The Psychology of Memory and the Study of the Gospels

journal for the study of the historical jesus 16 (2018) 136-155 brill.com/jshj

Richard Bauckham University of St Andrews (Emeritus) [email protected]

Abstract

New Testament scholars who have some acquaintance with the cognitive psychology of memory have tended to conclude that memory is generally unreliable. Research in cognitive psychology does not support that view. These New Testament scholars have been misled especially by failure to distinguish different types of memory, by relying heavily on study of eyewitness testimony in court (a special category from which it is not legitimate to draw broader conclusions), and by misunderstanding the deliberate focus on the failures of memory in much of the research (which is not because failures are common but because failures are interesting). For research in this field to be useful in the study of the Gospels, we need to distinguish personal event memory from other types and to specify the conditions under which this type of memory tends to be either accurate or misleading.

Keywords gospels – historical Jesus – memory – cognitive psychology – eyewitness memory – exceptional events

The opening sentence of Dale Allison’s recent major book, Constructing Jesus, is: “The frailty of human memory should distress all who quest for the so-called historical Jesus.”1 His reading in the field of the cognitive psychology of memory evidently gave him an overwhelming sense of how unreliable memory is:

1 Dale C. Allison, Constructing Jesus: Memory, Imagination, and History (London: spck, 2010), p. 1.

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“I am haunted by what we know about the frequent failings of human memory.”2 He is certainly not the only New Testament scholar to have concluded that psychological research has demonstrated the pervasive unreliability of memory. Moreover, this chimes with a more general cultural mood in which memory is thought untrustworthy. I do not think such conclusions are actually warranted by the research in cognitive psychology and they are not, for the most part, what the cognitive psychologists are actually telling us. Most of this essay will be aimed at correcting this view that has gained currency among some New Testament scholars with an interest in memory.

1 What Do We Know about Personal Event Memories?

Types of Memory In order to understand and to know what to do with the research in cognitive psychology, it is essential that we distinguish different types of memory. We cannot transfer research results for one type of memory to another. New Testa- ment scholars who have discussed the psychology of memory have often failed to observe these distinctions, with highly misleading results. There are three main types of memory that, in the cognitive psychology of memory, are generally agreed to be distinct and different. Procedural memory refers to learned skills and habits. We use procedural memory if we ride a bike or use a computer. This type of memory need not concern us in this essay. Semantic memory is memory for concepts and information. Episodic memory is memory for experienced events. If I read or hear about an event and then remember the account of it, that is semantic memory. But if I witness something happening and then recall it, that is episodic memory. There may be other kinds of episodic memory, but the kind that concerns us here is known by a variety of names, including “autobiographical memory,” “recollective memory” and “personal event memory.” The term “autobiographical memory” can have additional connotations that are not essential to this type of memory (such as contributing to the rememberer’s construction of their life history). So, although it is common, I shall not use it. The term “personal event memory” seems the best for conveying the specific character of this kind of memory. Personal event memories are what the rest of this essay will be about. Though I did not use this term when I wrote the chapter on the psychology of memory

2 Allison, Constructing Jesus, p. 22.

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138 Bauckham in Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, they are the sort of memories that I discussed there.3 A personal event memory is memory of a specific event in a person’s past, an event understood to have happened at a specific time and place (even if the memory is vague about these), an event that was personally experienced and is remembered as personally experienced. In other words, it embodies a subjective perspective on the past. One remembers being there, participating or observing, seeing and hearing, thinking and feeling. There may be a vivid sense of re-living the experience, though this need not be the case and probably diminishes over time. But always the memory is of something experienced by me. It is possible for such memories to be inaccurate or even completely false (in the sense that I did not actually experience the event at all), but false memories of this type embody a subjective perspective on the past just as genuine memories of this type do. I have said that a personal event memory is memory of a specific event in a person’s past. I should add that we also have generic event memories. For a particular event to stick in the memory as a memory of that unique event it needs to have remembered features that are distinctive enough to distinguish it from similar events (if there are such). From time to time I travel by train from Cambridge to London. As I write this I can remember, as a specific event, the journey I made from Cambridge to London recently. But I can also recognize that there was little about it that I am likely to remember as distinctive. My memory of it will merge with memories of other such journeys. As a series, these experiences have enough to distinguish them from, say, journeys from Cambridge to Scotland, which I also make from time to time, and so they form a generic memory of something I have done repeatedly over a certain period of my life. As a category of episodic memory, these generic memories have been appropriately called “repisodic” memories.4 We all have both specific event memories and generic event memories. A specific event memory is one that is distinctive enough to survive the early period of remembering when it might otherwise merge with others to form a generic event memory. I do not know any evidence that either sort of memory is more reliable than the other, better remembered than the other, or retained longer than the other. If we are interested in traditions about Jesus in the Gospels, as remembered initially by eyewitnesses, then both semantic and episodic memory are relevant. Most sayings of Jesus must have been remembered as semantic memories.

3 Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1st edition 2006, 2nd, expanded edition 2017), 319–357 (chapter 13). 4 Ulric Neisser, “John Dean’s Memory: A Case Study,” Cognition 9 (1981), pp. 1–22, here pp. 19–20.

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Exceptions will be those that belong intrinsically to a specific narrative, as in so-called “pronouncement stories”, unless the story has been created artificial- ly as a setting for the saying. But mostly those who first passed on the sayings of Jesus did not recall a specific occasion when Jesus said them. (In fact, it is likely that the carefully crafted sayings of Jesus that we have in the Gospels were not improvised on one occasion, but used frequently in Jesus’s teaching ministry.) So the study of semantic memory is relevant to the tradition of the sayings of Jesus. Study of the sayings of Jesus from this point of view would also need to pay attention to mnemonics and memorization practices. In this essay I shall focus on Gospel narratives rather than sayings of Jesus. On the face of it, most of these were originally personal event memories of specific events at which the eyewitnesses were present, though there are also some generic event memories in the Gospels. These are often referred to in scholarship as the evangelist’s summaries, as though they have no independent worth as historical memories, but they deserve reconsideration as preserving generic memories of eyewitnesses.

Personal Event Memories as Reconstructions A personal event memory is nothing like a videotape of the event. Even the process of encoding the memory as the event is experienced is selective and interpretative. Much of what we perceive is remembered only very briefly. The brain stores long-term what we experience as memorable. (It has been said that forgetting is at least as important as remembering. If we remembered everything we would be overwhelmed with data we could never do anything with.) The brain apparently stores the various aspects of a memory in different memory systems and these have to be brought together again in retrieval. Retrieval also draws on schemas (patterns of what usually happens in such cases, and narrative patterns we use to structure such memories). It is generally inferred that there is some kind of event model in the brain that enables it to retrieve the required elements of that specific memory.5 So memories are not copies of what we perceived at the time; they are reconstructions. It must be stressed that this—in and of itself—does not make memory generally unreliable. Reconstruction is emphatically not the same thing as invention. The brain performs the task of reconstruction astonishingly

5 This paragraph is based on my general reading of the literature and its content would be widely agreed by researchers in the field. But much of the way memory actually works—the processes of storing and retrieval—remains quite uncertain.

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140 Bauckham well.6 After all, memory evolved to serve purposes in human life for which it needs to be generally accurate. It is a functional system that we would not have if it did not work for most purposes. But it does leave scope for mistakes of the kind we know we make sometimes. An event can be placed in the wrong time or place. Parts of one memory can get confused with parts of another. Informa- tion from semantic memory can be misapplied to a specific event. Moreover, the brain tends to fill in gaps, often intelligently but not always accurately. Re- construction accounts for the errors that we know can occur. But it also en- sures that most of time memory is sufficiently accurate to be useful for most of the purposes to which we put it in ordinary life. The phenomenal experience of personal event memories (that it feels like being there) is not an infallible indication of a real personal event memory. We may come to think we were present at an event we only heard about. We may acquire completely false memories. But these are relatively rare aberrations (to which I shall return). David Pillemer says:

[It] is safe to say that memory researchers do approach a consensus on some issues. There is widespread agreement that memory is an active, reconstructive process rather than a passive, reproductive process. In the process of constructing a memory narrative, errors can occur. At the same time, memory, for the most part, does its job; that is, memory de- scriptions usually are consistent with the general form and content of past experiences, even if particular details are lost, added, or distorted in the act of remembering.

He then quotes a research paper from 1995 as providing an apt summary:

Most memory research … is really about the distortion of details, not cen- tral events. A person hit by a car may misremember its color, or the day of

6 For a very impressive example, see Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, pp. 321–323. There I did not make it sufficiently clear that the man who reported the event seventy-three years later had moved away from the area shortly after it and never saw the newspaper reports. (Hence Ju- dith C.S. Redman, “How Accurate Are Eyewitnesses? Bauckham and the Eyewitnesses in the Light of Psychological Research,” jbl 129 (2010) 177–197, here 190–191, misunderstands this example. It is not a case of memory of newspaper reports, but a case where the newspaper reports verify the remarkable accuracy of the man’s personal event memory over seventy- three years.) For some other examples of accuracy of memories, though over short periods (up to two years), see Ulric Neisser and Lisa K. Libby, “Remembering Life Experiences,” in The Oxford Handbook of Memory, edited by Endel Tulving and Fergus I.M. Craik (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 315–332, here p. 318.

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the week, but will rarely confuse being hit by a car with, say, falling down a mountain.7

The Reliability of Personal Event Memories Too often in popular literature we find general discussions of whether memory is reliable or not. If we are to get beyond such facile observations as “memory often leads us astray,”8 we need to distinguish between types of memory, as I have been doing. We also need to be discriminating about what kinds of things we remember well or badly and under what conditions we remember well or badly. There is plenty of discussion of these matters in the psychological literature. One of the sources of a widespread impression that memory is pervasive- ly unreliable is Daniel Schacter’s engaging book How the Mind Forgets and Remembers: The Seven Sins of Memory.9 But Schacter himself identified a criti- cal question for the psychological study of memory as:

Under what conditions is memory largely accurate and under what conditions is distortion most likely to occur? … It is unlikely that a memory system that consistently produced seriously distorted outputs would possess the adaptive characteristics necessary to be preserved by natu- ral selection. Therefore, the key issue is not whether memory is “mostly accurate” or “mostly distorted”; rather, the challenge is to specify the conditions under which accuracy and distortion are most likely to be observed.10

In my own study of the psychology of memory in Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, I illustrated both the strengths and the failings of memory and attempted a way forward beyond one-sided generalizations. I certainly did not argue for the

7 David B. Pillemer, Momentous Events, Vivid Memories (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univer- sity Press, 1998), p. 55. 8 Allison, Constructing Jesus, p. 2. 9 London: Souvenir, 2001. The us edition has the title The Seven Sins of Memory. 10 Daniel L. Schacter, “Memory Distortion: History and Current Status,” in Memory Dis- tortion: How Minds, Brains, and Societies Reconstruct the Past, ed. by Daniel L. Schacter (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1995), pp. 1–43, here p. 25. Cf. also Eugene Winograd, “The Authenticity and Utility of Memories,” in The Remembering Self, ed. by Ulric Neisser and Robyn Fivush (Emory Symposia in Cognition 6; Cambridge: Cam- bridge University Press, 1994), pp. 243–251, here p. 245: “A major task for the psychology of memory is to be able to state the conditions conducive to accuracy and the conditions likely to lead to distortion.”

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142 Bauckham reliability of all eyewitness memory, as some people (but not attentive readers of the book) seem to think I did. Rather, from the literature on personal event memories I distilled an account of what sort of events are remembered well, what aspects of those events are likely to be remembered, and what conditions help to ensure accurate and stable preservation of memories.11 Here is a very brief summary of the conclusions I reached: First, what would events have to be like in order for them to be remembered well? Unique and unusual events are remembered better than others; conse- quential or salient events are remembered better than less significant ones; events in which the eyewitness is emotionally involved are remembered better than others.12 These criteria indicate some of the reasons why eyewitness testimony in court can be seriously unreliable, because witnesses are asked to remember things that did not concern them at the time. But, conversely, by these same criteria the events of the story of Jesus score well as events their participant eyewitnesses would likely remember well. Secondly, what aspects of events are remembered well? Recollected events seldom include dates. The gist is often accurately recalled while inessential details are not and may well vary when the memory is rehearsed on different occasions.13 Again these criteria throw some doubt on testimony in court, where it is often peripheral details of an event that witnesses are asked to recall. But in the Gospels, where variation in details can easily be observed, it is the generally stable core narrative that counts and the variations of detail need not discredit it. That the gist or outline of an event, as opposed to inessential details, is remembered does not mean that generalities are remembered

11 Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, pp. 330–335. 12 These characteristics of the kinds of events that are well recalled are widely evidenced: see, e.g., the studies cited in William F. Brewer, “What is Autobiographical Memory?,” in Autobiographical Memory, ed. David C. Rubin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 25–47, here p. 44; William F. Brewer, “Memory for Randomly Sampled Autobiographical Events,” in Remembering Reconsidered: Ecological and Traditional Approaches to the Study of Memory, ed. Ulric Neisser and Eugene Winograd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 21–90; William F. Brewer, “Autobiographical Mem- ory and Survey Research,” in Autobiographical Memory and the Validity of Retrospective Reports, ed. Norbert Schwartz and Seymour Sudman (New York: Springer, 1994), pp. 11– 20; Gillian Cohen, Memory in the Real World (2nd edition; Hove: Psychology Press, 1996), pp. 159–160; Alan D. Baddeley, Human Memory: Theory and Practice (revised edition; Hove: Psychology Press, 1997), pp. 213–222. The effect of emotion on memory has been extensively debated: see Memory and Emotion, edited by Daniel Reisberg and Paula Hertel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 13 For references to the literature, see Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, pp. 333–334.

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The Psychology Of Memory And The Study Of The Gospels 143 better than particulars.14 The gist usually consists of certain details that make up the essential outline that gives the story its point. Peripheral details vary, core details compose the gist. Thirdly, preservation of memories is much assisted by frequent rehearsal, which also gives them stability. When memories are told, they often quickly acquire a standard narrative form, which they then retain. Memories can, of course, fade over time. But frequent rehearsal of memories (to oneself or to others) is a very strong counterweight to transience. This is one of the most assured results of psychological research on memory15 and it has obvious relevance to Gospel traditions. Paul Foster in his wide-ranging critique of the usefulness of various memory approaches in Jesus studies summarizes the criteria I offer for good remembering of personally experienced events and claims that many psychologists disagree with these criteria and think memory much more unreliable.16 He is wrong. For one thing, he seems to think a reconstructive view of memory re- futes them. It does not. They are fully compatible with a reconstructive view of memory. But, secondly, he takes me to task for discounting the pioneer- ing work of Frederick Bartlett (published in 1932)17 and the psychological research following the same line of approach.18 (April DeConick made the same criticism,19 and I guess Foster borrowed it from her). This criticism misses the fact that I discounted Bartlett’s work only in the sense of pointing out that it concerned semantic memory, not personal event memory.20 In fact, virtually all research before the 1980s concerned only semantic memory, because it was generally thought that only this type of memory could be tested in laboratory experiments. Foster’s accusation is an example of careless generalizing about

14 Against such a misunderstanding, see Richard Bauckham, “The General and the Partic- ular in Memory: A Critique of Dale Allison’s Approach to the Historical Jesus,” jshj 14 (2016), pp. 28–51. 15 Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, p. 334. 16 Paul Foster, “Memory, Orality, and the Fourth Gospel: Three Dead-Ends in Historical Jesus Research,” jshj 10 (2012), pp. 191–227, here p. 195. 17 Frederick C. Bartlett, Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1932). 18 Foster, “Memory,” p. 195 n.12. 19 April D. DeConick, “Human Memory and the Sayings of Jesus: Contemporary Experimen- tal Exercises in the Transmission of Jesus Traditions,” in Jesus, the Voice, and the Text: Be- yond the Oral and the Written Gospel, ed. by Tom Thatcher (Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press, 2008), pp. 135–196, here p. 179. 20 Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, p. 325.

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144 Bauckham memory that does not take account of the distinctions between different kinds of memory. Though I formulated my account of these criteria in 2005, updating my knowledge of the relevant literature in cognitive psychology has given me no reason to change them. It is worth noticing that these criteria for good remembering, the results of research, correlate quite well with what people generally consider “memorable.” David Pillemer comments that “research sup- ports a conclusion that fits nicely with commonly held conceptions of human memory: memories of personal life episodes are generally true to the original experience, although specific details may be omitted or misremembered and substantial distortions do occasionally occur.”21 One point, however, at which the results of research may seem counter- intuitive is that the vividness of memories is not a good indicator of reliability.22

Memories of Exceptional or Momentous Events The kinds of memories that score very well according to my criteria for good remembering of personally experienced events have actually come to the fore in some recent psychological study, notably in very different books by David Pillemer (1998)23 and Stephen Schmidt (2012),24 who respectively call them momentous or exceptional events. These memories are of events that (from the point of view of the person remembering) were unique or especially distinctive, particularly significant for that person, and experienced as deeply affecting emotionally. Not all of these three characteristics need be present, but a fourth element, frequent rehearsal of the memory, probably is essential. All of these factors are relative, of course, and so this category of memory obviously does not have hard boundaries. Memories may be of more or less exceptional or more or less momentous events. But as a roughly defined category, I think it is especially useful in thinking about Gospel narratives. Many of these narratives have strongly distinctive profiles, highlighting not generalities about Je- sus but the kind of unusual features that distinguish specific events. Together with their obvious significance for people who would have witnessed them

21 Pillemer, Momentous Events, p. 59. 22 A special kind of vivid memories are so-called “flashbulb memories,” in which people remember their circumstances when they first learned of an important public event (such as 9/11). It has been shown that such memories can be false. But this category of memory is a specifically modern phenomenon, dependent on the operation of modern media such as radio and television. It is not relevant to the study of the Gospels. 23 Pillemer, Momentous Events. 24 Stephen R. Schmidt, Extraordinary Memories for Exceptional Events (New York: Psychol- ogy Press, 2012).

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(if they were real events), these events are actually of a kind that is now recog- nized in cognitive psychology as producing strong and influential memories.

2 Why Have Some Other New Testament Scholars Concluded that Eyewitness Memory is Highly Unreliable?

While few New Testament scholars have yet taken serious account of research on memory in cognitive psychology, some of those who have done so have reached very different conclusions from mine. I have already quoted Dale Al- lison’s opinion: “The frailty of human memory should distress all who quest for the so-called historical Jesus.”25 Even if we had dependable access to eyewitness testimony (which he does not believe we do) we ought still to be dis- tressed, according to Allison, because observers “habitually misperceive, and they unavoidably misremember.”26 I think this is a hugely exaggerated claim, as well as being unhelpfully undiscriminating. So why have Allison and others reached such a judgment?27 The idea that research in cognitive psychology has shown that “personal event memories” are comprehensively unreliable may stem from the following factors: First, there is a failure to distinguish between types of memory. Unfortu- nately, Daniel Schacter’s popular discussion of the failings of memory—what he calls the seven sins of memory—omits to distinguish types of memory, and one could gain the impression that the seven sins all infect all kinds of memories.28 This gives a cumulative impression that is actually very misleading. For readers who know little of the subject before reading his book, learning that there are so many ways that memory can fail must easily create a general

25 Zeba A. Crook, “Collective Memory Distortion and the Quest for the Historical Jesus,” jshj 11 (2013), pp. 53–76, here p. 76, makes a similar claim in relation to all history: “memory theory ought to leave us feeling deeply troubled about what we can actually know about the past.” What Crook treats as “memory theory” is a wide range of different sorts of study, mostly not the study of individual personal event memory in cognitive psychology, which is my sole concern in this essay. 26 Allison, Constructing Jesus, p. 1. 27 See also Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus before the Gospels: How the Earliest Christians Remembered, Changed, and Invented Their Stories of the Savior (New York: HarperCollins, 2016) chapters 4 and 5. Ehrman is more careful than Allison to discriminate between types of memory, though he dwells on “flashbulb” memories (pp. 140–142), which are in fact of no relevance to the kinds of memories that lie behind the Gospels. 28 Daniel Schacter, How the Mind Forgets and Remembers:The Seven Sins of Memory (Lon- don: Souvenir, 2001). The us edition has the title The Seven Sins of Memory.

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146 Bauckham impression of frequent and pervasive failure. (In fact, of Schacter’s seven, only two—suggestibility and bias—have much relevance to eyewitness memories of Jesus.) Dale Allison, who from his wider reading in the literature formulated his own list of nine sins of memory, similarly fails to distinguish types of memory.29 A more recent popular account by a cognitive psychologist, Julia Shaw’s The Memory Illusion, also takes its readers through a series of examples of the way different kinds of memory can go seriously wrong, leaving a cumulative impression that is misleading.30 In writing for a popular audience, there must be a temptation to play up the “sins of memory” in order to make a strong impression on readers. In dealing with eyewitness testimony, there is a particular problem in the failure to recognize that eyewitness testimony in police investigations and in courts of law constitutes a very special category. The serious failings of memory in this kind of context have featured prominently in the psychological literature. For obvious reasons, this sort of eyewitness testimony has attracted a lot of attention and study, and many of the conclusions are disturbing in their implications for the safety of verdicts based heavily on such evidence. But there are very good reasons why we should not generalize from the unreliability of memory in this sort of context to judgments about the reliability of the sort of personal event memories I have discussed and which are the sort of memories we must postulate for Gospel narratives if they have historical bases. Unfortunately, writers such as Judith Redman,31 Dale Allison and even Robert McIver32 have done precisely that, despite the fact that in Jesus and the Eyewitnesses I carefully pointed out the special problems that attend eyewitness testimony in legal contexts.33 I will explain these problems more fully in the next section of this essay. Secondly, the scientific literature focuses on the failures and distortions of memory rather than its strengths and accuracy. The researchers are interested

29 I made this criticism in Bauckham, “The General,” 28–51. 30 Julia Shaw, The Memory Illusion: Remembering, Forgetting, and the Science of False Memory (London: Random House, 2016) chapter 1. 31 Redman, “How Accurate Are Eyewitnesses?” This article is remarkable for failing to engage at all with my discussion of the research on the psychology of eyewitness memory and yet claiming to refute my argument. It reads as though Redman had already written an essay on memory before encountering my book and decided to package it as a re- sponse to my book. Consequently she makes many points that I make myself as though they were arguments against me. 32 Robert K. McIver, Memory, Jesus and the Synoptic Gospels (sbl Resources for Biblical Stud- ies 59; Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2011) 1–20 (chapter 1). 33 Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, 355–357.

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The Psychology Of Memory And The Study Of The Gospels 147 in why memory goes wrong when it does go wrong. This is because failures of memory are particularly revealing with regard to questions about how memory works, which are the main interest of most of the researchers.34 Most of the research, we should realise, consists of experiments in laboratory conditions (typically involving lists of words, nonsense syllables, pictures and videos), which are set up precisely in order to illustrate both successes and failures of memory and to discover how precisely it is that memory fails when it does. If there are too few failures to provide the data required, the difficulty of the memory tests is increased. Such experiments bear absolutely no statisti- cal relationship to the frequency of memory errors in real life situations. It is also worth noting that most experimentation of this kind studies retention of memories only over very short periods. A month is a long time in cognitive psychology. But most of what we initially encode from events we forget very quickly. What survives into long-term memory has a much better chance of survival over many years, but this is largely beyond the reach of experimental psychology. Although, as I have suggested, some popular accounts may give a misleading impression, presumably unwittingly, many of the psychologists who write about this subject for a general audience are at pains to counteract the possible impression that memory is generally unreliable and to point out that most of the time memory is reliable, even remarkably accurate. For example, Gillian Cohen says:

In daily life, memory successes are the norm and memory failures are the exception…. Considering how grossly it is overloaded, memory in the real world proves remarkably efficient and resilient.35

34 This point is made by Eugene Winograd, “The Authenticity and Utility of Memories,” in The Remembering Self (ed. by Ulric Neisser and Robyn Fivush; Emory Symposia in Cogni- tion 6; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 243–251, here pp. 246–247. He quotes Michael Ross: “Biases [affecting memory] are of interest for the same reasons that perceptual psychologists study illusions and psycholinguists study grammatical errors: mental processes may be revealed that are obscured in accurate reports.” Schacter, “Mem- ory Distortion,” pp. 2–3, proposes this and other reasons for the interest of psychologists in memory distortions. The other reasons include interest in “applied problems” such as the reliability of eyewitness testimony in legal contexts and the nature of allegedly repressed and recovered memories of child sexual abuse. 35 Cohen, Memory, 222.

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148 Bauckham

Daniel Schacter himself, one of the experts on memory distortion, says that “memory operates with a high degree of accuracy across many conditions and circumstances”36 and “it is important not to lose sight of the fact that memory is often accurate.”37 Hoffmann and Hoffmann state:

Under the vast majority of circumstances, the probability exists that the information provided by memory, like that provided by most percep- tions, is trustworthy.38

David Pillemer I have already quoted to the same effect. Thirdly, the “sin of memory” that Schacter calls suggestibility provides an example of the way the importance of attested memory distortions can be exaggerated. Our memories can incorporate, without our realising it, information actually provided by others. “Suggested memories can seem as real as genuine ones.”39 There are well-known cases of psychological experiments in which completely false memories of childhood incidents are planted in people’s memories so that they recollect them just like other childhood memories. It is striking that such examples seem all to be cases of adult memories of childhood.40 In addition, there are so-called recovered memories, usually recovered during psychotherapy, in which people remember events in their childhood, most often sexual abuse, of which previously they had had no conscious knowledge. This topic is highly controversial. Many of these are may well be false memories, but the whole phenomenon seems to depend on the specifically twentieth-century notion of “repressed” memories that can be recovered through psychotherapy or hypnosis and thus belongs to a peculiarly modern western cultural context. (So far as I am aware, people in the ancient world had no notion of “repressed” memories and therefore used no techniques to “recover” them.41) It is curious that, like the implanting of false memories in

36 Schacter, How the Mind Forgets, 6. 37 Schacter, How the Mind Forgets, 4. 38 Alice M. Hoffman and Howard S. Hoffman, “Memory Theory: Personal and Social,” in Handbook of Oral History, ed. by Thomas L. Charlton, Lois E. Myers and Rebecca Sharpless (Lanham: AltaMira Press, 2006) 275–296, here 282. 39 Schacter, How the Mind Forgets, 114. 40 E.g. Shaw, The Memory Illusion, 18–22; Brewer, “What is Autobiographical Memory?,” 43–44. 41 So, e.g., the discussion of the “Satanic ritual abuse” scare of the late twentieth century by Crook, “Collective Memory Distortion,” 70–73, is simply not relevant to the study of the Gospels or other ancient historical evidence. As he himself states clearly, the “memories” of Satanic ritual abuse were “traumatic memories drawn out of victims [who were

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The Psychology Of Memory And The Study Of The Gospels 149 psychological experiments, these “recovered” memories concern childhood. Cases of false memories of adult experiences are reported in cases of mental disorder such as schizophrenia. People do have recollections of events they never experienced that are indistinguishable from genuine recollections, but, as far as my reading suggests, this seems a fairly exceptional phenomenon. It is not a phenomenon we should expect to occur frequently in historical evidence. Finally, in historical Jesus studies there is a sometimes a misplaced desire for certainty that is partly the result of the Second Quest of the historical Jesus and partly derives from the religious issues that are so often perceived to hang on such historical work. It takes the form of a supposition that we can only treat Gospel traditions as historically reliable if we can be sure of their authenticity and sure of their total accuracy. If it is shown that eyewitness testimony can be mistaken—that it is not infallible—some scholars apparently conclude that we cannot place any reliance on it at all. This attitude seems to account for the impression some people have that my argument in Jesus and the Eyewitnesses was intended to claim that the eyewitness testimony behind the Gospels must have been totally accurate.42 Of course, I did not intend that. It would never have occurred to me to make such a claim because I take it for granted that all historical knowledge is probabilistic. Historians have to take the risk of trusting what seems like the best evidence. That often means trusting the memories of those who wrote the sources. There is nothing remarkable about taking such a risk: it is the way we generally rely on memory in ordinary life. In a court of law, in order to condemn someone to many years of imprisonment or (in the usa, where much of the psychological research on eyewitness testimony in court has been done) death, a very high level of probability is naturally desired. But we do not generally require such certainty in ordinary life. Usually, without thinking about it, we take the risk of believing what people claim to remember, unless we have good reason not to do so. Since memory is indeed generally reliable and millennia of human history have taught us that we can rely on it for most purposes most of the time, the risk of believing occasional mistakes or deceptions is worth taking. History is much more like everyday life than it is like a court of law. In historical Jesus studies we need to stop requiring unreal- istically high levels of proof.

children] in therapy in the belief that the most traumatic memories are repressed and can be reliably recovered” (71). 42 E.g. Redman, “How Accurate Are Eyewitnesses?,” 195.

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150 Bauckham

3 Eyewitness Memory in Legal Contexts

As I have already suggested, psychological research on eyewitness testimony in legal contexts has been misused by some New Testament scholars as a basis for concluding that eyewitness testimony in general is highly unreliable. These scholars have failed to recognize that special factors are involved in legal contexts. So it may be useful to discuss this topic at some length.43 Are eyewitnesses reliable when they are interviewed by police officers, when they are asked to identify persons in identification parades or photos, and when they give evidence in court? I think it is fair to say that most psychologists who have conducted research intended to answer these questions have concluded that these methods of eliciting evidence from eyewitnesses of crimes are not very reliable. Some of the research relates to the way in which eyewitnesses are questioned and the way in which, for example, line-ups including the suspect are managed. As a result, psychologists have offered valu- able advice for improving procedures.44 But others suggest that, even with the most careful procedures, eyewitness testimony remains disturbingly untrustworthy. Why is this? First, there are problems about what the witness is likely to have observed. In many cases, what the eyewitness is asked to remember are aspects of the event that were insignificant at the time and insignificant to the observer. Their interests lay elsewhere. Sometimes the nature of the event may inhibit eyewitness perception. The situation may be very fast-moving and the eyewitness gets only passing glimpses of the people involved. The eyewitness may be observing from a distance and in bad light. There is a frequently noticed phenomenon that the eyewitness to a crime fixates on the weapon. In a situation

43 There is a large literature. See, e.g., Robert Buckhout, “Eyewitness Testimony,” Scientific American 231 (1974), pp. 23–31; Adult Eyewitness Testimony: Current Trends and Develop- ments, edited by David Frank Ross, J. Don Read and Michael P. Toglia (Cambridge: Cam- bridge University Press, 1994); Willem A. Wagenaar, “Autobiographical memory in court,” in Remembering Our Past: Studies in Autobiographical Memory, edited by David C. Rubin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 180–196; Peter B. Ainsworth, Psychol- ogy, Law and Eyewitness Testimony (Chichester: John Wiley, 1998); David A. Lieberman, Learning and Memory: An Integrative Approach (Belmont ca: Wadsworth, 2004) 450–456; Daniel Reisberg, The Science of Perception and Memory: A Pragmatic Guide for the Justice System (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); Ronald T. Kellogg, Fundamentals of Cog- nitive Psychology (3rd edition; Los Angeles: Sage, 2016) 195–201. 44 For an excellent recent example, see John T. Wixted and Gary L. Wells, “The Relationship Between Eyewitness Confidence and Identification Accuracy: A New Synthesis,” Psycho- logical Science in the Public Interest 18 (2017), pp. 19–65.

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The Psychology Of Memory And The Study Of The Gospels 151 of danger and stress, attention naturally focuses on the source of danger, with the result that more incidental details of the situation get little attention. All this means that many details the police and the court may wish to know were never encoded in the eyewitness’s memory and so cannot be dredged up by any effort of questioning and trying to remember. Secondly, in the process of retrieving memories there is often a tendency for witnesses unconsciously to fill in gaps in their memories, but this tendency is likely to be much greater in the legal context than in many others. In in- terviews and in court, witnesses are less likely than in many other situations to say simply, “I don’t know” or “I didn’t notice.” They guess, they infer, they elaborate, they are influenced by the testimony of other witnesses, they feel the pressure of questioning. In the situation of an identification parade, where they know that one of the people shown to them is someone the police have good reason to suspect, an eyewitness may be inclined to pick out someone who looks somewhat familiar. They adjust their memory to fit the available suspects. They may even pick someone else they did see at the scene who was not the criminal. It follows from all of this that processes of interview or identification can easily distort the eyewitness’s memory. Questions may convey misleading information that the eyewitness, in a susceptible condition, incorporates into their memory. When others seem constantly to doubt something the eyewitness remembers, they may lose confidence in it themselves. The contexts include police officers determined to get a result. It would be hard to deny that these factors making for untrustworthy testimony in legal contexts are real and have an effect. They lie behind some notorious cases of mistaken verdicts. But when psychologists judge the rate of significant errors in eyewitness testimony to be very high, they are largely dependent on experiments in a laboratory context. Critics suggest that the real life experience of witnessing a crime cannot be convincingly paralleled by the sort of experiments psychologists devise for testing subjects in controlled conditions. On the other hand, it is difficult to apply independent tests in the case of real crimes. Psychologists cannot intervene in an on-going legal process. But one case study of a real crime and its witnesses concluded that the accuracy of the eyewitnesses was much greater in this case than the laboratory studies would lead one to expect.45 At this event on a busy main road that involved a gun fight, there were many witnesses with a good view and a great deal of forensic evidence, leaving no doubt as to what actually happened.

45 John C. Yuille and Judith L. Cutshall, “A Case Study of Eyewitness Memory of a Crime,” Journal of Applied Psychology 71 (1986), pp. 291–301.

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152 Bauckham

Since the criminal died at the scene, there was no need for identification by the witnesses. Thirteen of the witnesses, among those who had been interviewed by the police, were interviewed again by the researchers four to five months later. The event was a particularly striking and dramatic one that gripped the attention of the witnesses. Some of them also got involved in dealing with the situation after the shootings. These factors may have contributed to the accuracy of their testimony. In any case, the testimonies were very accurate. Moreover, there was little change in the amount or the accuracy of recall over five months. The researchers made deliberate attempts to mislead the witnesses with biased questions, but were unsuccessful. Finally, with regard to inaccuracies that were present in the witnesses’ accounts, the researchers observed that “the incorrect recall of a detail such as the date of the event or the colour of clothing is unre- lated to the accuracy of the rest of the witness’s account.”46 A witness should not be judged generally unreliable on account of some inaccuracies of detail. It should be stressed, however, that there was generally good recall of many incidental details. Among the features that distinguish this study from the laboratory experiments relating to eyewitness testimony are the facts that the event was an obviously life-and-death matter, occurring close to the witnesses, and that some of the witnesses participated, actively as well as emotionally, in the event. They were interested and involved. These features distinguish this case from many court cases, and bring it rather closer to those “personal event memories” where significance and emotional affect are key factors contributing to good remembering (as I have observed above). There is no need here to reach a general conclusion about the reliability of eyewitness testimony in legal contexts. For our purposes, the important conclusion is that for many reasons this category of eyewitness testimony does not usually provide good analogies for the kind of testimony on which the Gospel narratives presumably depend. Unfortunately, all the studies by New Testa- ment scholars who have concluded that eyewitness testimony is generally very unreliable have relied heavily on research on eyewitness testimony in legal contexts. So they are not to be trusted for conclusions that have any relevance to the study of the Gospels.

46 Yuille and Cutshall, “A Case Study,” p. 300.

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The Psychology Of Memory And The Study Of The Gospels 153

4 Personal Event Memory and Social Memory

In this necessarily brief section, my purpose is not to engage in a critique of social memory studies as such, but simply to oppose the absorption of personal memory into social memory that was bequeathed by Maurice Halbwachs to social memory theory.47 Undoubtedly individuals and groups are embedded in society. Our personal event memories, like everything else about us, are formed, retrieved and communicated in a densely social context.48 While research on memory in cognitive psychology may be open to the criticism that it has often focused too much on the isolated individual (though there are also studies of the shared memories of groups that experienced events together), such criticism points to limitations in the research rather than invalidating its conclusions. I have indicated, in the example of memory in legal contexts, that the ways in which memories can be affected by the social context in which they are retrieved and communicated are certainly within the purview of cognitive psychology. But cognitive psychology does not allow us to erase the individual as the subject of personal event memories, to treat the individual subjectivity that defines such memories as an illusion, and to say that all memory is social memory. In distinction from social memory, which I take to be a community’s memory of its past, personal event memories are owned by and exclusive to the remembering subject. This is not just the way modern western individualists see it. For example, it is clear in Paul’s claims about his personal past. “Have I not seen Jesus our Lord?” (1 Cor 9:1) is a claim to a memory owned by and exclusive to himself, and in its context it functions as such, giving him rights that are shared only by other apostles who could equally recall appearances of the risen Lord as personally experienced events. This is a clear case in which precisely the individual ownership of a personal event memory defines the social function of the memory. If Paul’s memory of encounter with the Lord (cf. 1 Cor 15:8) could have been dissolved without distinction in some general Christian community memory of the resurrection, he could not have claimed the right of

47 On this, see Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, pp. 310–314. Paul Ricoeur, Memory, His- tory, Forgetting, translated by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. 122, criticizes Halbwachs for crossing “the line separating the thesis ‘no one ever remembers alone’ from the thesis ‘we are not an authentic subject of the attribution of memories.’” 48 But we should not ignore the phenomenon of internal dialogue, in which we rehearse memories to ourselves. We all have memories that we have often recalled to ourselves but have never communicated to others.

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154 Bauckham support from his churches on the basis of it (1 Cor 9:3–6). But that, as he would certainly have acknowledged, was a relatively unimportant social function of that particular personal event memory. Paul’s appeal to the memories of the individuals and groups he lists in 1 Corinthians 15:5–8 is much more significant. That appeal works because the distinctiveness of the kind of memory I have called personal event memory was taken for granted in the culture and was therefore accorded social functions that were not given to social memory. The mixture of groups and individuals in 1 Corinthians 15:5–8 is significant. The groups are not so indistinguishably corporate that individuals cannot be singled out. Peter appears not only as one of the Twelve. Among the five hundred believers there are some who have died, some who are still alive. The groups Paul mentions may or may not have had group memories in the sense that cognitive psychology uses that term, meaning that a group that has experienced the same singular event may share their memories, so that an individual’s account of the experience may borrow from those of others in the group.49 Group memories of this kind blur the edges of a purely individual personal event memory, but they depend on an awareness that all members of the group were present together when the event occurred. Such group memories are not, in the usual sense, collective or social memories. They are a kind of personal event memory, whereas social memory is not. Paul’s account shows that personal event memories were distinctive, both phenomenologically and in their social function, in ways that really mattered in the early Christian movement. The eyewitnesses who claimed them had a special status and function.

5 Conclusion

Research in cognitive psychology does not support the view that memory is generally unreliable. Those New Testament scholars who suppose that it does have been misled especially by failure to distinguish different types of memory, by relying heavily on study of eyewitness testimony in legal contexts (a special category from which it is not legitimate to draw broader conclusions), and by misunderstanding the deliberate focus on the failures of memory in much of

49 Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, pp. 313–314; Amanda J. Barnier, “Memory, Ecologi- cal Validity and a Barking Dog,” Memory Studies 5 (2012), pp. 351–359, here 355. Group memory in this sense should be sharply distinguished from a popular usage of the term to refer to shared memory for information (semantic memory). The theory of “transactive memory” concerns the latter.

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The Psychology Of Memory And The Study Of The Gospels 155 the research (not because failures are common but because failures are interesting). For research on memory in cognitive psychology to be useful in the study of the Gospels, we need to distinguish personal event memory from other types and to specify the conditions under which this type of memory tends to be either accurate or distorted. In the right circumstances, personal event memory, while not, of course, infallible, is generally trustworthy for historical, as well as everyday, purposes. Finally, research in cognitive psychology makes an important contribution to current interest in memory among New Testa- ment scholars by highlighting the reality and importance of personal event memories that are owned by and exclusive to the remembering subject. Such memories were not dissolved in the community’s collective memory of its corporate past but played distinctive and important roles in the life of the early Christian communities.

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