Bart D. Ehrman's Blog, page 331

What Is A Memory?

A number of readers on the blog have objected to my understanding of memory, specifically to what a memory is, that is, to what constitutes a memory. As a rule, these readers have argued – some with considerable force and conviction! – that a “memory” is a mental recollection of something that one has personally experienced.

Let me cite one of the more closely reasoned expressions of this alternative view by one of my respondents, before explaining my view and why I have it.

COMMENT:

Bart, I...

Ramblings on Charity and Religion

QUESTION:

Don’t you think that being raised in Christianity makes it more likely that you will make decent contributions to others like you do with your charity contributions? I know that one does not have to be Christian to be decent, but it seems, for many of us,to help increase the odds of being decent at least some of the time.

RESPONSE:

This is a really interesting question. And maybe unanswerable! Why are those of us who are concerned deeply about others and their welfare so … concerne...

Can A Made-Up Story Be A False Memory?

It has become clear to me, in seeing a number of responses to my posts on memory, that I’m not quite explaining myself clearly enough to get my point across to everyone. So, well, what else is new?

When I have mentioned “false memories” in the Gospels – that is, recollections of Jesus that are not true to what really happened – some readers have pointed out that these may not be memories at all, but they may simply be what the Gospel writers made up for their own reasons. In that case Jesus i...

My Memory Book, Ch. 4a

Chapter four of my book, tentatively entitled “False Memories and the Death of Jesus,” is where I address head-on the psychology of memory. My principal interest, at the end of the day, involves the problems of memory, of how memories for things we experience or hear about can be frail, faulty, and even false. That’s not to deny that most of the time our memories are pretty decent. If they weren’t we wouldn’t be able to function, either as individuals or a society. And so of course most of wh...

My Memory Book, ch. 3

In my previous post I started to summarize what I will be covering in my new book, which hopefully will be published next spring, possibly under the title Jesus Before the Gospels. After devoting the first chapter to a demonstration that everyone agrees that some early Christians were inventing stories about Jesus (as seen in the apocryphal Gospels; it should be stressed – those who read and thought about these Gospels “remembered” Jesus in light of the stories they told),and a second chapter...

My Memory Book, chs. 1-2

So, as I mentioned in the previous post, I did not start writing my current book until I had a very full outline already in place. With a massive outline that covers everything you want to say, the book pretty much writes itself. Well, that’s what I tell people. It’s not true, of course; but I have found that once all the hard work of research and outlining is finished, the writing – just for me, of course – is the very, very different chore of putting into clear and compelling words the idea...

How I’m Writing This Book

I have been asked about how I am actually writing my book just now. Here are some reflections.

One of the things you figure out pretty quickly when writing a book is that it never goes as planned. Things (usually) take longer than you thought they would; or they (rarely) go faster. For most authors, the structure of the book changes as they start writing it, and they realize that they really have to say more about this and they really probably should say less about that. They realize that, co...

Sketch of My Memory Book

Please read to the end of this post if you want to learn about a highly unusual opportunity.

I started writing my book on memory and the oral traditions about Jesus this week. My plan was to have an intense week at it. I’m teaching my regular two classes this term: a three-hour PhD seminar on the use of literary forgery in the early Christian tradition, and an undergraduate lecture course, Introduction to the New Testament. So I had to do those this week as well, in addition to departmental m...

Remembering Lincoln

I thought I would take a post to give you a taste of one of my early chapters in my book on Memory. It is in very rough draft, so don’t expect much. But this passage deals with the topic of my last post, “collective” memory. Here I use the example of how we remember, or misremember, the life and views of Abraham Lincoln.

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In 2014 a poll was taken of 162 members of the American Political Science Association, asking them to rank all...

Different Kinds of Memory

I indicated in the last post that I got interested in the study of memory for both personal and professional reasons. Professionally, I had long been interested in the question of how eyewitnesses would have remembered the life of Jesus, and how the stories about Jesus may have been shifted and altered and invented in later times based on faulty or even false memories. That led me to be interested in memory more broadly.

Memory is an enormous field of research, just within cognitive psycholog...