Baker Academic

Thursday, May 12, 2016





Later, Ehrman provides another lengthy quote:
In fact, Neisser goes further:






Continue to watch this space.



  1. Do you really want to say that distortions in memories put us in better touch with the truth?

    What if so many individual memories are distorted, And often in the same way (by say hope, ideology, master or "grand narratives", cultural biases), that finally the accumulation of the many details--the overall impression--also errs?

    1. Thank you, Anonymous.

      I would not say that distortions—all of them— put us in better touch with the truth. I would, however, say that the truth of an event or a figure in history is itself a distortion and is communicated through distortions (selections, emphases, juxtapositions, and other interpretive maneuvers) that highlight what a person thinks is appropriate in order to perceive and convey the truth of that event or figure.

      Some distortions obscure (e.g., Nixon's attempts to cover-up his awareness of and involvement in the events of the Watergate break-in). But other distortions focus (e.g., Dean's recollections of conversations with Nixon, recollections which turned out to be largely erroneous of the details but which accurately expressed "the truth" of the Nixon Whitehouse in September 1972 and March 1973).

      So, in the case of the Sermon on the Mount, if we were able to verify somehow the exact words—assuming there were any—that Jesus spoke when he went up on the mountain, sat down, and began to teach, we would likely find significant differences between those words (which presumably weren't even in Greek!!) and the words Matthew records. But Matthew isn't claiming to provide a transcript of Jesus' teachings; he is presenting an image of Jesus teaching. And that distortion, Matthew would have us believe (whether or not we actually do) puts us in touch with the truth of Jesus' message.

  2. Gene Stecher
    Chambersburg, Pa.


    I get this and accept the truth of it, but I also think that there are other aspects to memory. For example, at age 17, 55 years ago, I was sitting in a Western Civilizations class as a freshman in college. The professor made reference to the people of Israel crossing through the "Reed Sea." That one statement, and my wrestling with it, including having lunch with the professor, changed my approach to the Bible forever. I could point to other such moments in my life, as I'm sure we all could, as well. So I tend to think that individual memory moments can have tremendous impact as well as 'the common characteristics of a series.'

    I'm also thinking that there could have been such individual moments 'alive' even at the time of Mark's writing. Crossan, and others, have estimated the average 1st century life span in Palestine to be in the late 20's, but the normal statistical curve predicts that some would grow to a much older age. So whether it was Mark or Jesus who said that "some standing here" would not taste death until the kingdom arrived (9:1, 14:62), a few, say who were age 15 in 30 C.E., could in 85 C.E. still have a largely accurate single impactful memory.

    Of course, I can no longer "prove" my college freshman memory with paperwork, but in my last post, I did have paperwork to show a 20 year old memory accurate for its gist.

  3. Rafael, it's not clear to me from the above how memory conveys something "essentially correct" in a way that is reliably useful to the historian.

    I see a problem in trying to learn from Dean’s testimony about memory and history. It seems to me that the example of Dean is atypical; not only do we have a recording of what Dean said to compare to what Dean said he said but it also turns out that Dean was “essentially correct” in the way that remains essential to us today: Nixon was guilty. A more instructive example might be that of the watchmaker who repaired Lincoln’s pocket watch on the eve of the Civil War, and later claimed to have inscribed a message inside the watch hoping that the war would end slavery. When the Smithsonian opened Lincoln’s watch years later, they found that the watchmaker’s inscription expressed the hope that Lincoln would succeed in reunifying the country. Did the watchmaker’s story contain an “essential truth”? Yes. But it might not be the truth essential to you or me at any given moment … nor might we have been able to identify this essential truth from the watchmaker’s story if we didn’t also have access to Lincoln’s watch.

    The example of Lincoln’s watch identifies (for me) an essential problem that’s not readily apparent from the example of Dean’s testimony. It is a problem in direction of reasoning. We can (a) look at Lincoln’s watch and understand what was true in the watchmaker’s testimony. But we can’t with the same confidence (b) look at the watchmaker’s testimony and know what was inscribed in Lincoln’s watch. Isn’t it the case that the scholar of ancient history is almost always engaged in a (b) exercise, a (b) direction of reasoning (that is, unless the scholar is exclusively interested in reception history)? If so, then in what way can you say that the Gospels put us in touch with the Jesus of history? In the sense that this Jesus is the “cause” (or a part of the cause) that resulted in the “effect” of the Gospels? In the sense that the Gospels most likely contain an essential truth, or in the sense that we can identify this truth with any degree of confidence? On this point, isn’t Ehrman essentially right, that it falls to the historian to identify these essential truths, using the tricks of the trade?

  4. Larry makes some good points. The research around individual memory suggests that (except perhaps when we are witnesses in trials) we remember things in order to help us to understand who we are in relation to the world around us. And we only remember things that interest or surprise us or for some other reason stick in our minds. Over time our memories tend to bend in ways that are more harmonious with our images of who we are or who we want to be. My reading and thinking suggests that this means that some memories will 'slip' more over time than others. Richard Bauckham cites two examples in "Jesus and the Eyewitnesses" that illustrate this. One is of a man who as a ten-year-old was fascinated by an account of the rotting corpse of a fisherman washed up on a local beach that was reported in the reported in the paper and was still able to recall the details with significant accuracy some seventy years later because, as a small boy, he was fascinated by the gruesome details. The other is of Rossini who made an attempt to visit Beethoven when Rossini was a young musician. When he initially told the story, he talked about the frustration of their not being able to communicate because of the language barrier, but decades later he told of Beethoven praising and encouraging him. OTOH, apparently when I was a child, I was fascinated by a sex scandal that unfolded in the papers and read everything I could about it. My parents and grandmother were horrified, but decided not to make a 'thing' of it in the hope that I would lose interest. This seems to have worked because I have no personal memory of it as an adult, although I have no reason to believe that my mother made the story up when she told me about it. I suspect that Dean had little interest in his conversation with Nixon, so it slipped out of his mind but he was asked about it soon enough that not eveything had gone - or that the conversation made him uncomfortable enough that his mind was busily re-casting the memory.

    The problem with the gospel witness is that we have no way of knowing whether the material recorded is a memory made accurate by the fascination of the storytellers with the kinds of details they witnessed, or a memory that has been adjusted to make the person remembering it more comfortable, or something that they were re-creating from very vague details because someone else asked them about it. "Love your enemies" *could* be Jesus's actual words - something that was burned into the memory of the hearer because it was so surprising, but we have no way of knowing this for sure. People like Ehrman want to take the worst-case scenario as definitive. Others want to take the best-case scenario as definitive. I don't think either approach is really helpful, but we don't cope at all well with 'we really don't know' when it comes to Scripture. :-)

  5. As a general comment, I continue to be fascinated by the issue of "distortion" as NT studies comes to grip with memory theory. "Distortion" applies to historically accurate and historically inaccurate portrayals of the past alike. As Le Donne has argued at length, and he is here accurately representing the theory, this is not necessarily a problem (though it can be under certain circumstances) but the necessary precondition of portraying the past in the present at all. I'm becoming slowly convinced that some NT scholars have decided *what* memory is long before actually reading it or even about it, and are sometimes reacting to that preconceived notion. I have no idea whether this is the case with Bart, but it needs to be said that "distortion" is a jargon term in this discourse that, on its own, is neutral in terms of its implications for historical accuracy.

    1. Not all Historical investigators however, would accept the inevitability or neutrality of distortion. In a phenomenologicalistic account, that would be accepted: no one really knows what reality is or was really like; all we know are subjective opinions.

      However, most historians, say, are not of that philosophy. For many of them, as for much of science, physical and historical reality can be known with some high probability, in many cases. And therefore, we can separate accurate from inaccurate - distorted- accounts.

    2. Anonymous, thank you very much for illustrating perfectly the point that I just made, which is that people commenting on this issue aren't actually reading the literature before coming to conclusions about what "distortion" means *in this particular discourse.* The term, as a matter of fact, does not refer to "inaccurate" accounts. It refers to the process by which the past is rendered understandable to a person in the present. Also, affirming subjectivity does not entail an inability to come to conclusions about historical accuracy. That's a false choice.

    3. Christian MichaelMay 17, 2016 at 6:03 AM

      Perhaps LeDonnes alternative term 'refraction' is more apt: The conveyed image requires insertion of lenses to come into focus for the audience. As a result of the chosen lenses (e.g. cultural schemata) the image/memory may or may not resemble a faithful translation the original impetus.

    4. Le Donne's term "refraction" is precisely a replacement for "distortion."

    5. For various reasons, I'd use Le Donne's terminology here. Which will avoid a few problems that I see forming down the road.

  6. The Nessier article was very interesting, thanks for mentioning it.

    I'm wondering what 'gist' means to Nessier, and to you (Rafael) because I would have said that Dean does remember the gist of the conversations, with only a couple of bits of gist that he gets wrong. He rightly remembers that Nixon knows about the break-in and the coverup, and he was actually praised, Nixon seemed almost fixated on the blackmail money angle, and so on. To me that's more than the 'tenor' of the conversation, which would be more like 'people were pretty pleased' or something.

    Nessier's pointing out that psychology tends to study things that laboratory tests can be devised for is something I have pondered myself on more than one occasion. It seems like a big blind spot to me: most of the cognitive activities we're really interested in, it seems to me, are things that can't be so easily tested in a laboratory, including long-term memory about events that are actually important to us.

    I came across this idea when I did some reading about IQ a few years ago, and one researcher pointed out that IQ tests are over and done with in an hour or so, have all the material available to determine the answer, are unambiguous and clearly stated (if they are ambiguous this is deliberate and part of the test and often also clear), there's a clear right answer, they don't have any intrinsic interest, and they don't require a vast amount of specialist knowledge (in theory, of course, they require no specialist knowledge at all) or long-running investigations. And every interesting problem is almost the complete opposite of all of that!

    (to that list we could add 'cooperation with others'.)