14.7. Conclusion
Nearly all scholars agree that Jesus was a teacher and therefore also recognize the likelihood that he had disciples. Not all scholars have been as cognizant of the implications of this role for how and what Jesus’s disciples should have learned, based on the nearly universal practices of ancient pedagogy. But while ancient pedagogy will tell us what the disciples should have learned (ch. 15), questions still remain as to what they would have remembered about Jesus until elements of their testimony began being written in the sources we have extant today, or at least until it became standardized in community traditions.
The question of what Jesus’s disciples may have remembered invites us to explore some recent research on personal, psychological memory. (Such psychological memory differs from the longer process of oral tradition and cultural memory, namely, what happens after the memories are retold beyond the eyewitnesses, an issue addressed more fully in ch. 16.)1
While various scholars have offered opinions about how much Jesus’s followers “could have” remembered, studies of psychological memory offer a useful control on such speculation. They suggest what we can expect of memory at its best—and at its worst. Because this area of research is continually developing, in a single chapter only introductory comments are possible; nevertheless, the research offers insights for historical reconstruction based on testimony.
One limitation of most psychological memory studies so far is that they focus on contemporary Western memories, which most scholars recognize as generally less disciplined than ancient Mediterranean ones.2 Those of us who have taught and evaluated students over multiple decades may recognize a shift in mnemonic skills even over the course of our own teaching careers. Ready access to disconnected bits of information in the wired West often deprives our memories of rigorous exercise in a manner analogous to how calculators permit our arithmetical skills to atrophy.
I will cite some examples of ancient Mediterranean memory and oral tradition in other cultures in chapters 15–16, but even the Western studies noted here offer some important insights regarding the character of recall. Although the scholars I cite here reflect a range of perspectives, they all agree on a central (and not very counterintuitive) point: memories include both fixity and fluidity.
Citing memory’s frailties, some scholars dismiss as implausible the idea that the Gospels would preserve much reliable memory about Jesus. That side of the data accurately challenges our assumptions that tradents would preserve precise wording and details, matters generally of less concern in oral cultures in any case. Our long-term memory does not retain most of our experiences.
The other side of the data, though, suggests that the substance of most of what people do recall decades after the events still bears a strong resemblance to what actually happened. Despite many frailties of memory, it is not at all implausible that Jesus’s disciples would have correctly remembered the core of a number of noteworthy incidents in Jesus’s ministry and many of his more memorable teachings, certainly enough to fill some Gospels. The period between that ministry and the first written sources appears to be just a few decades.
Everyday assumptions about memory are usually sufficient for everyday purposes, but their precision is limited by suggestibility, susceptibility to bias, and chronological independence. Recall is rarely verbatim, except in the case of aphorisms. Still, memory is generally effective for personally significant and often multisensory events and for events frequently rehearsed. Memories significant enough to persist for five years may well persist for decades.
14.2. Everyday Assumptions about Long-Term Memory
Most of us take for granted that, barring unusual circumstances such as amnesia, schizophrenia, or dementia,3 we can recall key events within our own posttoddler lifetimes. We live our lives based on such assumptions.4
Like most other people, I normally live with such assumptions. Granted, at one time or another, I have experienced all the memory frailties mentioned in this chapter. Many memories that I have not used have faded over time; while I recall some close friends from forty years ago as if we were together in person yesterday, I have forgotten most acquaintances with whom I was not close. Having grown up with ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder), I also easily personify the stereotypical absent-minded professor.5
Yet I can also recall memorable incidents, information I learned, and some sermon illustrations I heard about four decades ago; I still reuse some of the jokes I heard at that time. On my fortieth-year high school reunion, a friend casually narrated to me a specific incident about me that she remembered clearly from when we were in third grade (I was age eight, about fifty years ago), and that, her husband added, she had also recounted to him. I had been humming the song to Gilligan’s Island, whereupon the teacher demanded that if I was going to hum it loud enough for anyone to hear, I ought to sing it. I then sang it perfectly, she recounted. I confess that I also recall that incident (which I find embarrassing), though I have long forgotten the words to that song.6
As a deliberate albeit amateur memory experiment,7 I recalled and listed more than twenty-five details from a family road trip from fifty years ago, when I was seven. I then consulted other surviving witnesses, whose testimony confirmed that a number of these memories had persisted independently over these five decades.8 Whereas my memories from when I was seven are quite limited, my memories from when I was seventeen are abundant. For some periods in my life, I can confirm the accuracy of my recall regarding the substance of such experiences, including even conversations, because I have personal journals or letters from those periods.9 Similarly, I carefully compared my oral interviews with my wife about her war experience with her journal.
Naturally, I recall my own memories best, but some secondhand accounts have stuck with me. Mentors at Duke University, such as Moody Smith, E. P. Sanders, and Dan Via, told us stories about their own teachers and other older scholars, a number of which I remember.10
I have also learned from others whose memories connected me back to a more distant past. I recall some of my grandparents’ stories about the Great Depression. My dad explained to me about people and events in old photos, usually sure about their subjects. One photo was merely a generic-looking scene from a second-story window, so I wondered why anyone had ever snapped it. “That was where I yelled out that the war [World War II] had ended,” he explained.11
Eager to learn more about a great uncle, I consulted a person in her eighties who filled me in on numerous concrete details from the 1940s, roughly seventy years ago.12 Noting that even in the United States repeating family stories was once a common pastime, a neighbor in her nineties shared memories of family stories reaching back to the 1700s, some of which I was able to subsequently verify independently.13 My wife, whose PhD is in women’s history, has assigned students to interview seniors for oral history projects and obtain a sampling of what life was like a generation or two ago.
If Westerners, even absent-minded ones with attention deficits, remember many experiences, surely we should not expect less from individuals in cultures that value and frequently recount their reminiscences, even if those cultures often also value supplying more engaging narrative frameworks.
Simple, yes? Not quite.
14.3. Reconstructive Recollection
Everyday assumptions about memory are usually sufficient for everyday purposes, but they need to be qualified in light of memory’s limitations. When we remember events, our mind reconstructs memory from various subsystems, sometimes filling in gaps with inferences, including mental elaborations and explanations fused to our memories.14 This process can lead to errors, but overall they “are the price of having a constructive memory that can fill gaps with best guesses.”15 Like anecdotes in some ancient biographies noted earlier in the book, our piecemeal memories are linked topically rather than chronologically. Even ancient orators with phenomenal memories recognized the chronological randomness of normal recollection.16
To prevent our brains from overloading with useless stimuli, we forget more of the input into them than we remember. One can arrange and narrate recollections in different ways, but our brains maximize efficiency by arranging memories according to learned narrative scripts or patterns17 that help us to frame and so make sense of the memories.18 By economizing memory, such framing can be either a strength19 or a weakness,20 depending on the script. As memory theorist Barry Schwartz notes, “Some genres and scripts are based on more detailed and accurate information than others.”21 Often these conforming to scripts stem from the earliest memories or even direct emulation, hence not always a subsequent literary imposition on earlier tradition.22
Video-compression algorithms today may compress videos by reducing redundancy. Apparently less efficiently, memories include bits for which a framework is assumed rather than provided. Each time we reconstruct a memory, we form a new reconstruction of the memory that can affect subsequent recollections, a process that both fixes the recollection and may attach to it new associations.23 No less than with the points I took for granted about everyday memory in the previous section, I find that my own experience comports with these observations as well.
In short, our memories are not videocameras. They are not straightforward, objective records of what happened, though they function well for normal, everyday purposes.24 Instead, as we learn and exercise them in given ways, they grow and adapt organically to the frameworks we construct for them. If all this sounds academic, a concrete example may illustrate the problem.
14.3a. Nixing Dean’s Faculties? A Neisser Reading
In a study published in 1981, Ulric Neisser compared taped conversations between John Dean and Richard Nixon with Dean’s recollections of those conversations in sworn testimony.25 Dean’s biases surface in his testimony, as he inflates his own role and justifies himself where possible at Nixon’s expense.26 As we shall see below, Dean was not alone; bias commonly shapes memories.
More important, Dean’s recollections blended elements of various conversations, recalling what was typical in his conversations with the president rather than specific topics covered on specific occasions.27 As Bart Ehrman correctly observes, this fallibility is hardly surprising; very few of us would claim to remember past conversations verbatim.28 Memory for conversations differs from episodic memory of life experiences,29 or at least extraordinary life experiences. Dean’s most frequent mistakes are timing errors; as McIver points out, Dean “reports things that did happen but that happened on occasions other than the one he is reporting.”30
Although such observations might have surprised Dean, they would not surprise twenty-first-century psychologists. Time-slice errors that conflate occasions are among memory’s most common frailties.31 If this is true today, we might expect even more such conflations in antiquity, when even writers had to depend on their memories because they could not access multiple works simultaneously.32 In antiquity, expectations for precision in detail thus differed from those of today.33 Conflation of events to condense a story was a common and apparently accepted practice.34
Even while pointing out such problems, however, Neisser concludes that Dean’s testimony is “essentially correct, even though it is not literally faithful to any one occasion. He is not remembering the ‘gist’ of a single episode by itself, but the common characteristics of a whole series of events.”35 Nixon hoped that transcripts of the tapes would discredit Dean’s testimony, but instead they confirmed it for what mattered: the basic substance of the testimony.36
There are of course significant differences between the kind of memory represented in Dean’s testimony and that found in typical oral tradition.37 The demands of legal testimony differ from those for ordinary recollection.38 Yet Dean’s chronological confusion is precisely what various lines of evidence lead us to expect for oral tradition, as well as for individual witnesses, as noted further below. Simplifying stories commonly leads to conflation in cultural memory,39 sometimes conflating “distinct people and events into archetypal landmarks.”40
Some scholars cite modern Western psychological memory studies to address the variations in the gospel tradition, some of which could reflect variations in memory.41 Frailties and variations should not, however, be inflated into massive distortion. Most memory research targets memory frailties rather than its more typical sufficiency, sometimes leaving lay interpreters of the material with a disproportionately negative perspective.42
Yet research commonly focuses on errors not because all memories are wrong but because, as memory researcher Gillian Cohen points out, “In experiments it is usually more informative to set task difficulty at a level where people make errors so that the nature of the errors and the conditions that provoke them can be identified.”43 William Brewer similarly points out that “laboratory studies of memory” are not always compatible with normal recollective memory.44 This contrast also applies to longer collective memory.
Even in laboratory settings, differences in interpretation of data affect conclusions;45 for example, as we have noted for ancient biographies (ch. 10), omissions are not actual errors.46 David Rubin, chair of the psychology department at Duke University, likewise contrasts the stability of oral tradition with memory in laboratory contexts and even with “most everyday activity.”47
Nevertheless, we should explore what these memory frailties are. In this section and at some other points in these closing chapters, I draw frequently, though by no means exclusively, on the extensive work of Robert McIver. Of the most common memory frailties identified in experimental settings, those most relevant for eyewitness memory are “transience, suggestibility, and bias.”48 Transience means that we forget most of what we encounter. This frailty is a survival strength, conveniently preventing normal brains from being overloaded—except when they belong to my students preparing for examinations. I address this first issue, that of transience, separately and more extensively later in this chapter. Here I turn to other memory frailties.
The second major memory frailty potentially relevant to the case is suggestibility. False memories may involve distortions “or, in extreme cases, involve remembering events that never happened at all.”49 Because of suggestibility, a false memory can be injected into collective memory.50
Still, the events depicted normally remain authentic. Even in memory experiments, planted memories tend to lack “perceptual detail,” are much more difficult to recall afterward, and are “more readily subject to correction or suppression in healthy adults.”51
Because this frailty normally comes into play only when what is suggested seems plausible and coherent with existing memories,52 most typical memory experiments for suggestibility, which deliberately seek to mislead on specific points, are of limited relevance for the gospel tradition.53 Scholars offer even the example of an experiment in which memories were found as often false as true, a situation that in ordinary life would make memory so nonadaptive as to make its (and our) survival difficult to explain.54
Both cognitive scientists and experimental psychologists have criticized the abuse of distortion experiments as if such distortions represent the normal social settings for memory. In the words of Alan Kirk, “Experiments studying memory distortion contrive to manufacture it, making use of deception, lures and misleading questions . . . and the like.”55 Thus McIver asks, “What have doctored photos, misleading questions, and memorizing lists of words and all the other diverse ways that have been shown to generate false memories have in common? The answer is that they all are able to induce false memories because they share the same characteristic of plausibility.”56 For example, participants often recall the word “sleep” when given a list of words related to sleep. Such results challenge the potency of verbatim memory, but they fit expectations for gist memory. That is, we remember meaning better than wording.57
Memory errors often arise in the process of reconstructing a gist that is coherent.58 Thus McIver contends that even any false collective memories that survived in the Jesus tradition may well have been consistent with the overall gist of Jesus’s ministry.59 As scholars regularly note, it is the gist and not verbatim recall that we normally should expect in any case. Gist recollection in the gospel tradition is likelier a more accurate representation of Jesus than many modern sermons about him. Given the union of both gist and adaptation in all our sources, some scholars suggest that the conventional scholarly approach of distinguishing “authentic” from “inauthentic” elements may not even reflect the best categories.60
Although entirely forged accounts do sometimes appear in collective memory, they seem to be very rare.61 Today such forged accounts sometimes include unintentionally fabricated memories “recovered” in therapy,62 but this phenomenon was not available to adjust memories in antiquity.63
Rather than inventing new stories, collective memory usually just shapes existing tradition to address present concerns. McIver thus concludes that any “nonauthentic Jesus tradition” in the early period would have likely persisted only if it “had considerable congruence with what he actually did and said.”64 In a given case, it is far more probable that a memory depends on a real event.
While everyone recognizes that memory is limited, not every scholar who emphasizes that point limits memory to the same degree. For example, Dale Allison, who emphasizes memory’s limitations,65 nevertheless affirms memory for gist66 and believes that a motivated tradent could have naturally recalled even a passage such as the Q version behind Luke 6:27–42.67
The third major potentially relevant factor in memory distortion is bias. (This factor also applies to collective memory in ancient biography and history, as noted in chs. 5 and 7.) In both personal and corporate memory, “People tend to select and pass down the view or version of events that puts themselves in the best light—and enemies in the worst light.”68 Personal constructed identity and bias do shape our storage, recall, and (along the way) reconstruction of memory,69 a tendency that helps individuals to cope and adapt as their settings change,70 but it can produce errors. Ideally, the value of fairness should restrain biased tendencies from producing deliberate distortion,71 but even today, disputed grades, elections, and religious preferences suggest that subjectivity in interpretation is difficult to avoid. In ancient courts, the bias of loyalty distorted and sometimes falsified eyewitness testimony.72
Ideology also shapes memory.73 While we typically do recall events that we regard as key, we remember them from our own perspectives.74 Memory studies show that interpretive grids affect what is remembered and how it is remembered.75 Interpretive structures are not necessarily signs of lateness, since they arise early in the recollection process; but this observation also means that no accounts, even those from eyewitnesses soon after the events, reach us in completely uninterpreted form.76
Thus, for example, adult siblings may confer about past events and supplement or even correct one another’s memories on matters of detail, even when they recall the same events.77 More conspicuously, a husband and wife will likely recall a recent argument from very different standpoints.78 (They may both forget some less recent arguments.) Both may remember the argument (the event) and perhaps overlapping elements of the argument, but they may well also remember different elements and may perceive different motives or meanings behind what was said. They might even conflate what was said on this occasion with what was said on previous occasions, and certainly hear it in light of previous occasions.
Of course, if they talked matters through and came to an understanding, their perceptions may be very similar—even if their final perceptions reshape the original event into a less conflictual form than that in which it actually occurred. Conferring can reshape shared memories with fuller details and fuller standardization. Repeating the memories will standardize them further. Similarly, the dialogue with one another of first-century eyewitnesses surely influenced and adapted their memories of Jesus.
Hindsight bias reconstructs prior views in light of current information, as in, for example, “I knew that the candidate was crooked all along.” Hindsight bias helps individuals adjust to new situations,79 with cognition shaping memory, as well as the reverse. Interestingly, the Gospels do not credit the disciples with much postresurrection insight before the resurrection (e.g., Mark 8:32; 9:10; 10:37, 41; John 11:12, 16), except on occasion possibly the beloved disciple (cf. John 19:26; 20:8–9). But no one will doubt that the conviction of Jesus’s exalted status stands behind the gospel tradition as we find it in the Gospels; the Evangelists believed in Jesus’s resurrection, for example, before they began composing their works.
Bias is more likely to shape earlier tradition than to fabricate it.80 Although such bias may affect which events ancient historians narrate, it does not usually mean that they fabricated the events themselves. They often tried to compensate for eyewitnesses’ potential biases, though of course they had their own.81 Thucydides complained about the partisan character of some recollections but still believed that he could provide a reasonably accurate account by building on common elements among these sources.82
Although we typically employ the term “bias” pejoratively, in its broader usage it simply means a perspective, which all interpreters have. By its very nature, memory has to be selective and perspectival. Even what we call memory “distortion” is thus not always negative, producing historical revisionism only in its more extreme form.83
14.3e. Time Zone Out: Chronological Conflations
Another memory frailty, highlighted above in the case of John Dean, is the lack of accurate chronological connection for memories. Individual memory usually preserves episodes, a familiar memory form for personal-event memories, piecemeal, organizing them interpretively rather than chronologically.84 Although episodic memory may preserve location and other elements, the timing of events normally must be reconstructed from other memory cues rather than simply retrieved from memory.85 Memory often thus conflates experiences that are similar.86
As I shall discuss in chapter 16, long-term cultural memory also usually collapses chronology.87 Such lack of precise chronology and conflation of “related” events probably disturbs modern readers more than it did ancient ones. As noted in chapter 5, the gospel tradition’s contemporaries did not expect chronological arrangement for the anecdotes in most biographies.88
Not surprisingly, the same pattern also appears to apply broadly to both the gospel tradents and the Evangelists. As is obvious to anyone who compares the Gospels in a synopsis, the Evangelists do not always follow a set sequence of episodes or retain Jesus’s sayings in their received frameworks. (For example, to pick a few examples at random, one may compare the varying contexts of Matt 6:9–13//Luke 11:2–4; Matt 7:7//Luke 11:9; Matt 7:13–14//Luke 13:24; Matt 8:11//Luke 13:29.)89
Rearranging material, for example, by setting sayings in new contexts, can change their application,90 but such a practice was not at all limited to the Gospels. Ancient composition practices presumed such rearrangement. Rhetorical handbooks demonstrate that writers inserted existing sayings freely into existing narratives as a matter of arrangement, not considering it a matter of fabrication.91 Unlike annals and most material in histories, ancient biographies also often diverged from chronological sequence, especially when they had literary reasons to do so.92 Indeed, their frequent dependence on episodic recollections made precise chronology neither possible nor expected.
14.3f. What Such Limitations Mean
We remember within the framework of our own perspectives—whether individually or as communities—which suggests one of the limits of memory. This acknowledgment is not very controversial; no one, including those who attribute the Evangelist’s perspectives to divine inspiration, doubts that the Evangelists (or their tradents) wrote from their own particular perspectives.
How we argue from here depends largely on our goal. If our goal is to show that memory is far less dependable than people commonly assume in daily life, we can appeal to many Western studies of psychological memory to demonstrate memory’s limitations. If, conversely, we are trying to reconstruct from early collective memory a picture of historical events to the most probable extent possible, we will try to sift the evidence of memory for the sorts of matters people actually should have remembered.
The former goal is useful in Gospels studies when challenging assumptions of verbatim recall and the like, rare as those assumptions are among scholars (apart from the case of particular literary forms such as concise proverbs). The latter goal is useful when working for historical reconstruction and combatting extreme historical skepticism, which unfortunately does flourish in some academic circles. Most scholars fall on the continuum between these poles.
Although some doubt the value of multiple attestation for individual sayings, most accept the value of this criterion (in the form of “recurrent attestation”) for major themes or events.93 Historical-Jesus scholars widely agree on some basic facts about Jesus: for example, Jesus had twelve key disciples, probably related to his intentions for a kingdom renewal of God’s people; he was executed by Romans on a cross after conflict with elites in Jerusalem; and many of his followers believed that they saw him alive from the dead a few days after his execution. (See further examples in ch. 1.)
That is, most of the basic emphases of the Gospels are not much in dispute; questions arise primarily concerning the details that fill out this picture. While the limitations of historical method do not allow scholars to assert such specific details with the same level of assurance as the overall picture, there is good historical reason to believe that even the picture of many particular events or themes goes back to Jesus and his immediate circle of disciples. Their memories would not need to be perfect to recall the substance of key events and teachings that they began retelling soon after Jesus’s departure, as the rest of Jesus’s movement looked to them for leadership in his name.
Politicians are not the only people who sometimes misrepresent their detractors’ positions. Hardly anyone, including the scholars most often accused of it, claims that the memories of Jesus’s teachings in the Gospels are verbatim recollections.94 As noted in chapter 11, it is obvious that the Evangelists themselves did not pretend to capture Jesus’s words verbatim; one need only compare, for example, Matthew’s fairly regular reference to “the kingdom of heaven” with Mark’s regular “kingdom of God.”95 Or one may compare Luke’s varied wording for words spoken in the scenes that Luke himself repeats.96 Early Christians often paraphrase the Old Testament freely to communicate what they understand to be its message (cf., e.g., Joel 2:28 in Acts 2:17).97 Why should we expect verbatim quotation of Jesus?
Of course, in the most technical sense, none of Jesus’s words in the Gospels purport to be precisely his exact words, except for Mark’s brief quotations of him in Aramaic.98 Anyone who claims that the Gospels consistently offer Jesus’s words verbatim (perhaps as an untested theological assumption) has simply never read them closely;99 it is simply impossible for an honest person to read many parallel Gospel accounts side by side and conclude that they all are word-for-word the same. (It would not make much sense to have separate Gospels if they had to be identical.)
Parallel Gospel accounts may use different wording and sometimes vary in storytelling details precisely because ancient Christians understood, far better than do their sometimes inflexible textual descendants, that we usually neither have nor need Jesus’s precise words. What matters more is the substance of his acts and teachings—the gist, the sense. And we have very good reason to believe that this is what the Gospels offer us, though some of the Evangelists (such as John) may develop their understanding of that gist more extensively than others.
14.4a. Verbatim Recall Is Very Rare
Not only in the Gospels or in ancient practice must we expect some flexibility. It characterizes human memory in general. Paraphrase, substitution of synonyms, as well as abbreviation and conformity to one’s interpretive grid are far more common than verbatim recall, especially for narratives.100 Wording is rarely preserved verbatim, especially in long-term memory, but central images and concepts are more stable.101 Memory usually preserves the gist of events it includes,102 which is all that ancient readers of biographies would ask.103
Different subsystems in the brain process different types of memory. Gist memory, encoding meaning, begins forming only a fraction of a second sooner than verbatim memory, but verbatim memory decays much faster.104 Gist memory focuses on meaning more than on precise wording. Thus, for example, high comprehenders of material are no better than low comprehenders at verbatim memory, but they are better at gist memory.105
Although speeches are a special case, it is noteworthy that where their sources ended, ancient historians simply composed speeches with as much verisimilitude for the speaker and occasion as possible.106 They did so partly because of the narrative demands of ancient historiography, but it is also relevant that ancient historians recognized that neither they nor their informants would remember speeches verbatim.107 (Consider how many speeches you recall word for word after hearing them just once.)108 Historians themselves sometimes were even explicit about disavowing verbatim reports.109 Ancient writers also reported conversations or dialogue according to their gist rather than trying to capture exact wording.110
In contrast to historians’ reconstructed speeches from the past, collections of teachings might be more careful to preserve a teacher’s content and even style,111 since the content of the teacher’s message was normally the point of the collection. This latter observation is relevant for the Synoptic tradition, but teachings remain subject to the general limitations of verbatim memory.
In all ancient historical work, the primary interest was the gist more than precise wording.112 Historians necessarily employed standards of accuracy appropriate to memory rather than to recordings.113 Until the nineteenth century, most historians, including all ancient historians, were storytellers who wanted to engage their audiences by how they communicated their stories.114 Arguing that the Evangelists and other ancient biographers or historians worked from information is thus not meant to suggest that they rigidly limited themselves to verbatim citations.
Ancient writers, who often had prior texts, had to decide whether to paraphrase their written sources or to repeat their material verbatim.115 Yet beyond at most one written source open at a time, they normally could produce only the gist of their sources because limitations of manuscript retrieval meant that they needed to rely on memory.116 Nor had their predecessors in the ancient Near East expected verbatim reproduction of texts; “The reproduction of the sense in the approximate wording was all they aimed at.”117 Variation also was often deliberate.118 Thus, for example, Phaedrus feels free to adapt Aesopic fables for aesthetic reasons, meanwhile seeking to keep to the spirit of Aesop.119 Short dialogues could be redacted to fit collections more neatly.120
14.4b. Except for Exceptions . . .
Without written texts, fully verbatim recall of any substantial body of material is nearly impossible, which naturally makes it quite rare121 (though scholars note some exceptions).122 It can occur and is attested in societies where literacy exists as a control,123 sometimes even among persons who are themselves illiterate.124 Early Christianity did flourish in a culture that included writing.125 Even such a context does not entail, however, that witnesses would preserve information verbatim.
Variations in the Gospels themselves, already noted, show that Jesus’s followers did not insist on preserving all his teaching verbatim. Such a requirement could have been difficult even in a society with much wider literacy. Memory is very rarely verbatim. The disciples’ role involved remembering more than memorization.126
There are, however, some exceptions to the lack of verbatim memory. Aphorisms (short, pithy sayings such as proverbs) are typically preserved in verbatim memory.127 (In English, one might think of, for example, “Haste makes waste,” “Silence is golden,” or, “Crap, my screen just froze!”) They also are fairly durable in long-term oral tradition; being memorable, proverbs can persist widely even far beyond the duration of living memory relevant to the first-century Gospels.128 (Thus scholars often suggest that some extracanonical sayings attributed to Jesus in the second century may be authentic—though we rarely know which of the sayings qualify.)129 Incidental written sources attest the oral preservation of some proverbs over a wide geographic area for more than one thousand years.130 Likewise, in Middle Eastern culture even today, a number of Arabic works, inaccessible to most Western NT scholars, attest the current circulation of thousands of proverbs.131 Preserving proverb-like sayings of Jesus within living memory should not have been a herculean task.
Aphorisms constitute the “literary form most frequently attributed to Jesus.”132 Unless Jesus did not really teach very often, the Gospels’ brevity suggests that Jesus’s disciples even cumulatively did not recall all his aphorisms. Nevertheless, what we know about aphorisms suggests that the ones they did remember would likely have been remembered fairly accurately.133
To preserve material verbatim, one must deliberately rehearse material until it becomes part of long-term memory.134 Yet, given the pervasive ancient practice of rote learning of such sayings (see ch. 9), Jesus’s disciples would likely have been able to recall many of Jesus’s aphorisms in forms close to those in which he gave them.135 Aphorisms were a common rhetorical form used by Jewish sages, which supports the suggestion that some of Jesus’s sayings would have been remembered and circulated in such a form.136
The Evangelists apparently understood the forms of material with which they were working and exercised freedom to adapt wording more with some kinds of material than with others. Thus when we compare, for example, the Evangelists’ respective treatment of particular parables, we find gist relationships, as expected for stories.137 The point usually remains stable, although the wording may vary.138 Comparing the Gospels confirms that the Evangelists often preserved aphorisms in a form closer to verbatim than is the case with their other material, probably reflecting wider practice regarding aphorisms.139
14.5. Functional though Fallible
Our memories are fallible, but that does not mean that they are nonfunctional. A degree of fallibility no more necessarily equates to general unreliability than do the limitations of language underscored by deconstructionists make language inadequate for ordinary communication. This functionality often prevails beyond individuals; present needs shape collective memory, but that memory normally depends on genuine experience, not pure fabrication.140
14.5a. Memory Usually Refers to Something
Historical data can constrain many excesses of bias;141 as Schwartz puts it, “Reality counts more than bias in the remembering of most events most of the time.”142 Thus memory in the real world is generally successful for ordinary tasks,143 especially “considering how grossly it is overloaded.”144 Even in the modern West, most of our memories are substantially referential.
Some scholars contend that current research even renders superfluous older debates between proponents of careful memory in oral tradition and those who favor re-creation; “memorization using constraints and re-creation within constraints produce much more similar results.”145
While our imaginations do affect how we reconstruct memories,146 normal human memories do not usually confuse our own experiences with fictional ones. For example, I fairly regularly dream vividly and in color and often record these dreams in my journal,147 yet I do not normally confuse them with incidents I have experienced in real life.
McIver contends that memory studies should lead us to expect inaccuracy in no more than “20 percent of the details” of eyewitness reports behind the gospel tradition, also that such errors would not negate substantial memory.148 Moreover, even these details “are almost always consistent with the broader picture of what actually happened, even if, strictly speaking, they are errors of detail.”149 While the 20 percent estimate may be debated (depending largely on a single study), most scholars agree that, in general and for the purposes at hand, memory is more reliable than unreliable.150
Were memory not dependable at all, we could never trust the substance of memoirs. Already in the second century the Gospels were viewed as “memoirs” (ἀπομνημονεύματα, apomnēmoneumata) of the apostles.151 We regularly learn from modern memoirs, despite their biases and imperfections; why should we dismiss ancient ones? As N. T. Wright puts it, Jesus impacted people’s memories no less than do other significant figures: “Just as the friends of C. S. Lewis still bring out books of reminiscences about the great man forty or fifty years after his death, and people who worked with Winston Churchill during the war still dine out on their memories of his temper, his wit and his prodigious intake of alcohol.”152
Of course, scholars debate how close the Gospels are to apostolic testimony, which adds a remove to the concept of “memoirs”—thus the need for chapter 15. But before memories can be passed on, they must be remembered to begin with. What sorts of memories do eyewitnesses usually preserve?
14.5b. Kinds of Memories Preserved
We generally recall memories that are memorable—that is, unusual and emotionally charged personal experiences that we have shared with others and that are matters of great interest to us.153 People are not apt to recall everyday events such as conversations that lack evident long-range significance. Memory assimilates matters that happen regularly, focusing instead on experiences that are more distinctive.154 We are thus more likely to remember important or unusual experiences.155 I do not remember what I ate for lunch last Tuesday, but I remember that my Doktorvater, Moody Smith, and my physical father, John Keener, died within hours of each other.156 I do not remember which pages I was typing a month ago, but I recall my unpleasant confrontation with a US consular official in Kinshasa in 2008. As Dale Allison observes, memory can be especially reliable when handling atypical events that one personally participated in, found mentally engaging, experienced as emotionally intense, and then later rehearsed.157
We are most apt to remember personally relevant and emotionally charged memories,158 though emotion can distort recall of events as well as impress them in one’s memory as significant.159 Emotion helps imprint memories by creating multiple associations;160 ancient rhetoricians recognized and even played on this feature of memory.161 (We recall emotional events themselves better than the emotions experienced during the events.)162 The veridicality of “flashbulb memories,” often connected with events learned secondhand through the media, has generated greater criticism,163 but such experiences (esp. focused on the contexts in which one learned of a more public or other event) differ from typical personal experiences.164
Personal-event memories may even include a respected mentor’s words that had a significant impact on one’s life.165 Memory theorist David Pillemer notes that memorable “personal life episodes are generally true to the original experience, although specific details may be omitted or misremembered and substantial distortions do occasionally occur.”166
Because narrative and sensory memory represent distinct subsystems, experiences impressed on multiple senses (e.g., sight, sound, and smell) also are more memorable.167 This multisensory reinforcement of memory is one reason that we are more apt to remember our own experiences than merely those we have heard about from others. We reconstruct memory based on multiple memory subsystems168 distributed in different parts of the brain.169 This multiple-location distribution provides reinforcement for memories that the brain deems vital; when different subsystems preserve aspects of an experience, memories can prove particularly resilient.170
The Gospels do suggest that Jesus’s closest followers would have had such stark, emotive experiences (e.g., Mark 4:38–41; 6:49–51; 8:17–21, 33; 9:32; 10:13–14, 24, 26, 32; 14:18, 22–25, 29–31, 37, 43–52, 72). Jesus’s teachings also incorporate graphic, often vivid visual imagery that could impress itself through hearers’ imagination in multiple subsystems (e.g., Matt 5:34–36, 39–41, 45; 6:2, 26–30; Mark 9:42–43; Luke 12:6–7). Morally salient information also invites “evaluative attention,” hence reinforces retention;171 evaluative attention is relevant to the consideration demanded by Jesus’s ethical pronouncements and riddles.
For individuals, different memory systems produce different outcomes; personal-event/episodic memory, for example, differs from cognitive/semantic memory, and both differ from procedural memory.172 Indeed, episodic personal memory may be processed in different regions of the brain than conceptual aspects of autobiographic memory.173 Tradition tends to preserve more semantic elements of community memory than episodic details because of the process of consolidation to essential, meaningful points.174 Both Jesus’s disciples and the stories shaped in community retellings undoubtedly found many points meaningful, as patterns of meaning in the Gospel narratives suggest (e.g., faith in Matt 8:10//Luke 7:9; Mark 2:5; 4:40; 5:34, 36; 9:23; 10:52; 11:22–24; John 11:40).175
Interest in what is being learned also provides motivation.176 Thus, as David Rubin notes, “the interest aroused by participating in an oral tradition,” where meaning is valued, “far exceeds that aroused by participating in an experiment on the learning of lists of nonsense syllables” in typical laboratory settings.177 Or as Kirk notes, “Subjects are more highly motivated to encode information that is salient—that matters—to them.”178
Interest motivates memory in both literate179 and illiterate persons. Swazi herdsmen, for example, with normal memories on other matters, could readily and nearly precisely recite verifiable details of cattle purchases that they had merely witnessed a year earlier.180 Illiterate !Kung bushmen and doctoral-level ethnographers who interview them each may remember what the other finds impossible to recall; different cultures value and develop memory skills for different subjects.181
Apostles and tradents who staked their lives on the message of Jesus obviously had deep interest in it.182 These long-term memories were not a mere matter of random recollections.183 As Samuel Byrskog notes, “Since Jesus was a qualitatively unique teacher, it must have been generally essential to transmit his words and deeds” (emphasis his).184 In chapter 15 I compare them to other ancient disciples, but ultimately they had more reason, not less reason, than disciples of other teachers to transmit carefully their master’s words and deeds.185 As noted earlier, perspectives are inevitable,186 and in this case, far from their faith in Jesus as Lord invalidating their perspective, it shaped their perspective for the very reason that the disciples preserved and propagated his teaching widely to begin with, despite the enormous cost.187 Even disciples of other teachers normally preserved their teachers’ message; they did not, however, always stake their lives on its propagation, as most of Jesus’s disciples ultimately seemed ready to do.
We are also most apt to recall events narrated to others, since this activity reinforces narrative memory.188 (Even narrating memories to ourselves strengthens recall.)189 Autobiographic memory usually quickly assumes narrative form from the start.190 As noted in the following chapter (ch. 15), Jesus’s disciples probably recounted Jesus’s deeds and teachings from the start, even if initially only among themselves.
Frequent repetition or rehearsal helps memory.191 Even we absent-minded professors often recall the substance of courses that we have taught repeatedly over the years. Rubin points out that memory research has recognized from the beginning that “recitation, the technical term for the mixing of test trials with study trials, aids learning.”192 Granted, repetition that consolidates memories can also contaminate them.193 Frequent rehearsal can also fix in memory the form in which one is accustomed to telling a story rather than the story itself.194 On the whole, however, the effect usually reinforces memory. Rehearsal for communication to others is a particularly common form of rehearsal, and for positive (as opposed to negative) events correlates with reduced affective fading.195
Like others, I could illustrate the point from my own experience. For example, I often recount a condensed version of my own conversion story from atheism, highlighting the features that I or others have found most interesting during repeated retellings.196 Retelling this form from habit is less vivid than reexperiencing more of the details. Nevertheless, this fixed form need not obliterate all other elements of the memory; after decades, I still recall other elements that I almost never have reason to recount (including the names of others present during my confrontation with the theists).
Even apart from the disciples’ role as preachers about Jesus, the disciples’ hearers surely would have invited them to recount their stories of Jesus again and again.197 Such factors in personal memory would suggest that Jesus’s disciples would have remembered many incidents from his ministry and many of his teachings. But for how long?
14.6. Transience and the Longevity of Memories
Can personal memories last long enough to become sources for the Gospels? Ancient thinkers, like modern ones, recognized that witnesses’ memories were most complete and reliable when the events remained fairly fresh.198 Jesus’s primary followers presumably would not have remembered everything he said to them or did among them.199
In one study, even emotional memories faded quickly over the first year, but then the forgetting curve leveled off, so that what was still remembered tended to persist even after ten years.200 Citing memory studies, McIver notes that after five years the witnesses might recall as many as half of “distinctive episodes” and particularly significant personal memories.201 Memory studies also suggest that memories that remain after those five years typically remain stable for at least the following quarter century.202 Significant personal-event memories for the disciples would include their callings (Mark 1:16–20; 2:14) and extraordinary healings.203
What they did remember after a few years, however, should have easily filled more than a Gospel, rather than less.204 Indeed, if we add up the time necessary for the occurrence of all episodes reported in all four Gospels, it would represent only a fraction of even a one-year ministry. Mark’s 11,000 words are brief compared to Irish bards’ tradition of about 100,000 words.205 Some might in fact wonder how eyewitness testimony could be so brief, but biographers normally chose to present only samples that were valuable for their purpose,206 even when they knew their subjects directly.207
Of forms of long-term memory, episodic memory is particularly vulnerable to blending of analogous events;208 nevertheless, it can preserve significant information. Laboratory studies can most easily test short-term memory, but some studies have confirmed the tendency to recall memorable personal events for even six decades.209 Thus, for example, researchers compared Danes who had experienced the time of the German invasion (April 9, 1940) and subsequent surrender (May 4, 1945) with others who had merely studied it in school. More than two-thirds of those who lived through the invasion correctly remembered the weather during the invasion, as opposed to about one-twentieth of the control group. Roughly one-sixth of survivors could even recall the time of the German surrender within five minutes, a feat not replicated by any members of the control group (and hard for many of the rest of us to imagine). Those who did not recall the correct answer normally did not substitute an incorrect one.210
Similarly, more than four decades after the closure of Camp Erika, a Dutch prison camp, nearly all interviewed survivors recalled it vividly. Over half could recall even the precise date of their imprisonment; over half likewise remembered their registration number.211 McIver concludes that memory does not preserve all details accurately, but that the gist of memories of key personal events normally persists for decades.212
The crucial period for the eyewitnesses’ ability to remember what they recounted is thus “not the thirty to sixty years . . . before the writing of the Gospels” but “the first three to six years” after Jesus’s execution.213 Most of what the disciples remembered at that point would have remained through the following decades, especially when it was reinforced through retellings.
Everyday assumptions about memory are usually sufficient for everyday purposes, but they need to be qualified in light of memory’s limitations. Our memories must reconstruct experiences, and as in the case of John Dean, that reconstruction is an approximation that is most helpful regarding the overall gist rather than sequence or verbatim wording. Typical memory frailties include suggestibility, susceptibility to bias, and chronological displacement and even conflation. Recall is rarely verbatim, except in the case of aphorisms.
Still, memory usually depends on actual experience or learning and is especially effective for personally significant and often multisensory events. Rehearsal embeds memories more thoroughly. Memories significant enough to persist for five years may well persist for decades. These factors should have been relevant to the experience of the disciples.
1. One considering “eyewitnesses of Jesus” will deal with “cognitive and autobiographical approaches” (as Person and Keith, “Media Studies,” 5), whereas subsequent reception and shaping of those memories turn to collective- and cultural-memory approaches.
2. Cf. Galinsky, “Introduction,” 17: “Ancient Rome was a memory culture par excellence”; Rhoads, “Events,” 173. Cf. also the concessions in Redman, “Eyewitnesses,” 179, 192–93.
3. See, e.g., Larsen, Thompson, and Hansen, “Time,” 153; Baddeley et al., “Delusions,” 384, 423–24 (though cf. 427); Schacter, “Memory, Amnesia, and Dysfunction”; Koutstaal, Verfaellie, and Schacter, “Objects”; Simons et al., “Gist”; Pierce et al., “Effects”; Budson et al., “Memory.”
4. Bockmuehl, Seeing, 170–71, observes that he has told his children stories about his great-grandmother’s childhood before World War I.
5. Absent-minded professors may find encouragement from the observation that “absent-mindedness assists in preventing the memory capacity of an individual from being overwhelmed” (McIver, “Personal Memory,” 54).
6. Cindy Johnson Meyerson, August 25, 2018. I had also forgotten in which elementary grade it happened. The other side of memory was also in evidence, however; most of us who traded stories there recalled details that other participants had forgotten or had forgotten details that others had remembered, and I mixed up memories of some persons with others.
7. Undertaken, even if somewhat tongue in cheek, in consideration of some oft-cited experiments by researchers on their own autobiographic memory, although theirs were far more carefully controlled than mine; see, e.g., Linton, “Memory”; Wagenaar, “My Memory” (cited in, among many others, McIver, Memory, 30–34).
8. Esp. Gail Keener, interview, Massillon, Ohio, June 30, 2017. Naturally, we did not always recall the same details—as a child I was more prone to recall the sherbet in the freezer or my scary first experience with “hush puppies,” for example—but our memories overlapped significantly and did not contradict.
9. When I do consult detailed written accounts, even decades later, they inevitably preserve details that I have forgotten; in the vast majority of cases, however, what I do recollect is fully consistent with the written accounts. Popular-level memoirs can illustrate dependence on memory in a way obviously irrelevant to pure novels. Much of the information in Keener and Keener, Impossible Love, comes from our journals. Under editorial constraints, I deleted roughly 45 percent of its original draft, retaining what seemed most useful to the basic thread of our stories that we chose to emphasize. On several occasions, cutting required conflation of similar scenes. The content, however, consists entirely of actual events; our source material constrained our telling in ways not necessary to a novel. Indeed, a well-written novel would be able to appeal to popular interest better than our true account by reducing the number of active characters and including far fewer toponyms and names unfamiliar to our audience.
10. I am not alone. In 2002, for example, scholars recounted their early experiences with Adolf Schlatter (d. 1938; Bockmuehl, Seeing, 170–71n13).
11. Exchange with John W. Keener, as he recounted many stories from his childhood (August 2–10, 2014).
12. Mary Jane Bogg, phone interview, July 12, 2017.
13. She also recounted some of these stories in Gulick, Windows, 6–8. For passing on family tales in the modern Mediterranean world, see, e.g., Pizzuto-Pomaco, “Shame,” 38, 42; Pizzuto-Pomaco, Shame, 35.
14. Barber and Barber, Severed, 33.
15. Cohen, “Overview,” 389.
16. Seneca the Elder, Controversiae 1.pref.4.
17. Schemata can be “patterns of what usually happens in such cases” (so Bauckham, “Psychology of Memory” [3 in my preliminary version]). For the social dimension of schemata, see Eve, Behind Gospels, 91, 96; Schwartz, “Smoke,” 24; Kirk, Memory, 193, 199–200, 218–19; for the interplay between memories and schemata, see, e.g., Schwartz, “Harvest,” 322–23.
18. On such interpretive scripts and schemata, see, e.g., Rubin, Memory, 21–28, 63; Rubin, “Introduction,” 4; Small, Wax Tablets, 196–97; Kirk, “Memory Theory,” 824–26 (including information from Bonanno, “Remembering,” 177); Kirk, “Nexus,” 146 (noting neurological encoding into engrams); Eve, Behind Gospels, 89–91; Nikulin, “Introduction,” 9, 27; Kesteren et al., “Schema and Novelty.”
19. They can provide relevant context (e.g., in Larsen, Thompson, and Hansen, “Time,” 153).
20. Since such schemata are fallible, they sometimes generate errors (Brewer, “Recollective Memory,” 41, 44–45; Eve, Behind Gospels, 90).
21. Cf. Schwartz, “Harvest,” 321. Older persons with poorer memory depend more on stereotypical frameworks than do younger persons (Mather, Johnson, De Leonardis, “Reliance”).
22. Le Donne, Historiographic Jesus, 77.
23. Eve, Behind Gospels, 90–91; cf. Small, Wax Tablets, 199.
24. Against excessive pessimism, see, e.g., Schwartz, “Smoke,” 31; Schwartz, “Harvest,” 313.
25. Neisser, “Dean’s Memory.”
26. McIver, Memory, 19 (following Edwards and Potter, “Memory,” 193); cf. Brewer, “Recollective Memory,” 45.
27. Ehrman, Before Gospels, 144–48, esp. 146.
28. Ehrman, Before Gospels, 146–47.
29. Brewer, “Recollective Memory,” 40–41 (challenging Neisser).
30. McIver, Memory, 19.
31. Rubin, “Introduction,” 4; Brewer, “Recollective Memory,” 41–42; McIver, Memory, 47, and sources cited there. Both McIver and Rubin, “Introduction,” 4, note the study of time-slice errors in Brewer, “Memory for Events.”
32. Pelling, “Method,” 91–92; Small, Wax Tablets, 81, 151–53, 160–68, 176, 181–82, 185–87, 201; Derrenbacker, Practices, 38–39, 46–47, 54. Cf. Barker, “Reassessment,” for possible contrast in early Jewish and Christian scribal practices.
33. Small, Wax Tablets, 4–7, 194–95, 223; for oral tradition, see Rosenberg, “Complexity,” 78.
34. See, e.g., Derrenbacker, Practices, 94, 100–113 (albeit identifying alternating chunks of source material), following esp. Downing, “Redaction Criticism 1,” 56; see also Licona, Differences, 20, 48, 52, 56, 67, 91, 95, 109.
35. McIver, Memory, 18, quoting Neisser, “Dean’s Memory,” 19–20. Compare also Bock, “Note,” esp. 22, challenging as selective Ehrman’s representation of Neisser.
36. Small, Wax Tablets, 193, quoting and concurring with Neisser.
37. See, e.g., Rubin, Memory, 23.
38. Bauckham, Eyewitnesses, 355–57.
39. Vansina, Oral Tradition, 171; Small, Wax Tablets, 200; Kirk, “Memory Theory,” 825; Thatcher, Why John Wrote, 122; Barber and Barber, Severed, 115–18; Kloppenborg, “Memory,” 289.
40. Thatcher, Why John Wrote, 118.
41. E.g., Ehrman, Before Gospels.
42. Schwartz, “Smoke,” 22; Schwartz, “Harvest,” 313; Cohen, “Overview,” 389; Kirk, Memory, 212; Bauckham, “Psychology of Memory,” citing Pillemer, Momentous Events, 55; cf. McIver, Memory, 22, and Kirk, Memory, 212, both citing Schacter, “Distortions,” 25.
43. Cohen, “Overview,” 389, adding that “the conditions of laboratory testing provoke errors and magnify their importance”; cf. Rubin, “Introduction,” 4. Testing in everyday settings helps qualify and thus is complementary to experimental settings (Cohen, “Everyday Memory,” 16–17).
44. Brewer, “Recollective Memory,” 53–60. Cf. Goody, Interface, 253, for other limitations with some experimental settings.
45. Brewer, “Recollective Memory,” 41.
46. Brewer, “Recollective Memory,” 42.
47. Rubin, Memory, 7–8; cf. 28. The context of oral tradition thus contrasts, as he notes, with Bartlett’s seminal laboratory studies (Rubin, Memory, 130–32, esp. 131; cf. also Horsley, “Patterns,” 64–65; Derico, Tradition, 174–82; Kirk, Memory, 190). Even dictation of stories differs from their natural, indigenous performance contexts (Goody, Interface, 94–95, 172).
48. McIver, Memory, 21.
49. Schacter, “Neuropsychology,” 193; cf. Spanos, Multiple Identities. Severe cases may involve brain damage, as in cases studied in Dab, Claes, Morais, and Shallice, “Confabulation”; Ward et al., “Recognition.”
50. Cf. Redman, “Eyewitnesses,” 185–88; Stock, Gajsar, and Güntürkün, “Neuroscience,” 386–88; Kloppenborg, “Memory,” 290, following, e.g., Schacter, “Sins,” 192.
51. Bockmuehl, Seeing, 174, citing Loftus et al., “Manufacturing Memory”; Kensinger and Schacter, “Memories.”
52. McIver, Memory, 60–61, 156; cf. Brewer, “Recollective Memory,” 41.
53. McIver, Memory, 153–56.
54. Kirk, Memory, 212, citing the warning of Koriat, Goldsmith, and Pansky, “Psychology,” 522: “If information retrieved were as likely to be correct as wrong, then memory would be totally useless.”
55. Kirk, “Ehrman, Bauckham, and Bird,” 91–92 (quotation from 92); Kirk, Memory, 211–16. Kirk cites Campbell, “Memory”; Harris, Paterson, and Kemp, “Recall”; Koriat, Goldsmith, and Pansky, “Psychology”; and Kirk’s own fuller treatment of sources and the subject in Kirk, “Cognition.”
56. McIver, Memory, 154–55.
57. McIver, Memory, 60; McIver, “Personal Memory,” 54; cf. already Rosenberg, “Complexity,” 83.
58. McIver, Memory, 79. Memories often conform details to the broader gist of one’s life story (Small, Wax Tablets, 192, citing Barclay, “Truth,” 291).
59. McIver, Memory, 154–56. McIver, Memory, 181, quotes here Dodd, Founder, 33 (21–22 in my 1971 edition), regarding Jesus’s “consistent” and “distinctive” character; see also Dunn, Tradition, 200, 213n3. Long-term oral tradition is not always concerned with internal consistency (Anderson, “Oral Tradition,” 23).
60. Rodríguez, “Authenticating Criteria,” 162–64, following Tonkin, Narrating, 6; cf. Rodríguez, Structuring, 51. The earliest Christians were in a much better position to understand what Jesus meant, in light of their early environment and the full context of the Jesus tradition, than are modern armchair scholars (see Rodríguez, “Authenticating Criteria,” 164).
61. McIver, Memory, 157.
62. See Loftus, “Reality”; Belli and Loftus, “Pliability,” esp. 172–76. See a clear case of fabrication in Wagenaar, “Memory.”
63. For this reason, Bernier, Quest, 66, and Bauckham, “Psychology of Memory,” criticize the relevance of Crook’s use of tales of Satanic ritual abuse as an analogy for misremembering in the Jesus tradition (Crook, “Distortion,” though Crook, unlike many more traditional Jesus scholars, is at least exploring questions of memory).
64. McIver, Memory, 157, against Bultmann and Dibelius.
65. Allison, Constructing Jesus, 1–7; but cf. 8–9. Bauckham, “General,” critiques Allison’s limitations, and Allison responds in “Memory”; among other differences, they are working for different levels of certainty.
66. Allison, Constructing Jesus, 11–13, 28.
67. Allison, Constructing Jesus, 374.
68. Barber and Barber, Severed, 89; in social memory, see Barber and Barber, Severed, 89–95; Rodríguez, Structuring, 75–76.
69. McIver, Memory, 21; Barber and Barber, Severed, 89–95, esp. 89; note, e.g., the example of nostalgic distortion in Campbell, Faithfulness, 25–26; for personal constructed identity, see Bruner and Fleisher Feldman, “Narrative,” 292. McIver, Memory, 71–75, focuses on hindsight bias (on which, see also Barber and Barber, Severed, 13).
70. McIver, Memory, 75.
71. Cf. Bernier, Quest, 29.
72. Pelling, Texts, 26. For deliberate cases, see Rhetoric to Alexander 15, 1432a.3–11; Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Isaeus 16; Keener, Acts, 2:1313–15.
73. Rodríguez, Structuring, 47–51. “Prejudices and stereotypes” can shape memories (Stock, Gajsar, and Güntürkün, “Neuroscience,” 388).
74. Thus “events can be experienced in qualitatively different ways” (Robinson, “Perspective,” 199).
75. Redman, “Eyewitnesses,” 180–82; Corbin, Crawford, and Vavra, “Misremembering Emotion.”
76. Bauckham, Eyewitnesses, 330, 334–38, 350; cf. Elder, “Narrativity,” 242. Redman, “Eyewitnesses,” though highly informative, seems to regard Bauckham as claiming more than he actually claims; see briefly Keener, Acts, 1:299n357, but esp. the balanced conclusions in McIver, “Eyewitnesses” (see esp. 535, 540–41, 545–46).
77. E.g., my wife’s mother and siblings (July 16, 2008) and Aimé Moussounga (January 21, 2013) supplemented and confirmed my wife’s accounts of their experiences in the Congolese war.
78. Cf., e.g., Baucom and Adams, “Communication,” 170.
79. McIver, Memory, 75; on hindsight bias more fully, see 71–75; Barber and Barber, Severed, 13.
80. McIver, Memory, 158–60. He cites here Schwartz, Forge, 293–312; Schwartz, Post-heroic Era, 219–68.
81. Byrskog, Story, 176–79. Against counting a problem already compensated for, see, e.g., Breggen, “Scale.”
82. Thucydides, History 1.22.2–3.
83. Le Donne, Historiographical Jesus, 50–52 (preferring the more neutral label “refraction” to “distortions”).
84. Thatcher, Why John Wrote, 113–15; Bauckham, Eyewitnesses, 326, 333, 344; cf. Brewer, “Recollective Memory,” 52; Allison, Constructing Jesus, 5. For topical associations, semantic substitutions, schematization according to relevance, etc., see Kloppenborg, “Memory,” 289 (here following Schacter, Norman, and Koutstaal, “Neuroscience,” 294; and Schacter and Addis, “Neuroscience,” 778).
85. See Larsen, Thompson, and Hansen, “Time,” esp. 153–54; Wagenaar, “Memory,” 187.
86. Kirk, “Memory,” 166; Kloppenborg, “Memory,” 289.
87. E.g., in periods before the floating gap, Vansina, Oral Tradition, 24, 122, 173–88, esp. 176; Bailey, “Tradition” (ExpT), 365; Barber and Barber, Severed, 115–17.
88. E.g., Stanton, Preaching, 119–21; Aune, Environment, 31–34, 63–64; on the Gospels, cf. Augustine, Harmony of the Gospels 21.51.
89. Commentators rightly point out that Jesus probably reused the same sayings on multiple occasions (cf. Dunn, Tradition, 56, 281), but such explanations go only so far, in view of the limited range of material in the Synoptics.
90. With, e.g., Kloppenborg, “Memory,” 304. Some sorts of teaching, however, including many proverbs, were meant to be applied in diverse settings.
91. See Theon, Progymnasmata 4.73–79; cf. 5.388–441.
92. See, e.g., Aune, Environment, 31–34, 63–64; Stanton, Preaching, 119–21; Thorburn, “Tiberius”; esp. the concrete cases in Licona, Differences, 32–33, 47, 50–51, 89–91, 110 (with reference to the Gospels on 136, 163, 185–96).
93. See, e.g., Tuckett, “Sources and Methods,” 134; Holmén, Covenant Thinking, 33–34; Allison, Constructing Jesus, 16–23; Allison, “Criteria,” 22–26; Keener, “Epitome,” 10–11.
94. See Luther (in Kolb, Word, 87); Bock, “Words,” 75–77; Bock, “Note,” 21 (arguing for ipsissima vox, summarizing, and allowing for variations); Bauckham, “Response,” 229, 245; Eve, Behind Gospels, 38–39 (regarding Gerhardsson), 88–89 (regarding Bauckham), 115 (regarding Dunn); with respect to speeches in Acts, see, e.g., Bruce, Speeches in Acts, throughout; cf. Bruce, “Speeches Thirty Years After”; with respect to oral tradition generally, Finnegan, Oral Poetry, 139–40. Quotation marks are modern (Williams, Trust, 98, cites Houston, Characters, 197–200).
95. Cf. similar examples in other ancient biographies in ch. 11.
96. Compare Luke 24:47–49 with Acts 1:4–8; Acts 9:5–6 with 22:8, 10; 9:15–16 and 22:10 with 26:16–18; 10:4–6 with 31–32 and 11:13–14; 10:14 with 11:8; cf. also John 13:10–11.
97. Indeed, many Jewish contemporaries apparently required paraphrase of the Ten Commandments rather than reciting them verbatim (Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 3.90).
98. As in Mark 5:41; 7:34; 14:36. Nor can anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of translation between languages expect completely word-for-word translation; translation requires gist, whereas insistence on the original text often lends itself to verbatim recitation more than grasping the meaning, and insistence on equivalent words produces nonequivalent phrasing and obscures semantic units.
99. Agreeing with, e.g., Sanders, Paul, 211n22, and many others, e.g., Kelber, Gospel, 27, 67.
100. See here Kloppenborg, “Memory,” 291, following helpfully DeConick, “Memory”; cf. Person and Keith, “Media Studies,” 11, following Carr, Formation, 33. Cf. again Kloppenborg, “Memory,” 318: “The Jesus tradition was [likely] condensed, schematized, paraphrased and occasionally elaborated in the course of transmission.”
101. See Kloppenborg, “Memory,” 291 (again summarizing DeConick, “Memory”).
102. Bauckham, Eyewitnesses, 327, 333–34, 345; Allison, Constructing Jesus, 11–13; Kloppenborg, “Memory,” 289, 293–94.
103. Vatri, “Writing,” 770–71, shows that ancient writers could distinguish gist memory of texts, including the sequence of their topics, from verbatim memorization of their precise words (citing Aristophanes, Knights 346–50; Plato, Menexenus 236b7–c1; Alcidamas, Sophists 18–19; Cicero, On the Orator 2.359; Quintilian, Orator’s Education 11.2.8).
104. McIver, Memory, 61–62, noting, e.g., Brainerd, “Theory,” 220; McIver, “Gist Memory,” 157.
105. Small, Wax Tablets, 195, following Baddely, Memory, 138–39.
106. With, e.g., Horsley, “Speeches,” 609; Ehrman, Introduction, 133–34; Balch, “Ἀκριβῶς,” 244; Small, Wax Tablets, 191–92, 206–9.
107. Thucydides, History 1.22.1–2; Walbank, Speeches, 4; in later philosophic lives, Eunapius, Lives 484. Alleged exceptions (Pliny, Letters 2.3.3) were rare.
108. Ancient audiences probably recalled more than we do, because speeches were themselves noteworthy events (Gempf, “Speaking,” 261) and usually fit preexisting rhetorical frames.
109. Marincola, “Speeches,” 120, citing, e.g., Polybius, Histories 18.11; Sallust, Catiline’s War 50.5; Livy, History 37.45.11; Arrian, Alexander 5.27.1; Tacitus, Histories 1.15–16 (note “to this effect,” LCL 1:27, 33); Agricola 29.4.
110. Small, Wax Tablets, 202–6.
111. See, e.g., Epictetus, Discourses 1.pref; contrast Epictetus’s freer adaptation in Encheiridion. For recollections of a teacher’s style, cf. also Porphyry, Life of Plotinus 3.
112. Small, Wax Tablets, 192, 195, 202, giving the example of Plato on 205; also 311n94, quoting Pelling, “Truth,” 36.
113. Small, Wax Tablets, 223.
114. Bauckham, “Response,” 247.
115. Derrenbacker, Practices, 44, 52 (noting Dionysius of Halicarnassus, On Literary Composition 6).
116. See Pelling, “Method,” 92; Small, Wax Tablets, 81, 129, 151–55, 167–68, 176, 181–82, 185–87, 223; Derrenbacker, Practices, 38–39, 47, 96–97. For proposed exceptions in the Jewish scribal tradition, see Barker, “Reassessment”; cf. earlier Cadbury, Foakes-Jackson, and Lake, “Writing History.”
117. Gordon, Near East, 107.
118. For historians’ frequent preference for variation, see Aune, Environment, 125; stylistic preferences for variation in Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights 1.4; 2.5.1; Cicero, On the Orator 46.156–57; Letters to Friends 13.27.1; Nock, “Vocabulary,” 137; Anderson, Glossary, 53–54, 114; examples in, e.g., Xenophon, Anabasis 5.1.8–10; Cyropedia 3.1.36, 41; Lee, “Translations: Greek,” 776–77.
119. Phaedrus, Fables 2, prol. 8.
120. Cf., e.g., the redactional structure of m. ʾAbot 2:9.
121. Finnegan, Oral Poetry, 140; Ong, Orality, 56–57; Goody, Interface, 86–91, 168, 180; Rubin, Memory, 7, 319; Small, Wax Tablets, 7, 192; McIver, Memory, 120; see further Hunter, “Recall.”
122. See Finnegan, Oral Poetry, 73–86, 142; Finnegan, Literacy, 90, 158, 166–67, 172–73 (although she defines accuracy more generally than do her detractors); Ong, Orality, 61–63; Byrskog, Teacher, 323–24; Goody, Interface, 176; Anderson, “Oral Tradition,” 40. On Ong, see, e.g., Lumpp, “Ong”; on Goody, see Person, “Goody”; on Finnegan, see Eve, “Finnegan.”
123. Ong, Orality, 56–57; cf. Goody, Interface, 189.
124. Cf. Lord, Singer, 137. For Greco-Roman antiquity, see Byrskog, Teacher, 324, and the sources noted there.
125. Byrskog, Teacher, 324. Byrskog recognizes Mark and at least parts of Q as written sources employed by Matthew (337–38).
126. Kelber, Gospel, 59, 197, highlighting Mark 8:18.
127. McIver, Memory, 176–80, here 176, 180; McIver, “Gist Memory,” 157; more extensively, McIver and Carroll, “Experiments”; McIver and Carroll, “Characteristics.”
128. Thus, e.g., Bauckham, Eyewitnesses, 284, citing Vansina, Oral Tradition, 51.
129. See, e.g., Jeremias, Unknown Sayings; Hofius, “Sayings,” 336–60; cf. Charlesworth and Evans, “Agrapha,” 483–91.
130. McIver, Memory, 176–77n12, citing Dundes, Writ, 9–10, on a proverb independently attested in fifth-century-BCE Egypt, an Arab manuscript from 1127 CE, “Serbia in 1885, in India in 1920, and in Kurdistan in 1937.” On Dundes, cf. Mieder, “Dundes.”
131. Bailey, “Tradition” (Themelios), 6–7; Bailey, “Tradition” (ExpT), 365; cf. Bailey, “Oral Tradition,” 41. One work that he cites, collecting six thousand proverbs, is that of ʿIsa ʿAtallah, Qalu fi al-Mathal: Mowsuʾah fi al-Amthal wa al-Hikam al-Saʾira (The Proverb Says: Encyclopedia of Current Proverbs and Wisdom Sayings) (Bethlehem, 1985).
132. Aune, “Aphorisms,” 211, noting a similar observation already in Justin, 1 Apology 14.5.
133. They are typically recalled “accurately or . . . not at all” (McIver, Memory, 176).
134. McIver, Memory, 167.
135. McIver, Memory, 180. For some material preserved in close form in antiquity, Byrskog, Teacher, 324, cites Gerhardsson, Memory, 123–30; Riesner, Lehrer, 441–43; Harris, Literacy, 30–33.
136. As in, e.g., Proverbs, Sirach, and Pirke Aboth; cf. Vermes, Jesus the Jew, 27.
137. McIver, Memory, 171–76 (esp. 171).
138. McIver, Memory, 174. Of course, for those lacking direct knowledge of the stories, arrangement can affect the point envisioned (contrast, e.g., Mark 4:21 with Matt 5:15; Mark 4:22 with Matt 10:26//Luke 12:2), though usually even floating logia carry the same general punch (compare Mark 9:43 with Matt 5:30; 18:8).
139. McIver, Memory, 177.
140. McIver, Memory, 158–60, esp. here 160, following Schwartz, Forge, 293–312; Schwartz, Post-heroic Era, 219–68.
141. Bosworth, Arrian, 63–64; Larsen, Thompson, and Hansen, “Time,” 153.
142. Schwartz, “Smoke,” 21, emphasis his.
143. Bauckham, “Psychology of Memory,” citing Neisser and Libby, “Remembering Experiences,” 318; Pillemer, Momentous Events, 55; Hoffman and Hoffman, “Memory Theory,” 282.
144. Cohen, “Overview,” 389, cited in Bauckham, “Psychology of Memory.”
145. Rubin, Memory, 293, on ballads.
146. See the helpful survey of evidence in Ehrman, Before Gospels, 89–94.
147. Against Hume, imagination can sometimes appear more vivid than reality; see Brewer, “Recollective Memory,” 27; cf. Rubin, “Introduction,” 5.
148. McIver, “Eyewitnesses,” 545. The 20 percent figure might be low, based on a single study.
149. McIver, “Eyewitnesses,” 545–56.
150. See Allison, Constructing Jesus, 8n46.
151. See, e.g., Justin, 1 Apology 66; 67; Dialogue with Trypho 100–107, esp. 103.8; 106.3 (with Stanton, New People, 62–63; Abramowski, “Memoirs”; Kennedy, “Source Criticism,” 136; Bockmuehl, Seeing, 185; Bird, Gospel, 250–53, 280; cf. discussion in Robbins, Teacher, 62–67). Cf. perhaps Papias, frag. 3.16 (Holmes; Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 3.39.1), if Papias’s “Matthew” is our Q (e.g., Filson, History, 83; Hill, Matthew, 23–27, 53; Bruce, Documents, 40; Trevijano Etcheverría, “Obra”; Edwards, “Genre,” 55; cf. Hagner, Matthew, xliv, citing also Schleiermacher, T. W. Manson, and M. Black; rejected by, e.g., Jeremias, Theology, 38). Papias’s logia could refer to something dominated by sayings (such as Q), fitting common usage (see, e.g., BDF), and explaining the contextual contrast with Mark if (and Eusebius’s selectivity with Papias leaves this uncertain) his treatment of Matthew followed in the original (Papias, frag. 3.14–16; but cf. Kok, “Papias”); but the term may not be used so narrowly in Papias, frag. 3.1, 15; 5.1; 6.3; cf. Stanton, New People, 117n1. Such “memoirs” should not be confused with the later (esp. fifth- and sixth-century) genre of apostolic memoirs, fresh interpretations of the Jesus tradition; see, e.g. (from citations by Niklas, “Gospel of Peter,” 4), Suciu, Apocryphon; Broek, Apocryphon.
152. Wright, Faithfulness, 649. Ancient historiographically oriented writers also consulted memoirs; see, e.g., Polybius, Histories 12.25e.1; Plutarch, Demosthenes 5.5; Laistner, Historians, 35; earlier, on Xenophon’s memoirs of Socrates, despite their limitations, cf. Kennedy, “Source Criticism,” 137; Hägg, Biography, 23–30. For Cicero’s memoirs, see Cicero, Letters to Atticus 2.1. History today takes into account impacts and “history of effects,” which can often be explained only through the events that initiate them (Le Donne, Historiographic Jesus, 75), an idea developed by Dunn (Perspective, 15-34, esp. 29; cf. Piovanelli, “Authority”; Wright, Faithfulness, 649; for limitations in this approach, cf. Schröter, “Begründer”); one cannot explain early Christianity without Jesus.
153. See here also Bauckham, Eyewitnesses, 330–35.
154. For the memorability of distinctive events, see Brewer, “Recollective Memory,” 50; see also Conway, “Autobiographical Knowledge,” 81, though his approach is highly constructivist (cf. 67, 76, 90), as the volume’s editor observes (Rubin, “Introduction,” 6). Constructiveness per se does not equate to distortion (see Kirk, Memory, 213).
155. Bauckham, Eyewitnesses, 331; cf. Redman, “Eyewitnesses,” 182–83; Galinsky, “Introduction,” 18. On the neuroscience of novelty in memory formation, cf. Kesteren et al., “Schema and Novelty”; Otmakhova et al., “Loop.”
156. May 10, 2016.
157. Allison, Constructing Jesus, 9n46. Allison urges caution rather than “hyperskepticism”; he doubts that the disciples were “amnesiacs” (9n47).
158. For emotionally charged events, see Rubin, “Introduction,” 3; Christianson and Safer, “Emotional Events,” 219, 237–38; Pillemer et al., “Memories of College,” 336; Bauckham, Eyewitnesses, 331–32, 492–505; Redman, “Eyewitnesses,” 184; Kirk, Memory, 218–19; McIver, Memory, 33, citing Hulse et al., “Arousal,” 73–90; Otani et al., “Memory,” 23–42.
159. Eve, Behind Gospels, 155. Depression can focus recall on negative events (Williams, “Depression,” 244), trauma may interfere with recall (Christianson and Safer, “Emotional Events,” 219), even regarding details of unrelated events (Williams, “Depression,” 245), and emotion can concentrate on a particular element of an event while detracting from recall of other details (Rubin, “Introduction,” 3); cf., e.g., the distracting presence of a weapon in McIver, Memory, 11.
160. Stock, Gajsar, and Güntürkün, “Neuroscience,” 379–80; cf. Harkins, Reading, 183–84, 187.
161. See Rhetorica ad Herennium 3.22; Galinsky, “Introduction,” 17.
162. Christianson and Safer, “Emotional Events,” 238.
163. See Allison, Constructing Jesus, 7n40; Redman, “Eyewitnesses,” 184; Slade, “Reports”; though cf. Brewer, “Recollective Memory,” 39–43, 47–51; Hirst et al., “Follow-Up”; Gandolphe and El Haj, “Memories” (citing negative emotion); recent work brought to my attention by Christopher Chandler, in Lanciano, Curci, and Semin, “Determinants”; Kraha and Boals, “Negative”; in cases of trauma, cf. Stock, Gajsar, and Güntürkün, “Neuroscience,” 384. Rehearsal stimulated by emotional intensity may play a direct role in clear flashbulb memories (Tinti et al., “Processes”).
164. Brewer, “Recollective Memory,” 50; Tinti et al., “Processes.”
165. McIver, Memory, 52. Cf. also, e.g., Pillemer et al., “Memories of College,” 319.
166. Pillemer, Momentous Events, 59, quoted in Bauckham, “Psychology of Memory.”
167. See Pillemer, Momentous Events, 53, 99, 100–102, 138, 147, 164, often considering traumatic experiences (though some distinguish traumatic from other emotional experiences; see discussion in Sotgiu and Rusconi, “Memories”); McIver, Memory, 49–50, following Pillemer, Momentous Events, 50–51; cf. Rubin, Memory, 46, 54–56; Rubin, “Introduction,” 3; Small, Wax Tablets, 105–6, 119–22. With Pillemer’s “momentous events” Bauckham, “Psychology of Memory,” also compares Schmidt’s “exceptional events” (Schmidt, Memories). Note discussions of visual imagery and sound, respectively, in Rubin, Memory, 39–64, and 65–89; imagery in Rubin, “Introduction,” 3; Brewer, “Recollective Memory,” 35–36. Multiple sensory stimuli impress the memory even in simulations and reenactments (Harkins, Reading, 189).
168. McIver, Memory, 60; see more fully 76–80.
169. McIver, Memory, 79.
170. Cf. McIver, Memory, 79; Barber and Barber, Severed, 11.
171. Kirk, Memory, 219, noting esp. DiMaggio, “Culture.”
172. Eve, Behind Gospels, 88. Still, episodic and semantic memory are interdependent, with the former involving scripts and the latter generalizations (Williams, Conway, and Cohen, “Autobiographical Memory,” 22; cf. also Cohen, “Memory for Knowledge,” 207). Tulving viewed episodic memory as distinctively “self-knowing” (O’Connor, Moulin, and Cohen, “Memory and Consciousness,” 343).
173. Williams, Conway, and Cohen, “Autobiographical Memory,” 39.
174. Kirk, Memory, 227, 230.
175. The linkage of πιστ- (pist-) terms with σωζ- (sōz-) terms (Mark 5:34; 10:52; Luke 7:50; 17:19; Acts 14:9; James 5:15; possibly 1 Tim 2:15; cf. Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 10.167), though suitable for physical restoration, also suits some other early Christian thought (Luke 8:12; Acts 15:11; 16:31; Rom 1:16; 10:9–10; 1 Cor 1:21; 15:2; Eph 2:8; 2 Thess 2:13; 2 Tim 3:15; 1 Pet 1:5, 9; 1 Clem. 12.1; Ignatius, Philadelphians 5.2; cf. Jude 5; the terms do not appear together, e.g., in Epictetus).
176. Rubin, Memory, 129, 157; cf. 319.
177. Rubin, Memory, 122, 125, 129, 155; cf. 157; Schwartz, “Smoke,” 24.
178. Kirk, Memory, 218; cf. 214. The terms “salient” and “salience” appear more than sixty times in Kirk’s book.
179. Rubin, Memory, 319.
180. Rubin, Memory, 132, following Bartlett. Despite his patronizing attitudes, Lévy-Bruhl, Natives, 111–13 (noted by Jerry Breen in a doctoral paper for my Seminar on the Historical Jesus, May 2018), respected some mental feats in traditional societies, such as Australian indigenous people for being able to recognize each person’s distinctive tracks.
181. Small, Wax Tablets, 4, citing Cole and Scribner, Culture, 138; cf. Rubin, Memory, 169, 317.
182. With Schwartz, “Smoke,” 24–25; Byrskog, Teacher, 400.
183. Dunn, Tradition, 238.
184. Byrskog, Teacher, 307. Insofar as other Jews thought of a unique teacher, they would presumably think of Moses; see, e.g., Philo, Cherubim 49; The Worse Attack the Better 86; Studies 177; Names 42; Moses 2.205; Special Laws 1.319, 345; 2.88, 256; Contemplative Life 63; ʾAbot R. Nat. 1A; Pesiq. Rab. 31:3.
185. Byrskog, Teacher, 308.
186. Cf. Bruner and Fleisher Feldman, “Narrative,” 291: far from inhibiting the communication of information, “narrative patterning . . . provides a framework for both telling and understanding.”
187. Cf. Dunn, Tradition, 270–71, regarding Jesus’s impact.
188. McIver, Memory, 50–51; cf. Pillemer, Momentous Events, 48, 53–54, 99, 101; Rubin, “Introduction,” 2.
189. Small, Wax Tablets, 118–20 (noting the emphasis on repeating aloud in both modern studies and in Quintilian, Orator’s Education 11.2.33).
190. Rubin, “Introduction,” 2; cf. Elder, “Narrativity,” 242.
191. Bauckham, Eyewitnesses, 334; see Goody, Interface, 177; Rubin, Memory, 129.
192. Rubin, Memory, 129, citing Thompson, Wenger, and Bartling, “Recall.”
193. Stock, Gajsar, and Güntürkün, “Neuroscience,” 385.
194. Eve, Behind Gospels, 156, 180.
195. Walker et al., “Why People Rehearse.”
196. See, e.g., Keener and Keener, Impossible Love, 17–20.
197. McIver, “Memory, Persistence,” 223. For a more recent parallel in Middle Eastern practice, see Derico, Tradition, 208.
198. Lysias, Orations 20.22, §160.
199. McIver, Memory, 143–61, addresses memory frailties and the gospel traditions.
200. Hirst et al., “Follow-Up.” This recall included inconsistencies, though engagement with others often corrected inaccuracies.
201. McIver, Memory, 144.
202. McIver, “Memory, Persistence,” 223; McIver, Memory, 23, 35–39, 144; cf. also 183; Rubin, Memory, 147; Brewer, “Recollective Memory,” 49–50. McIver’s sources include Bahrick, “Memory Content”; Bahrick, “Maintenance”; Bahrick, Bahrick, and Wittlinger, “Fifty Years”; Conway, Cohen, and Stanhope, “Retention.” It is important to distinguish different forms of memory in these sources; episodic personal memory is more relevant than language learning (e.g., in Bahrick, “Memory Content”), name recognition, etc. The cases he notes in Offer et al., “Altering,” 737, all reflect subjective judgments rather than information.
203. McIver, Memory, 146. For other lines of evidence regarding genuine historical memory in the call narratives, see Witherington, Christology, 129–30; Davies and Allison, Matthew, 2:393–94; Sanders, Figure, 119.
204. In a different context, Ehrman, Before Gospels, 116, calculates that it takes just “about two hours to read” through Mark.
205. Riesner, Lehrer, 451, citing Gaechter, Gedächtniskultur, 49–53. Crossan, Birth, 51–53, draws lessons for gospel tradition from Irish oral tradition; Derico, Tradition, 60–63, challenges the analogy for its distance from ancient Galilean culture (and on 129–42, Crossan’s attempted analogy with modern Greek laments).
206. E.g., De Pourcq and Roskam, “Virtues,” 167, on Plutarch.
207. Beck, “Demonax,” 83–84, 87, noting esp. Lucian, Demonax 67.
208. Steussy, “Memory,” 211; cf. Kirk, Memory, 217.
209. Many research studies have focused on the molecular neurochemistry of long-term memory; e.g., Bekinschtein et al., “BDNF”; Rossato et al., “Dopamine.”
210. McIver, Memory, 54–55, noting the study of Bernsten and Thomsen, “Memories,” esp. 245, 248–49.
211. McIver, Memory, 56, following Wagenaar and Groeneweg, “Memory,” esp. 84.
212. McIver, Memory, 58 (distinguishing personal-event memories from some other kinds); cf. Schwartz, “Smoke,” 21.
213. McIver, Memory, 144.