Jesus before the Gospels: a serial review (pt. 2)

In the Introduction, Bart D. Ehrman mentioned three general approaches to memory and announced his intention to address all three of them in turn. Those three approaches include social anthropology (memory and oral tradition), sociology (social or collective memory), and cognitive psychology (individual and/or eyewitness memory; see pp. 2–3). Chapter 1 is entitled "Oral Traditions and Oral Inventions" (pp. 17–48), and presumably addresses the first of these three approaches.

Ehrman begins by admitting, rightly, that the word memory is used in multiple senses by scholars who talk about memory. He mentions Endel Tulving's (whom he erroneously calls Engel Tulving; pp. 18; 302n. 1) distinction between episodic and semantic memory (available here), though his discussion of the distinction is confused and somewhat contrived. The whole point of this section seems to be that "episodic memory" (recall of episodes from one's own biography) is often false ("flat-out wrong"; p. 18), and also that different groups of people often remember the same event or figure differently. He says, "Let me stress again: most of the time our memories are pretty good" (p. 20), but despite his claim to stress the normally-accurate-enough functioning of memory, the focus of his discussion is clearly and almost entirely on memory's mistakes. "But there are times when we simply don't remember the past accurately. It is worth exploring why we remember things poorly, or wrongly; it is also worth exploring whether such frail or false memories might be helpful for understanding the contexts within which we remember the things we do—and the reasons we remember them in the first place" (p. 21).

The rest of the chapter includes discussion under five subheadings. The first, "Remembering Jesus" (pp. 21–25), sets up the very diverse portrayals of Jesus in popular American culture and among scholars. Ehrman draws attention to Reza Aslan's book, Zealot, and Bill O'Reilly and Martin Dugard's very different volume, Killing Jesus. These are merely examples, among very many others, to demonstrate the point: "Not only does the past impose itself on us when we remember; but also our memories of the past are always affected by our views of the present" (p. 22). This is exactly right. This second subheading, "Memories of Jesus' Companions" (pp. 25–32) surveys fanciful stories told about Peter, Judas, and Pontius Pilate, almost exclusively in NT apocryphal texts (Acts of Peter, Gospel of Nicodemus, Papias, etc.). The third, "Memories of the Birth and Early Life of Jesus" (pp. 32–38) similarly provides a survey of fanciful stories of Jesus' birth and youth, again from NT apocryphal texts (Infancy Gospel of James, Pseudo-Matthew, and Infancy Gospel of Thomas).

The fourth, "Memories of Jesus' Life and Death" (pp. 38–45), surveys the Correspondence with Abgar, Gospel of Thomas, and Gospel of Peter. The last subheading, "The Very Real Memories of Jesus" (pp. 46–48), provides a lovely and sympathetic defense of the notion that "what really happened in the past" is only one among many kinds of truth. "If we want to read a book, do we really only want to read histories and historically accurate biographies? Are our only human interests tied to what has really happened in the past? Don't we also want to read novels? And short stories? And poetry? Don't imaginative storytellers who piece together complicated plots with intricate but invented characters have something to say to us? Can't 'truth' by bigger than the bare-bones question about what happened before now?" (p. 46). This is exactly right.

We could delve into the details of the content of Ehrman's discussion, highlighting this or that insight or questioning this or that oversight. But none of that is the most important thing to note about this chapter. The most important thing is this: The Introduction hinted at a discussion of "what anthropologists have written about oral cultures and the ways they preserve their unwritten traditions" (2). Ehrman gave this chapter the title, "Oral Traditions and Oral Inventions." So it is absolutely astounding that nowhere, not in one single section or page or paragraph or sentence or word does Ehrman say a single thing about either oral tradition or oral invention. The user's manual to my minivan has exactly as much information about "what anthropologists have written about oral cultures and the ways they preserve their unwritten traditions" as this chapter. The eighteen endnotes to this chapter refer to one work on memory (remember: Engel [sic; Endel] Tulving's essay), a handful of books on the historical Jesus, and a number of editions and discussions of extra-canonical Christian texts. One looks in vain for even a single reference to even one of the following:

• Albert B. Lord's now-classic work, The Singer of Tales (Harvard University Press, 1960), which analyzes actually oral tradition and the dynamics of composing long, metrical poetry without the accoutrements of writing (south Slavic moslem epic songs), and then applied that analysis to the Homeric epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey.
• Jack Goody and Ian Watt's influential essay, "The Consequences of Literacy" (in J. Goody, ed., Literacy in Traditional Societies; Cambridge University Press, 1968), which undergirds most theories of the eclipse of the past by the present in oral societies, which Goody and Watt call "homeostasis."
• Walter J. Ong's massively influential book, Orality and Literacy (Routledge, 1982), which set out to describe the effects of communicative media on thought and meaning.
• Werner H. Kelber's ground breaking volume, The Oral and the Written Gospel (Fortress Press, 1983), which applied Ong's insights to questions of early Christian traditions, especially Q, the Gospel of Mark, and Paul's letters. This book has sparked nearly innumerable works; two books are explicitly identified as responses/reactions to it (Horsley, Draper, and Foley, eds., Performing the Gospel, and Thatcher, ed., Jesus, the Voice, and the Text), and we can probably rightly speak of a "Kelber revolution" in biblical studies.
• Jan Vansina's seminal work, Oral Tradition as History (James Curry, 1985), which is the standard work on describing and assessing oral accounts of the past.

• John Miles Foley's work, which transformed the legacy of Albert Lord (and his teacher, Milman Parry) and set it on a new path. Here two books are especially worthy of note: Immanent Art (Indiana University Press, 1991), and The Singer of Tales in Performance (Indiana University Press, 1995). Foley's work sets the agenda for all discussions of oral tradition and movement between media (esp. from oral performance to written text); moreover, Foley has engaged discussions of memory, media, and biblical scholarship on multiple occasions.
• Elizabeth Tonkin's work on oral history and the transmission of historical accounts and memories apart from written texts; see Narrating Our Pasts: The Social Construction of Oral History (Cambridge University Press, 1992).
• David C. Rubin's seminal work, Memory in Oral Traditions (Oxford University Press, 1995), which applies the work of cognitive psychologists to the question of memory and the performance and transmission of oral traditions.
• Ruth Finnegan's extensive anthropological work among the oral traditions of Africa, including (for example) The Oral and Beyond (University of Chicago Press, 2007), or her Literacy and Orality (Callender Press, 2013), though Finnegan is in the later years of a long, productive, and influential career.

These are all seminal voices in the discussion of "Oral Traditions and Oral Inventions." Neglecting one or two would be acceptable, especially in a discussion that engaged not just the others but also a robust selection from the myriad other studies that analyze actual oral traditions, the dynamics of narrating the past in oral media, and the question of reading written texts with roots in oral events and experiences. For that matter, neither does Ehrman discuss even the now-outdated work of the form critics, those biblical scholars whom Ehrman mentioned in the Introduction (see pp. 12–13) and whose work Ehrman explicitly aims to introduce to a general-reading audience. Ehrman's discussion engages exactly no scholarship on oral tradition, whether authentic or invented (though this binary is hugely problematic), and so the title of his chapter is, at best, wrong.*

Let me say one last thing here. It gives me no joy to give such a negative critique of this chapter. And I hold out hope that his discussion of eyewitness memory, social/collective memory, and Jesus will be better and more responsive to the current state of scholarship on the issues Ehrman claims to want to talk about. But this chapter was literally nothing more than a rehashing of issues that Ehrman could have addressed (and did address) without recourse to the language or conceptual apparatus of memory and oral tradition. And that, I think, is too bad.

Continue to watch this space.

Jesus before the Gospels: a serial review (pt. 1)
Jesus before the Gospels: a serial review (pt. 2)
Jesus before the Gospels: a serial review (pt. 3)
Jesus before the Gospels: a serial review (pt. 4)
Jesus before the Gospels: a serial review (pt. 5)
Jesus before the Gospels: a serial review (pt. 6)
Jesus before the Gospels: a serial review (pt. 7)
Jesus before the Gospels: a serial review (pt. 8)

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* I had earlier used an unfortunately strong word in my criticism of Ehrman's chapter. I have chosen to delete that word, with apologies for those who saw it.