and the formation of the New Testament canon were heavily influenced by
how we remember texts (cf. Czachesz & Theissen, 2016a, 2016b).
4.9 MEMORY AND THE NEW TESTAMENT:
SOME REFLECTIONSThe role of memory in the formation of the New Testament has been
addressed by biblical scholars for some time (Luomanen, 2013; Keith, 2015;
Kirk, 2015). The topics covered in the literature vary from oral culture and
mnemonic techniques to collective memory and eyewitness testimony. Let us
conclude this chapter by reviewing three key areas where cognitive and
neuroscientific approaches offer new perspectives on memory and the New
Testament.
(1) Bringing memory studies to assessing the authenticity of gospel tradi-
tions (Bauckham, 2006; McIver, 2011) is as exciting as it is controversial.
Critics of this approach concluded that memory studies do not bring us much
closer to the historical Jesus (Redman, 2010) or that memory studies in fact
give cause for even more skepticism about Jesus’figure (Crook, 2013). From
the perspective of cognitive science, however, there is nothing that should
prevent us from asking questions about the experience and episodic memories
of the Jesus followers—provided that we do not a priori exclude the historical
existence of Jesus and a group of people following him. If these people existed,
they had episodic memories and knowledge of how such memories work can
be applied to them. Theoretically speaking, a better understanding of how
memory distortions occur can also give us methods to recognize them. For
example, because eyewitness testimony is so valuable in justice, neuroscientists
are now developing neuroimaging techniques that can help us tell apart false
from true memories (Schacter & Loftus, 2013; Beaty et al., 2015). The problem
is that we cannot use such empirical methods to check the truthfulness of dead
people’s memories. Thus we can understand much about the memory pro-
cesses that shaped the episodic memories that possibly underlie some passage
of the New Testament (including Pauline texts and other literature), but it is
unlikely that we can ever develop hard criteria of establishing their original,
“undistorted”forms. (2) However, learning about memory as a creative
process is still helpful in studying our sources. Instead of wanting to go back
to some original form of the memory of the Jesus followers and otherfigures of
the New Testament, we can use our knowledge of episodic memory to study
the processes that influenced various traditions of the New Testament. We can
examine, for example, the typical constructive steps involved in encoding,
storage, and retrieval, respectively. Most importantly, the texts of the New
86 Cognitive Science and the New Testament