Reddit mentions of Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, Volume 1

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I will extend those so they're easier for our sausage fingers to click!


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There are several places to start with social memory theory. Full disclosure, I'm all aboard the memory approach and their critiques on the criteria approach.

Here's a few places to start:

• Alan Kirk, "Social and Cultural Memory," in Memory, Tradition, and Text, Semeia Studies 52, 1-14.
  
  
• Alan Kirk and Tom Thatcher, "Christian Origins: Historical Truth and Social Memory,"in Memory, Tradition, and Text, Semeia Studies 52, 25-42.
  
  
• Chris Keith, "Social Memory Theory and Gospels Research: The First Decade (Parts One and Two), Early Christianity vol 6 (2) 2015.
  
  
• Chris Keith and Anthony le Donne, eds., Jesus, Criteria, and the Demise of Authenticity
  
  
• Fentress and Wickhan, Social Memory
  
  
• Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory (There's a PDF of this work floating around on the internet.)
  
  
• James Dunn, Jesus Remembered
  
  
• Bart Ehrman, Jesus Before the Gospels (But see Rafael Rodriguez's serial review at The Jesus Blog)
  
  That should be enough to get started. I think the Kirk and Thatcher article and Keith's articles are a good place to start with summaries of the positions within social memory research into the Gospels.

>actually

probably*

That's the best we can do, since the evidence is suspiciously lacking and internally contradictory.

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Happy Ēostre, and happy reading!

But you've assumed that Q is the only way in which the gospels could have been written. The Two Source Hypothesis and Bauckham both challenge this (in different ways).


>How would their authors be primary witnesses if they relied on the same earlier source of supposed sayings, while being unable to agree on important "facts" surrounding the life of this hypothesized man?

Again, this only works if Q is objectively correct- you've got to prove that there is such an thing as a Q document (which so far doesn't exist, it's a hypothesis). As for their (apparent) disagreement: all the major events are agreed on, the differences are in some details and perspective (why you'd expect 4 people to have the same perspective on numerous events I'm not sure). They were not writing history in our modern sense, but they were giving historical accounts as far as they saw it, and hence picked out different details (Matthew being more interested in Jewish things than Luke for example). Also, I don't know anyone who honestly thinks that Jesus didn't exist. They might disagree with what the sources say he did, but they don't abnegate his existence.

>Really, some thirty years in the ancient world could correlate with an entire lifetime. Why didn't these gospel writers feel it was important to write anything down for such a long period of time, then all of a sudden you have three likely to have been written in the same decade, nearly thirty years later?

Well, assume they're all roughly Jesus' age at the time of the crucifixion, that means they've got until 90AD to sort things out (at the top end). As it is, the first deaths (these are the traditional dates) start in 44AD and finish roughly around mid 70AD, which is within the spectrum of lifespans for the time period. Now you're running out of eyewitnesses - you've got to start writing things down or else you've lost your link with what happened. A 30 year gap isn't a huge amount of time (Muhammad's first book comes out 125 years after he's dead, the great Jewish Rabbi Hillel's work comes out about 200 years after he dies). You've also got a chirographic bias - oral/aural tradition is incredibly important during that time, more than the written one (cf: James Dunn).

>Why would they then neglect to save a record of the Q Source?? The whole thing reeks.

The argument is that Q is actually incorporated into the gospel accounts. Q is only theorized.

I would also recommend James Dunn's Jesus Remembered. Its a rigorous if confessional source that does a marvelous job of placing Jesus and the gospel texts in historical context.