“ Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?
Caught in a landslide, no escape from reality
Open your eyes, look up to the skies and see…’
Freddy Mercury
I happened across an article on a Facebook post concerning the nature of memory, which is interesting in its own regard, but it reminded me of the thread here discussing the dating of the Gospels. The article discusses how memories are more like an impressionist painting put together, giving a picture of what happened but out of focus and blurry at times, and viewed up close lacking definition and clarity, except in cases where perhaps either positive or negative events are “seared into our brains.” Time changes those memories, with the events filtered through emotions, later experiences, and maturity.
How then does that relate to inspiration of scriptures written at a later date? And, almost all scripture would fall into that catagory, although for the purpose of this post, we might focus on the Gospels, since they are most often put forth as being historical, eye-witness accounts of actual events and conversations. Do we take our meaning from the events as being real and factual, or the is the meaning God has for us filtered and derived through selective memory, Does it matter? Is the inspiration and breathe of God in the events, or in the words?
Link to article. Feel free to comment on other aspects of memory if desired, these were just questions that came to mind:
“The Lost World of Scripture” by John Walton and Brent Sandy was the first book to introduce me to the following two terms:
Ipsissima verba: the very words
Ipsissima vox: the very voice
So I don’t think the Gospel of John contains the ipsissima verba of Jesus (translated that be, from Aramaic to Greek), but the ipsissima vox.
Jesus’ language in John reminds me a lot of the terms used by Philo of Alexendria. It is so symbolic and philosophical (pun intended). No way a Galilean carpenter would have talke like that.
But I am sure the words don’t disagree with what Jesus actually did say. Jesus’ words turned into “art”.
In education it is often required for people to put things in their own words rtaher than repeat verbatum the text. It is seen as a sign of understanding. The Gospels each have a specific message and understanding and the words used reflect that. Surely that is better than a word perfect recording to which there is no understanding?
I would agree. it seems when speaking of memory of events that happened 20-30 years ago at best, and perhaps if, say Luke was written 50 or more years later, that those words would be remembered not as they were spoken, but rather as they were interpreted through time and transmission through the retelling in the light of subsequent events. Thus, the inspiration contained in the words as recorded must be from the retellers and later recorders, not the eyewitnesses and the events themselves.
This reminded me of a research article I read some time ago, where sociologists took on the common idea that eye-witness accounts can’t be trusted. The big result of their research is that as a blanket statement this is not true: when people are asked to relate what they remember, eye-witness accounts are amazingly accurate – but when they’re pressed on something they don’t recall clearly or details they didn’t notice, then the brain fills things in with whatever seems to fit, and that kind of eyewitness testimony is just garbage and indeed isn’t really eye-witness testimony at all!
Ask people what is “seared into their brains” and you get good results; press them on anything else and the result is almost guaranteed to be misleading.
[Which is why a good defense attorney I knew always told clients to never answer a question that tried to get them to say something about anything they didn’t clearly remember but instead say, “I don’t remember that”.]
I think sometimes about Jesus speaking on the side of a mountain, or from a boat, or out in a field to large crowds of people. I wonder how well they could hear since there was no loudspeaker or microphone. I am wondering if possibly the disciples may have stood away from Jesus a bit and hearing what he said, say it again to those sitting further out. If they did this, they would have come to remember Jesus’ words quite well.
Yes, the video series “The Chosen” portrays the disciples as doing exactly this. It is possible. On the other hand, “The Chosen” also portrays the sermon as delivered in a single long speech to the crowd, as something meticulously crafted, written down, and practiced and memorized by Jesus beforehand. I find that rather implausible. Rather, I think Jesus taught elements of the Sermon on the Mount, on more than one occasion, to various crowds, and used the same parable (or a similar rephrasings) many times during his ministry. Any student hanging around with a professor for three years, carefully listening while the teacher lectures repeatedly on “the same topic” is going to remember the “gist/meaning” of the professor’s pet-examples and anecdotes on that topic, if not the verbatim delivery.
The moment something is processed and regurgitated in your own words, the meaning is also processed. If the understanding was there, then all well and good, but Scripture repeatedly says that the disciples did not understand, so that causes a few problems with this sort of reproduction.
Yes, but scripture also describes the disciples asking Jesus what a teaching meant if they were confused, and Jesus further unpacking things to them. Jesus invited questions, he did not shut them down. One can’t get around that all human brains operate on sometimes fallible human processing. Jesus seemed to expect such effort of mental “processing” by his listeners and baked it in to his teaching style. Apparently he wasn’t afraid of the need to process his teachings, and was not interested in only the rote regurgitation of simple facts. But yes, each of us should hold our own interpretation of Jesus’s words with a degree of humility, knowing it is based on our own mental processing.