the core of its stories. Evidence further suggests that, by the standards of such oral tradition, the time frame between Jesus’s ministry and any of the first-century Gospels is quite brief.
That is, these chapters show that memory studies offer no reason to discount our earlier conclusions that the Gospels as ancient biography preserve substantial information about Jesus. Biographies from within living memory of their subject normally include stories from their subject’s lives that go back to the earliest memories. In general, the core of any given story from within living memory is likelier than not to recount a genuine incident in the life of its subject. In the case of teachers, their message and the gist of even many of their sayings are likely to be correct.
By core, I mean something like the following. If disciples witnessed the raising of the widow of Nain’s son (Luke 7:11–17), features they might well recall would include the locality (Nain)3 and the raising of the widow’s son in the midst of the burial procession. Luke would be within his rights as a historian to reconstruct Jesus’s wording, to infer (based on his other knowledge) the crowds and Jesus’s compassion, and to mention the gate (7:12), even if these features were not in his oral or written source (although they may have been).
Since Mark knows Jairus’s name (in contrast to that of many other characters in his Gospel, e.g., in 1:40; 2:3; 3:1; 5:2), the ultimate source of the account may have been familiar with this locally prominent family (cf. 5:22). Jesus’s immediate disciples (5:37) could well have remembered mourners’ scorn (5:40), obviously the previously apparently dead girl responding to Jesus, walking and eating (5:41–43), and a feature as striking as Jesus touching someone presumed dead (5:41). While we normally do not expect the recollection of direct discourse, the preservation of the Aramaic command “Talitha kum!” (5:41) presumably reflects a reminiscence rather than Mark’s elaboration, since Mark must translate it for his audience.4 Details such as the witnesses’ astonishment could well be in Mark’s source, but neither would any of us likely begrudge him this inference.
Others will insist on a core larger or smaller for these examples, but the point is that the Evangelists normally derive the basic putative events from their sources; in the case of these illustrations, the genre leads me to expect that Luke and Mark did not invent the stories that Jesus raised this young man and woman. Nevertheless, as I have repeatedly noted, this approach does not settle all historical questions. Individual sources must still be weighed critically on their own terms, keeping in mind for example that Suetonius is happy to report any negative stories about Nero or Domitian available, and the Gospel writers adored Jesus. Some ancient stories are better attested than others; some appear to be distortions of other stories, albeit with a core shared between them.
Neither the Gospels’ genre nor patterns of oral tradition offer certainty about particular passages. They do, however, offer a general default expectation to follow when other evidence does not point in a different direction, to the extent that particular Gospels cohere with their sources where we can test them. Even a general default setting provides a potentially significant way forward in what is sometimes the quagmire of historical-Jesus research.5 In this case, I believe that the default setting should be significantly more positive than the default skepticism embraced by some members of the guild (and far more than the popular Jesus mythers). That is, in full-length, first-century biographies within living memory of their subjects, we have more reason to trust than to reject the core of even singly attested incidents or themes in Jesus’s message, where we lack other compelling arguments either way.
1. Sections of the Memories chapters are adapted from Keener, “Before Biographies” (written with the present book in mind, a sort of prolegomenon to the prolegomenon). I use “memoir” in the general sense of an account based on personal knowledge or sources, not as one’s autobiographic “memoirs.”
2. See 1 Cor 1:12; 3:22; 9:5; 15:5; Gal 1:17–19; 2:9; cf. Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 20.200.
3. A site that would be unknown in the Diaspora and barely known in Galilee; Josephus mentions a Nain apparently only in Idumea (Josephus, Jewish War 4.511, 517), although it attests the name in the region. Although Luke was not Galilean and cannot be expected to know the geography of his sources, commentators usually identify the Nain of this narrative with modern Nen or Nein (e.g., Leaney, Luke, 142; Marshall, Luke, 284), apparently near Shunem (Bovon, Luke, 1:268; Carroll, Luke, 164–65) or perhaps even abbreviating “Shunem” (Liefeld and Pao, “Luke,” 144; but cf. LXX 2 Kgdms 4:8’s Σουμαν [Souman] vs. Josh 19:18; 1 Sam 28:4; Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 6.327). These features would reinforce the allusions to the raising at Shunem (2 Kgs 4:8, 34–36); Luke’s failure to explain this point may suggest that he was unaware of this nuance already in his source.
4. Cf. Lane, Mark, 198; Garland, Mark, 223.
5. For one sober evaluation of the quagmire already a quarter century ago, see Crossan, Historical Jesus, xxviii.