Transience of Memory & the Gospels

A classic experiment on fast forgetting was carried out by Peterson and Peterson (1959). They asked participants to memorise a three-letter sequence, then count backwards in sets of threes. Participants were then asked to try and recall the three-letter sequence after different lengths of time counting backwards.

Participants did surprisingly poorly on this test. After only six seconds of counting backwards in threes, on average half of the original three letters had disappeared from memory. By the time participants had been counting backwards for 12 seconds, less than 15% of the original memory remained. Finally after 18 seconds it was all but gone.["How Quickly We Forget: The Transience of Memory," January, 2008]

Concerning the "classic experiment" by Lloyd Peterson, he stated "The evidence linked short-term retention with the acquisition process." [This Week's Citation Classic, September, 1982]

Many critics of the Bible have used similar arguments to suggest or imply that the Jesus tradition (that is, the oral tradition about Jesus before Matthew, Mark, and Luke penned their Gospels) was already severely distorted by the time the Evangelists set out to write their Gospels, which are really Graeco-Roman biographies. (see Can We Trust the Gospels?: Investigating the Reliability of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John & also The Historical Reliability of the Gospels.) 


In other words they are suggesting the Gospels are both, in some sense, history and myth to a certain extent. We are suppose to dig out the fact from fiction. (This has, over time, developed into the Historical Jesus studies, for which see Darrell Bock in Studying the Historical Jesus & also Craig Keener in The Historical Jesus of the Gospels). But there are several problems with this understanding of short-term memory and distortion of the Gospels. Of most importance, we need not forget that first century Palestine was an oral culture. That is, they were already accustomed for many centuries to recount history by means of oral tradition. They were quite capable of reproducing stories and histories fairly accurately.

Consider for example the 1959 study of Harald Riesenfeld entitled, "The Gospel Tradition and its Beginnings."  In this study, Riesenfeld concluded that the passing and memorizing of oral tradition was much more rigid and complex than what critics had often alleged. He stated that Jesus probably made his disciples remember Jesus' most important sayings and teachings, a practice that was common in Rabbinic circles.

Riesenfeld's thesis was, of course, challenged given that Jesus was not like other Rabbi's so Riesenfeld's proposal was a bit off in that he compared Jesus to other Rabbis' form of teaching. It was simply an invalid comparison in some respects. However, a few years later came another scholar by the name of Rainer Riesner who, instead of proposing that Jesus adopted Rabbinic practices, focused on the educational methods used in Ancient Israel. He gave at least 6 good reasons how accurate information could be kept without having to memorize every single detail verbatim:

1. Jesus followed the practice of the Old Testament prophets by proclaiming the word of the Lord with the kind of authority that would have commanded respect and concern to safeguard that which was perceived as revelation from God.

2. The fact that Jesus presented himself as Messiah, even if in a sometimes veiled way, would reinforce his followers' concern to preserve his word, since one fairly consistent feature in an otherwise diverse body of first-century expectations was that the Messiah would be a teacher of wisdom.

3. The Gospels depict Jesus as just such a teacher of wisdom and phrase over 80% of his sayings in forms that would have been easy to rmember using memorable imagery and figures of speech much like those found in Hebrew poetry and in carefully preserved Middle-Eastern tradition more generally.

4. Elementary education for boys until at least the age of twelve was widely practised in Israel in Jesus' day, so texts like Acts 4:13 cannot mean that the disciples had no competence in reading, writing and memorization.

5. There is widespread evidence in the Gospels of Jesus commanding the Twelve to 'learn' specific lessons and to transmit what they learned to others, even before the end of his earthly ministry. In additioin to teh obvious missions of Mark 6:7-13 and parallels and Luke 10:1-17.

6. Almost all teachers in the Jewish and Graeco-Roman worlds gathered disciples around them in order to perpetuate their teachings and lifestyles. Thus, however different he was from the rabbis in other ways, Jesus probably resembled them in this respect.(see Craig Blomberg in The Historical Reliability of the Gospels, pp. 56-57)