McIver (2011) drew on memory studies to examine the role of eyewitnesses
in the origins of the Jesus tradition, both authors arguing for a constitutive
role of such memories in the creation of the gospels. Although we cannot
discuss theories of the formation of the gospels in depth in this chapter, we
can mention some recent insights about the role of emotions in memory
that bear immediate consequences for understanding the gospel traditions.
Further considerations will follow in section 5.4 in the context of ritual
theories.
A long line of studies shed light on the frailty of human (episodic) memory.
For example, Daniel Schacter (2001) mentions seven mechanisms of memory
distortion: transience (the weakening of memory over time), absent-
mindedness (lapses of attention when retrieving memories), blocking (the
inability to access memories, such as notfinding the name matching a familiar
face), misattribution (assigning the memory to the wrong source, such as
mistaking fantasy for reality), suggestibility (memories implanted by leading
questions, comments, or suggestions), bias (the influence of the present on
remembering the past), and persistence (the recurrence of experiences we do
not want to remember). Misattribution, bias, and suggestibility are powerful
mechanisms of creating false memories. We rewrite our past experiences in
light of what we believe in the present, mix up imagination and reality, as well
as let ourselves fooled by leading questions, comments, or suggestions. The
accuracy of episodic memories is a burning issue in the treatment of eyewit-
ness testimonies in justice, a problem that psychologists have been studying
for a century (Roediger III et al., 2013). Examples of false eyewitness memories
(that is, false memories and not intentional lies)fill many pages of the
literature. In a textbook example (Baddeley et al., 2015, p. 347), a woman
who was raped while watching a television show later identified a guest in the
studio as her attacker, a mistake that the police upheld even after the innocent
man presented his alibi of being in the studio at the time of the attack.
A particular type of episodic memory concerns so-called flashbulb
memories. As Roger Brown and James Kulik (1977) suggested,flashbulb
memories are memories for the circumstances in which we first learned
about emotionally arousing events (public news in the original theory). For
example, most people remember what they were doing on nine-eleven, but
not what they were doing the day before—the original event functioning
as aflashbulb that sheds light on otherwise forgotten circumstances. A some-
what different understanding of flashbulb memory underlay the study
of Ulrich Neisser and his colleagues (1996), when they followed up the
consolidation of memories about a Californian earthquake in participants
of the event (comparing it with the memories of people following the
events from a distance in Atlanta). Their main finding was that narra-
tive rehearsal consolidates memories. People who are directly involved in a
78 Cognitive Science and the New Testament