Here’s the link to this article by Bart Ehrman.

June 10, 2023

I’m going to be discussing soon some of the things that appear to be “misremembered” about Jesus in our early sources, but first it’s important to emphasize some of the hugely critical positive things about memory – like, that most of the time we get it basically right.  Depending, of course, on what “basically” means!

Here’s how I discuss the matter in Jesus Before the Gospels (HarperOne, 2016).

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Remembering the Gist?

Let me make a point that may not be clear from what I have said so far about the psychology of memory.  In stressing the fact – which appears to be a fact – that memories are always constructed and therefore prone to error, even when they are quite vivid, I am not, I am decidedly not, saying that all of our memories are faulty or wrong.   Most of the time we remember pretty well, at least in broad outline.   Presumably, so too did eyewitnesses to the life of Jesus.  As did the person who heard a story from an eyewitness may well have remembered in broad outline he was told.   And the person who heard a story from a neighbor whose cousin was married to a man whose father told him a story that he heard from a business associate whose wife once knew someone who was married to an eyewitness.   Probably in the latter case – which, as far-fetched as it sounds, may be pretty close to how most people were hearing stories about Jesus – a lot more would have been changed than in the case of an eyewitness telling someone the day after he saw something happen.   But my basic point here is that despite the faults of memory, we do obviously remember a lot of things, and the fundamental memories themselves can often be right.

This is a commonplace in the psychological study of memory.  We tend to remember the “gist” of an experience pretty well, even if the details get messed up.    You may not remember correctly (despite what you think) where, when, with whom, or how you heard about the Challenger explosion, or the results of the O. J. Simpson trial, or even (this is harder to believe, but it appears to be true) the attacks of 9/11.  But you do remember that you heard about the events, and you remember that they happened.

As we will see, this is an important point, because there are gist memories of Jesus recorded in the New Testament Gospels that are almost certainly accurate.  At the same time, there are a lot of details – and in fact entire episodes – that are almost certainly not accurate.   These are “memories” of things that didn’t actually happen.  They are distorted memories.

Still, many of the broad outlines that are narrated in the Gospels certainly  happen.  Much of the gist is correct.  One big question, then, is just how broad does a memory have to be in order to be considered a gist memory?   Different scholars may have different views about that.

John Dean as a Test Case

A famous example can demonstrate my point.   There is a much cited study done of both detailed and gist memories of a person who claimed to have, and was generally conceded to have, a very good memory:  John Dean, White House Counsel to Richard Nixon from July 1970 to April 1973.

During the Watergate hearings Dean testified in detail about dozens of specific conversations he had during the White House cover up.  In the course of the hearings he was asked how he could possibly remember such things.  He claimed to have a good memory in general.  But he also indicated that he had used later newspaper clippings about events in the White House to refresh his memory and to place himself back in the context of the events that were described.  It was after he publicly described his conversations with Nixon that the White House tapes were discovered.  With this new evidence of what was actually said on each occasion, one could look carefully at what Dean had earlier remembered as having been said, to see if he recalled both the gist and the details correctly.

That’s exactly what the previously mentioned Ulric Neisser did, in an intriguing article called “John Dean’s Memory: A Case Study.”  Neissser examined two specific conversations that took place in the Oval office, one on September 15, 1972 and the other on March 21, 1973, by comparing the transcript of Dean’s testimony with the actual recording of the conversation.  The findings were striking.[1]  Even when he was not elevating his own role and position (as he did), Dean got things wrong.  Lots of things wrong.  Even big things.

For example, the hearing that involved the September 15 conversation occurred nine months later.  The contrast between what Dean claimed was said and what really was said was sharp and striking.  In Neisser’s words:

Comparison with the transcript shows that hardly a word of Dean’s account is true.  Nixon did not say any of the things attributed to him here…. Nor had Dean himself said the things he later describes himself as saying…. His account is plausible but entirely incorrect…. Dean cannot be said to have reported the ‘gist’ of the opening remarks; no count of idea units or comparison of structure would produce a score much above zero.[2]

It should be stressed the Neisser does not think Dean was lying about what happened in the conversation in order to make himself look good:  the conversation that really happened and the one he described as happening were both highly incriminating.  So why is there a difference between what he said was said and what was really said? Neisser argues that it is all about “filling in the gaps,” the problem I mentioned earlier with respect to F. C. Bartlett.   Dean was pulling from different parts of his brain the traces of what had occurred on the occasion and his mind, unconsciously, filled in the gaps.  Thus, he “remembered” what was said when he walked into the Oval Office based on the kinds of things that typically were said when he walked into the Oval Office.   In fact, whereas they may have been said on other occasions, they weren’t on this one.  Or he might have recalled how his conversations with Nixon typically began and thought that that was the case here as well, even though it was not.   Moreover, almost certainly, whether intentionally or sub-consciously, he was doing what all of us do a lot of the time: he was inflating his own role in and position in the conversation:  “What his testimony really describes is not the September 15 meeting itself but his fantasy of it: the meeting as it should have been, so to speak….  By June, this fantasy had become the way Dean remembered the meeting.”[3]

Neisser sums up his findings like this:  “It is clear that Dean’s account of the opening of the September 15 conversation is wrong both as to the words used and their gist.  Moreover, cross examination did not reveal his errors as clearly as one might have hoped…..   Dean came across as a man who has a good memory for gist with an occasional literal word stuck in, like a raisin in a pudding.  He was not such a man.”[4]

And so, whether Dean had a decent gist memory probably depends on how broadly one defines “gist.”  He knew he had a conversation with Nixon.  He knew what the topics were.  Nonetheless, he appears not to have known what was actually said, either by Nixon or himself.

In this instance we are talking about an extraordinarily intelligent and educated man with a fine memory, trying to recall conversations from nine months before.  What would happen if we were dealing with more ordinary people with average memories, trying to recall what someone said maybe two years ago?  Or twenty?  Or forty?  Try it for yourself: pick a conversation that you had two years ago with someone – a teacher, a pastor, a boss.   Do you remember it word for word?  Even if you think you do (sometimes we think we do!) is there any actual evidence that you do?   It is important to emphasize what experts have actually learned about memory, and distorted memories.  Leading memory expert Elizabeth Loftus and her colleague Katherine Ketcham reflect on this issue:  “Are we aware of our mind’s distortions of our past experiences?  In most cases, the answer is no.  As time goes by and the memories gradually change, we become convinced that we saw or said or did what we remember.”[5]

These comments are dealing with just our own personal memories.  What about a report, by someone else, of a conversation that a third person had, written long afterwards?  What are the chances that it will be accurate, word for word?   Or even better, what about a report written by someone who had heard about the conversation from someone who was friends with a man whose brother’s wife had a cousin who happened to be there – a report written, say, several decades after the fact?   Is it likely to record the exact words?  In fact, is it likely to remember precisely even the gist?   Or the topics?

Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount in Matthew chapters 5-7 was recorded about fifty years after he would have delivered the sermon.  But can we assume he delivered it?  If he did so, did he speak the specific words now found in the Sermon (all three chapters of them) while sitting on a mountain addressing the crowds? On that occasion did he really say, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven,” and “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves,” and “Everyone who hears these words of mind and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on a rock”?  Or did he say things sort of like that on the occasion?  Or did he say something sort of like that on some other occasion – any occasion at all?  Which is the gist and which is the detail?[6]

Or what about episodes from Jesus’ life, recorded, say, forty years later?  Was Jesus crucified between two robbers who both mocked him before he died six hours later?   Are those details correct?   Or is the gist correct?  But what is the gist?  Is it that Jesus was crucified with two robbers?  Is it that Jesus was crucified?  Is it that Jesus died?

[1] Ulric Neisser, “John Dean’s Memory:  A Case Study,” Cognition 9 (1981) 1-22.

[2] “John Dean’s Memory,” p. 9.  Italics his.

[3] “John Dean’s Memory,” p. 10

[4] “John Dean’s Memory,” p. 13.

[5] Elizaeth Loftus and Katherine Ketcham, Witness for the Defense: The Accused, the eyewitness, and the Expert who Puts Memory on Trial (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), p. 20.

[6] See my discussion of the sermon on pp. xxx.

Here’s the link to this article by Bart Ehrman.

June 7, 2023

It is flat-out amazing to me how many New Testament scholars talk about the importance of eyewitness testimony to the life of Jesus without having read a single piece of scholarship on what experts know about eyewitness testimony.  Some (well-known) scholars in recent years have written entire books on the topic, basing their views on an exceedingly paltry amount of research into the matter.  Quite astounding, really.  But they appear to have gone into their work confident that they know about how eyewitness testimony works, and didn’t read the masses of scholarship that shows they simply aren’t right about it.

Here’s how I begin to talk about eyewitness scholarship in my book Jesus Before the Gospels (HarperOne, 2016).

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In the history of memory studies an important event occurred in 1902.[1]   In Berlin, a well-known criminologist named von Liszt was delivering a lecture when an argument broke out.  One student stood up and shouted that he wanted to show how the topic was related to Christian ethics.  Another got up and yelled that he would not put up with that.   The first one replied that he had been insulted.  A fight ensued and a gun was drawn.  Prof. Liszt tried to separate the two when the gun went off.

The rest of the students were aghast.  But Prof. von Liszt informed them that the event had been staged.

He chose a group of the students to write down an exact account of what they had just seen.  The next day, other students were instructed to write down what they recalled, others a week later.  The results of these written reports were surprising and eye-opening.  This was one of the first empirical studies of eyewitness testimony.

Prof. Liszt broke down the sequence of events, which had been carefully planned in advance, into a number of stages.  He then calculated how accurately the students reported the sequence, step-by-step.   The most accurate accounts were in error in 26% of the details the reported.  Others were in error in as many as 80%.

As you might expect, research on the reliability of eyewitness testimony has developed significantly over the years since this first rather crude attempt to establish whether it can be trusted to be reliable.  Scholarship in the field has avalanched in recent decades.   But the findings are consistent in one particularly important respect.  A report is not necessarily accurate because it is delivered by an eyewitness.   On the contrary, eyewitnesses are notoriously inaccurate.

There have been many books written about whether the Gospels were written by eyewitnesses or by authors relying on eyewitnesses.  Some of these books are written by very smart people.  It is very odd indeed that many of them do not appear to be particularly concerned with knowing what experts have told us about eyewitness testimony.[2]

This chapter is focused on two questions.  Are the Gospels based on stories about Jesus that had been passed around, changed, and possibly invented by Christian storytellers for decades before being written down, or were they written by eyewitnesses?  If they were written by eyewitnesses , would that guarantee their essential accuracy?  We will deal with the second question first.

Research on Eyewitness Testimony

Psychological studies of eyewitness testimony began to proliferate in the 1980s, in part because of two important phenomena related to criminal investigations.   The first is that people started recalling ugly, painful, and criminal instances of sexual abuse when they were children.[3]  These recollections typically surfaced during the process of therapy, especially under hypnosis.   Both those who suddenly remembered these instances and the therapists treating them often maintained that these repressed memories explained why the patients had experienced subsequent psychological damage.   Some of these reports involved incest committed by relatives, especially parents; others involved abuse by other adults, for example in child care centers.   As reports of such memories began to proliferate, some psychologists started to wonder if they could all be true.   Some were obviously real memories of real events.   But was it possible that others were not true memories at all, but false memories that had been unconsciously implanted during the process of therapy?    It turns out that the answer is a resounding yes, which creates enormous complexities and problems for all parties: the victim or alleged victim, the therapist, the accused adults, and the judges and juries of the legal system.

The other phenomenon involved the use of DNA evidence to overturn criminal convictions.  Once DNA became a reliable indicator of an accused person’s direct involvement in serious crimes, such as murder or rape,  a large number of previous convictions were brought back for reconsideration.   Numerous convictions were overturned.  As Harvard psychologist Daniel Schacter has recently indicated, in about 75% of these reversed judgments, the person charged with the crime was convicted solely on the basis of eyewitness testimony.[4]   What is one to make of such findings?  In the words of a seminal article in the field:  “Reports by eyewitnesses are among the most important types of evidence in criminal as well as in civil law cases…  It is therefore disturbing that such testimony is often inaccurate or even entirely wrong.”[5]

This particular indictment emerged out of a study unrelated to DNA evidence.  It involves an interesting but tragic case.  On October 4, 1992, an El Al Boeing 707 that had just taken off from Schipfol Airport in Amsterdam lost power in two engines.  The pilot tried to return to the airport but couldn’t make it.  The plane crashed into an eleven-story apartment building in the Amsterdam suburb of Bijlmermeer.   The four crew members and thirty-nine people in the building were killed.   The crash was, understandably, the leading news story in the Netherlands for days.

Ten months later, in August 1993, Dutch psychology professor Hans Crombag and two colleagues gave a survey to 193 university professors, staff, and students in the country.  Among the questions was the following:  “Did you see the television film of the moment the plane hit the apartment building?”  In their responses 107 of those surveyed (55%) said Yes, they had seen the film.  Sometime later the researchers gave a similar survey with the same question to 93 law school students.  In this instance, 62 (66%) of the respondents indicated that they had seen the film.  There was just one problem.  There was no film.

These striking results obviously puzzled the researchers, in part because basic common sense should have told anyone that there could not have been a film.  Remember, this is 1992, before cell phone cameras.  The only way to have a film of the event would have been for a television camera crew to have trained a camera on this particular apartment building in a suburb of Amsterdam at this exact time, in expectation of an imminent crash.  And yet, between half and two-thirds of the people surveyed – most of them graduate students and professors – indicated they had seen the non-existent film.  Why would they think they had seen something that didn’t exist?

Even more puzzling were the detailed answers that some of those interviewed said about what they actually saw on the film, for example, whether the plane crashed into the building horizontally or at vertical and whether the fire caused by the plane started at impact or only later.  None of that information could have been known from a film, because there was no film.  So why did these people remember, not only seeing the crash but also details about how it happened and what happened immediately afterward?

Obviously they were imagining it, based on logical inferences (the fire must have started right away) and on what they had been told by others (the plane crashed into the building as it was heading straight down).  The psychologists argued that these people’s imaginations became so vivid, and were repeated so many times, that they eventually did not realize they were imagining something.  They thought they were remembering it.  They really thought that.  In fact they did remember it.  But it was a false memory.  Not just a false memory one of them had.  A false memory most of them had.

The researchers concluded:  “It is difficult for us to distinguish between what we have actually witnessed, and what common sense inference tells us that must also have been the case.”   In fact, commonsense inference, along with information we get by hearsay from others, together “conspire in distorting an eyewitness’s memory.”   Indeed “this is particularly easy when, as in our studies, the event is of a highly dramatic nature, which almost by necessity evokes strong and detailed visual imagery.”[6]

The witnesses to the life of Jesus certainly were recalling events “of a highly dramatic nature” – Jesus’ walking on the water, calming the storm with a word, casting out a demon, raising a young girl back to life.  Moreover, these stories certainly evoked “strong and detailed visual imagery.”  Even if such stories were told by eyewitnesses, could we trust that they were necessarily accurate memories?

[1] This episode is recounted in Elizabeth F. Loftus, Eyewitness Testimony, 2^nd ed.  (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1996) pp. 20-21.

[2] The best known and very large study is Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006).

[3] See Richard J. McNally, Remembering Trauma (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2003).

[4] Daniel L. Schacter, “Constructive Memory: Past and Future,” Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience 14 (2012) 7-18.

[5] Hans F. M. Crombag, Willem A. Wagenaar, Peter J. Van Koppen, “Crashing Memories and the Problem of ‘Source Monitoring,’” Applied Cognitive Psychology 1 (1996) p. 95.

[6] “Crashing Memories,” p. 103.