As a part of a curriculum, one lecture within my course on Roman Empire is about the Historical Jesus and the origins of Christianity. The logic is simple: Christianity emerged in the 1st century as a minor Jewish movement in Galilee and Judea. In the next several centuries it became the dominant religion of the Roman Empire. Consequently, it seems natural to dedicate one lecture to the life of Jesus and the origins of Christianity. While preparing for the lecture, I came across my old notes about human memory.

You might ask yourself what does the human memory have to do with the Historical Jesus? Well, everything! Most of the things we know about Jesus’ life came from the oral tradition that was written down by the evangelists (from Mark in 70 CE to John in 95 CE). In other words, their accounts of Jesus’ life were (for the most part) based upon the oral tradition. After Jesus’ death, his disciples came to believe that he was resurrected. They told stories about him in order to convert more people. Those people told stories they heard to other people. And so it went – a string of oral traditions were circulating across the Mediterranean. It went on for several decades before someone (e.g. Mark) sat down, collected those stories, and wrote his own account. People who spread stories about Jesus didn’t have a pen or paper. They didn’t have a mobile phone at their disposal. All they have was their memory. Remember, they lived in a predominantly oral culture where most people (c. 85 to 90 %) couldn’t read or write. Hence, in order to figure out the basic elements of the stories told in the Gospels, one has to do serious research on the human capacity to memorize. This is precisely what I have done 5 years ago when I decided to write a scholarly article about different methodologies in the Historical Jesus scholarship. I started with Ehrman’s book “Jesus Before the Gospels“, but soon I found myself reading nothing but the psychological and sociological studies on human memory. This was actually at the beginning of my Ph.D. and it took me 8 months to properly study all the relevant books and articles published in English and German language. So, what did I find out?

HOW DOES HUMAN MEMORY ACTUALLY WORK?

I quickly realized that everything I thought about our ability to memorize is wrong. To begin with, I had an idealized picture thinking that our memory works something like a snapshot. I thought that our experiences (things we heard or saw) get stored in one place in our brain ready to be retrieved later. Just like you would retrieve a file from your computer. A famous study by renowned psychologist Frederic C. Bartlett has shown that our brain doesn’t work like that at all! Instead, when we experience something, bits and pieces of its memory are stored in different parts of the brain. Later, when we try to retrieve the memory, these bits and pieces are reassembled. The problem is that when we reassemble the pieces, there are some, often lots of them, that are missing. To complete the memory we unconsciously fill in the gaps, for example, with analogous recollections from similar experiences. In other words, we are not aware of that process. For example, you can be sure that you have managed to reproduce accurately a particular story your father told you at the Christmas dinner table three years ago. But it could easily be the case that you recollect only a part of that story and your brain unconsciously constructed other parts based on all of your other experiences related to Christmas dinners you had with your family. I know it sounds strange, but that’s what psychologists are telling us! And they have done tons of experiments to back that up! In the end, we get the impression that everything we can vividly remember about a certain event or a story is accurate, but it isn’t. As Bartlett points out:

Remembering then is not a matter of literally reduplicating the past. . . . In fact, if we consider evidence rather than presupposition, remembering appears to be far more decisively an affair of construction rather than one of mere reproduction. Remembering is not the re-excitation of innumerable fixed, lifeless, and fragmentary traces. It is an imaginative reconstruction, or construction, built out of the relation of our attitude towards a whole active mass of organized past reactions or experience, and to a little outstanding detail which commonly appears in image or in language form

I do not want to suggest that our capacity to remember is useless! Far from it, scholars have discovered that the gist of the event is (more or less) secure, while most of the details are problematic at best. There have been numerous studies and experiments confirming the basic conclusion Bartlett made. For the sake of this post, I’ll emphasize just one.

1. Space Shuttle disaster:

On January 28th, 1986. Americans experienced a national tragedy when the Space Shuttle Challenger broke apart 73 seconds into its flight, killing all seven crew members aboard. It was the first fatal accident involving an American spacecraft in flight. And it was all broadcast on every major news channel in the country! The next day psychologists Ulric Neisser and Nicole Harsch gave 106 students a questionnaire asking them about their personal circumstances when they heard the news (Where did you hear it? How did you react? Did you hear it on the radio or on tv? Whom did you first tell? etc.). A year and a half later, in the fall of 1988, they tracked down 44 of these students and gave them the same questionnaire. A half year later (spring of 1989), they interviewed 40 of these 44 about the event. What did they find? For starters, 75 % of those who took the second questionnaire were certain they had never taken the first one! They were obviously wrong! Furthermore, 25 % of them got every single answer wrong on the second questionnaire despite their confidence and vivid memories they had. Finally, another 50 % got only two of the seven questions correct. And the most amazing thing was they were sure they were right. When they were shown the original answers (those they had filled out just a day after the explosion), they didn’t back down. They denied taking the first questionnaire claiming that it was all set up!

CONCLUSION

Given all that we know about human memory, is it possible that someone could memorize (without a mistake) Jesus’ sermon on the mountain which is 3 chapters long, and reproduce it several decades later? Is it possible that a string of people (maybe 10, 15, or even more) carefully and without a mistake transmitted words that Jesus uttered 40 years ago until Matthew wrote them down? Could you remember a lengthy speech by your professor in high school? Well, the answer is obvious. But where does that leave us? We are not supposed to believe that evangelists manage to secure every single detail of Jesus’ life intact and accurate. The gist of his life was probably preserved. However, what exactly counts as a gist – that’s a huge problem and a subject of ongoing debates and polemics among the Historical Jesus scholars!