How can we optimize memory for a timeline, without rote memorization or
narrativization?
When chronology does cohere in our memories, does it merely resemble a
“story” or is there a more precise cognitive dynamic at work?
How does each type of “Temporal Information” facilitate and distort
memory in unique ways?
Event memories that indicate their own temporal sequence (e.g., details
featuring causality, movement, location, disruption, and familiar time patterns)
accommodate constructive retrieval.
This promising research may support new scaffolding strategies for composition,
hermeneutics, pedagogy, and public discourse.
How I transitioned from ancient chronology to memory science:
I bought the Oxford Classical Dictionary, followed its footnotes on the Hellenistic and early imperial eras, wrote my own chronology of the first century CE, and sought feedback from scholars of the New Testament. I then began to discover (1) that NT scholars generally do not think like historians, and (2) that timelines do not cohere strongly in most people’s minds.
I began to consider that informational overload was at least one impediment to my progress. At about that same time, Anthony LeDonne introduced me to cognitive memory studies. My old desire to write down a comprehensive account of the first century soon gave way to a new goal: how can I convey this information so that it sticks? What do I need to do to write differently so that readers will be able to remember all this chronological detail?
Since then, I did this. Two years later, I also did this. I’m currently working to make this research suitable for publication.
As I have said here before, my basic finding is that some types of information effectively imply their own temporal sequence during acts of constructive remembering. Most prominent among these kinds of “temporal information” are (A) causality, (B) movement & location, and (C) disruption of perceived equilibria. Part of my work involves demonstrating that these informational types are reflected by essential aspects of narrative, respectively (A) plot, (B) setting, and (C) conflict.
We have long known that stories enhance memory while distorting reality. My hope is that science can guide us towards more responsible and ethical management of ‘storying’ dynamics.
If anyone is interested in helping me in any way, that would be wonderful.
One reason that mysticism has been frowned upon by the church, historically, is that people who get mystical also tend to get kooky, if not down right unstable. That sad trend is well documented. Another reason mysticism has been frowned upon by the church, historically, is that it threatens the clergy/laity arrangement. If each person claims their own profound sense of access to God, then who needs a priest or a preacher?
Personally, I have long considered myself a failed mystic. I gave it up long ago and I do not promote it. As for clergy, I have also loads of evidence that ditching formal hierarchy in the pews often leads to little more than informal domineering in a living room. The challenge of group dynamics is not solved by trusting everyone to stay well-attuned to their own imagination to God.
As Christian historians of Jesus, however, neither institutional resistance nor personal failure nor fear of kooky chaos must ever prevent us from considering ways in which Jesus was not as we are. It may have been a long time since I personally felt a profound touch from the Lord, but that should not stop me from proclaiming that I think Jesus believed he was experiencing spiritual communion with God, probably everyday of his adult life.
As both Christians and historians, then, let us further suppose that Jesus did indeed experience deep and profound interaction with God on a regular basis, during his earthly life. If we do so suppose, then I would urge us to also weigh heavily the fact that Jesus spent his teens and twenties abstaining from public ministry. That is, if we agree Jesus was exceptionally spiritual during his public ministry, then let us also recognize that Jesus at age 12 had no such lock down on God's leading, and that intervening years provided him opportunities to grow. Alas, here's a third reason for religious systems to resist my construction of Jesus, because they're addicted to leveraging youthful enthusiasm and idealism in their leadership programs. More's the pity.
At any rate, I am not a mystic but I think Jesus was a mystic.
Furthermore, as the above thought experiment illustrates, embracing the view that Jesus was NOT like me in some ways can be a prerequisite for extrapolating from there to achieve higher vistas. If we do not first embrace the view that fully-grown Jesus was super spiritual (although we are not), we cannot then proceed to consider that younger Jesus was not yet fully in tune. Perhaps it is only after surrendering our short-sighted need to promote a Jesus who is like us, and after ceasing to fear the promotion of a Jesus whom we cannot imitate, that we can then discover a higher paradigm.
Perhaps Jesus grew. Perhaps spiritual maturity requires decades of growth. Perhaps evangelical leaders who teach newly baptized believers to declare confidence in God's direct leading, are simply perpetuating a tragic and desperately vainglorious pretense. And perhaps older Christian traditions are being too cautious. If we all embraced the simple historical inference that Jesus's own mysticism required thirty years of developing growth before he began making weighty pronouncements, then established authorities might be less worried about kooks, and grass roots ecclesias might be far less at risk of living room insta-gurus.
If spiritual weight was something we expect persons to acquire not without decades of devotion, that expectation might put a stop to all sorts of shenanigans.
Now, I said all this in part because I would love for you all to go read my 2011 draft of Jesus in Nazareth, if you haven't already. Heck, feel free to revise it for me. Thanks in advance!
But the other point I wish to underscore is about courage and self-denial in historical method.
We need to get away from the practice of building into the past only what we promote. I support the military and pay taxes. I'm not sure Jesus ever did either. I refuse to attend religious services. Jesus faithfully attended Synagogue gatherings. I have become an avowed feminist but no person in the first century was a feminist. The list could go on, but the point should be clear.
We cannot see Jesus as he was if we continue using him to justify ourselves.
And we cannot construct history in good faith if the ideological cart is pulling the analytical horse.
History may be one thing after another but a literary history is the author's attempt to convey their own vision. The authorial representation should therefore guide scholarly interpretation of the text.
Steve Mason's dissertation on the Pharisees in Josephus is a masterclass in narratological interpretation. Previous scholars had taken a single line of Josephus's autobiography (an odd phrasing which seemed to declare Pharisaic affiliation) as evidence for doubting all the passages in Josephus's narrative work which expressed criticism of Pharisees. Since that dissertation, scholarship in general has recognized Mason's superior exegesis of the one difficult line and henceforth overturned the previous dogma that Josephus identified as a Pharisee. Also since that dissertation, Josephus scholars have come around to the larger issue raised by Mason's methodology. Unfortunately, NT scholars have not. If you haven't sussed quite yet what that larger issue might be, please bear with me a bit longer.
Frank Ankersmit has argued that a narrative text cannot be comprehended in the same way linguists exegete a single propositional statement. Let us examine the difference.
When reading one sentence, we decode individual words while looking for grammatical cues and patterns of syntax. Piecing those things together is how one comprehends the proposition. The task is to build meaning from the bottom up. If a statement mentions "Elvis Presley" we might wonder whether that refers to Ed Sullivan Elvis or military service Elvis or Blue Hawaii Elvis or Las Vegas Elvis or the Elvis purportedly haunting Graceland today. As exegetes of a single reference, we must deduce which Elvis the author means us to recognize, and our initial deduction may be confirmed or corrected a few words later, or perhaps a few lines later, further down in the text. This is not necessarily the case with a large collection of sentences.
The first distinction to recognize is that a narrative passage cannot "refer" in the same way as an individual word or a propositional statement. If you mention the name of my dog, you "refer" to one identifiable being. It is "picked out uniquely" by the label I use. Even if I may have given my dog a common name, we can easily clarify with further specification. "I mean the cocker spaniel Taffy who lived at Bill's childhood home until he was 13." The ideal one-to-one correspondence is at least achievable, even if our collective vocabulary (or "cultural repertoire") does not contain a single term to label each object on Earth. With enough added words, we can still pick out which dog I mean to describe.
Narrative cannot do that. It simply cannot. A published story about the battle of Waterloo can only "refer" to its subject in general (what Ankersmit idiosyncratically calls "aboutness"). Of course I can cite a year to specify which Treaty of Paris or Ocean's Eleven I might have in mind, but that is not the point. The one and only battle of Waterloo can be identified with a single place and time but it cannot be identified by a single set of words. That is, we cannot select one verbal discourse as the proper description of that singular battle. It was unique, but words cannot designate it uniquely. If that were possible, then we should expect to find only one proper description of the battle, only one proper biography of Napoleon, only one acceptable version of any given event in Earth's history. Obviously, this is not the case. The one-to-one correspondence between words and things cannot be extended to words and events. This necessarily shifts our hermeneutic away from objective decoding of a linguistic construction and towards the subjective interpretation of an aesthetic construction.
Narrative is not reference. Narrative is representation.
The construction of meaning from narrative, therefore, cannot be treated exclusively as a bottom-up endeavor, in the same way we construct meaning from the propositional statement. Unlike the grammatical and syntactical bits of a sentence, the individual sentences within a larger narrative text create a whole which is not merely the sum of its parts. Thus, instead of piecing together the meaning of each text by tackling one sentence at a time, one must rather prioritize a determination about the overall meaning of an authorial representation IN ORDER TO have any chance at properly understanding each single statement within it. Although this prescription may seem paradoxical, because of course we must read the text one statement at a time, the point is that our hermeneutic spiral must build and build and built UNTIL we have reached the point where we can look back on each part and see how they all fit in the whole.
Impressively, that is precisely how Mason engaged the corpus of Josephus's writings. Where other scholars had camped out on one troublesome sentence and erased several passages which appeared to contradict it, Mason argued that we should rather prioritize understanding Josephus's whole body of work before turning again to that difficult bit in his autobiography. When taken in context, Mason demonstrated conclusively, there was a different way to interpret the one bit. Josephus had not joined the Pharisees. He had merely studied them for a while. The single ambiguous statement was best understood in the context of Josephus's larger narratological construction.
I have argued the same thing about Luke and Quirinius: whatever else we think about that difficult bit of text, it cannot be taken as evidence that Luke thought Jesus was born in the year 6 CE. Rather, the larger story Luke tells obviously fits in a world where Judea and Galilee were being administered in a unified way. Rather, a reconstruction of Luke's esthetic vision must be prioritized. The author's view of the story he means to tell should be our first reconstruction, after which we can use that reconstruction as context for attempting to understand what Luke was trying to say about that odd proconsul Quirinius.
I have argued the same thing about Matthew and Archelaus. Instead of getting stuck on one word ("basileuei") and declaring that to be inaccurate (because Archelaus was an ethnarch and not a king), we should rather go back several verses and prioritize Matthew's narratological context. Even if Jesus living in Egypt is pure fiction, Matthew's angel wakes Joseph precisely at Herod's death so that Matthew's readers can recognize the timeframe. Archelaus was indeed, just then, playing the king. He was literally "kinging" in Judea, in his father's position. Recognizing this temporal context lends dramatic irony and praises God's foresight, because Galilee was not yet safe from the dangerous princeling, but it would soon be once Augustus slapped down the upstart.
I have argued the same thing for the book of Acts. Instead of treating each episode as more or less random, we must first reconstruct the authorial viewpoint. First, the author inserts himself into the story, aligns himself not just with the gentile mission and Paul but also with the narrative climax in Caesarea. The author, as character, appears to remain for two years with the Caesarean church as his base. That the apprehensions they feel for Jersualem have lingered is not anti-Jewish but anti-mother-church. Within that context, it cannot be coincidental that Luke's outstanding point of view characters for the early chapters - Stephen and Philip and Cornelius and Barnabas, the ones Luke goes out of his way to introduce and to follow - also happen to align with the gentile mission, with Antioch, and with Caesarea. Philip and Cornelius in particular signal an authorial focalization. These are not random characters with marginal stories Luke felt bound to include. They are some of his favorites. In terms of comprehending narrative to be representational, that authorial construction should be prioritized as the context for everything else in the text.
As I said at the top of this post, history itself may be one thing after another but a literary history is the author's attempt to convey their own vision. One cannot merely analyze bits of narrative content and then think about them as truth claims, or potentially true. The exegetical analysis of any passage must root itself in a larger awareness of the "history" as a literary construction, an authorial representation. The individual truth claims are not merely tainted by authorial bias; they are painted with brushstrokes of meaning. As Josephus's overall view of the Pharisees elucidates a proper exegesis of each statement he makes about them, so should we apply Luke's overall disposition (against the heavy-handed Christians in Jersualem) to our exegetical analysis of each line and episode in the book.
Narrative history is not simply a story, to be taken or left. It is not simply "narrative" because that's what we call this stuff. Narrative history is an authorial representation. Before we judge the potential veracity of a narrated claim, we must first be careful to understand the meaning of that claim, NOT with a bottom-up semiotic and linguistic approach, BUT with a top-down approach of narratology and literature.
The authorial representation should guide scholarly interpretation of the text. After which, THEN AND ONLY THEN, historical critical judgment should absolutely proceed to have its field day by assessing the evidential value (or lack thereof) in each claim and action depicted. But those claims must be judged with a full awareness of their nature as brush strokes, rather than log entries.
At any rate... I said all that to say this.
If any NT scholar happens to be thinking about doing a project called "Acts as History" I dearly hope they pay attention to these important distinctions.
When critics frame simple stories versus complex reality as a binary choice, authoritarians thrive. So long as it's one or the other, the domineering "reality is what I say it is" leaders can simply assert "the stories we tell are NOT fictions." Polarization is not the result of such conflicts; it is their fertile ground.
If I could wipe away that false binary and re-write critical dogma I would tell academia to assert that simple stories often are and can more often be a pathway to more complex understandings. Scientists know this. Where the university history professor takes an oppositional stance against stories their students have previously heard, the university physics professor affirms the basic concepts of high school teaching and adds, "now we're going to incorporate friction and wind resistance." Although not everyone can keep up with the math in that case, they gain a new appreciation for how simplified the earlier teaching had been.
Imagine if politicians were culturally expected to share two versions of each story. First, tell me the short version. Next, expand on that with the complicated details. The liars and spin doctors who prefer that the public options for narrative rhetoric should remain binary, suddenly, would be unable to compete. Because they only have their one simplified version of lies, expanding upon which would require receipts. In contrast, the earnest and honest would no longer face an automatic competitive disadvantage. Rather, those who understand the complex version and wish to convey it completely would simply need to learn strategic methods for non-fiction storytelling as an introductory practice.
The logic here reminds me of the twin gatekeepers in Labyrinth. One liar and one truthteller, one guarding safe passage and one trying to doom you; the trick is to ask both of them, "Which door would he tell me to take?" The liar points to doom, the honest one points to doom, and you pick the opposite door.
It may be optimistic of me, but I suspect "Give me the simple version and then follow up with the long version" would upend lots of nonsense... especially if we could establish that every purveyor of claims should be expected to follow that custom.
On a personal note, this whole suggestion developed in me because I wish biblical scholas would see the four Gospels in a similar way - not as simple claims to uphold or dismiss but as authorial representations which point the way to considering various complex possibilities about the real historical past.
A simple story should invite us to ask questions about the more complex reality.
The false binary only empowers those who thrive on such conflict.
Please direct your attention to Loren Rosson's extensive reviews of two recent books by Jason Staples. If you can read only one review, the second briefly synopsizes the first. Both books regard Paul's sense of what "Israel" meant in the first century. You can search for other positive reception of Jason's work. I recommend Rosson because he writes clearly and offers perspective illuminating for non-specialists.
Go read those reviews to understand why this new work is important. My comments which follow are strictly personal.
It was something like twenty-years ago that Jason made some common sense observations, framed by a genuinely fresh perspective, and it took him this long to contextualize those observations comprehensively and defensibly for academic reception.
After earning his Ph.D, Jason spent years supporting his family with jobs outside academia while doggedly pursuing his goal of completing his grand passion project. It took him two books. Both have been well received. I admire him greatly.
Doing scholarship on one's own time is always costly, often thankless, and completing one's work does not guarantee that anybody will care. Although I cannot yet compare the caliber of my work to Jason's, I must say I find it vicariously thrilling to see his long-term project, triumphantly, finding its audience.
Paul of Tarsus once noted that some Corinthian believers longed to see signs and wonders while others longed to hear wisdom through oratory. Ostensibly, Paul's allegations describe two distinct factions: one being a sub-group of predominantly Jewish Corinthians who liked Peter because he spoke in tongues and healed people, and the other being a sub-group of Greek Corinthinans who liked Apollos because of his scriptural knowledge and rhetorical prowess. Still today, as we all painfully know, some Christians seek miracles while others prefer preaching. To both groups, Paul said that no human mind had conceived the rewards of inclining one's heart towards God.
Feel free to stop reading at this point and incline yourself thusly. The rest of this piece is going to explore the "eyes" and "ears" distinction a bit further. However, instead of miracles and preaching, I'd like you to consider that stories can leave behind, in your mind, both words and images.
If you're sticking around, please bear with me now for a paragraph or two on cognitive technicalities.
In the information processing model of cognitive psychology, scientists distinguish auditory input from visual input in a number of ways. The classic model of "working memory" includes a "phonological loop" (in which songs can 'get stuck' and through which you quickly memorize names or phone numbers) and a "visuo-spatial sketchpad" (where you visualize images, albeit faint, fuzzy, fragmented, and/or distorted images). In this theoretical model, both of these two components feed into the "episodic buffer" where a third component (a theoretical "chief executive") coordinates bits and pieces of previously encoded sights and sounds (a.k.a. "trace memories") and reconstructs as much as possible your memory of the previously lived situation. In this way, psychologists have accounted for separate input (eyes and ears) and separate encoding (images and sounds), but processing and manipulation of information takes various pathways as our future selves continue to store up, re-code, and reconstruct various permutations of combined audio-visual memories.
One curious phenomenon in all this is that WORDS can become informational content in both categories. Historically, most common experiments for memory have involved a collection of words, either in list form or on flash cards. In these studies, participants will usually rehearse the words in some way: seeing them, speaking them, hearing them. The phonological loop can preserve a few seconds of rehearsal and the visuo-spatial sketchpad can preserve a few sketchy images of the word list and/or flash cards. This flexibility illustrates precisely why words are so useful as rhetorical tools and so powerful as conceptual placeholders; it is not merely that words serve as tags for ideas in our minds but that words persist across various "modalities" of sight, sound, and speech. You can even copy a word list repeatedly through writing. Although we should rightly forget about educational theories that some students prefer one modality over all others, the research on learning is at least clear that reviewing the same content in multiple forms does provide an advantage.
This modal advantage also puts words above images in at least one respect: you cannot rehearse mental images through recitation or graphic transcription. You cannot speak pictures. You cannot write pictures. In the case of visual input from unique lived experience then we must admit you cannot even look at such a mental image more than once. Moreover, words provide empirical evidence for laboratory researchers. The established field of cognitive linguistics is widely renowned while the budding field of studies on "event memory" is still struggling to get past reading comprehension. Incidentally, one modestly promising development is the comparison of body-camera footage to self-reporting summaries of personal activity (e.g., walking to the campus library, finding a book, and returning to the psych lab).
Now, here comes the difficult bit. Something occurred to me today which bothers me greatly.
If proficiency depends on repeated practice, our brains have less opportunity to become adept at manipulating visual memories. Even illiterate people learn many different ways of processing verbal information. We all get lots of practice at thinking about words. But images? Although we can strengthen visual memories through repeated viewings of the same photos, same artwork, or the same movie scenes, it seems perhaps that only avid readers receive the opportunity to become adept in the skill of constructing situation models while receiving narrative discourse. Further, it seems that perhaps only avid readers from childhood have a chance to put in the proverbial 10,000 hours of practice required to become experts at visualizing a narrated situation. To speculate even further, it may be specifically that we do not develop this talent to its fullest without being an avid reader from childhood of fiction, specifically.
In reality, of course, almost every human person has some imagination ability, but on that scale we could say everybody has some degree of physical ability as well. Some can run. Some cannot even walk. In my musings above, I am talking about the difference between walking around and becoming an athlete. Some readers naturally build worlds while receiving a discourse. Other readers mainly wait for the speaker to get to a point, and such readers will otherwise struggle when pressed to prioritize their imaginative function. Such readers may even stare in disbelief when one suggests that imaginative function should be a default process when receiving narrative content for general purposes. Particularly savvy operators know that stories are often just vehicles for agendas. They feel justified in looking down at those of us who take stories too seriously.
I now present today's disturbing thought, albeit prefaced with a disclaimer.
It has been said, rather rudely, that sometimes unintelligent persons prefer authoritarian leaders because parrotting such leaders spares trusting dimwits from having to think for themselves. To whatever extent this is sometimes the case I would like to offer as much sympathy for the individuals in question and condemnation for the leaders who abuse their simple trust. In contrast to this sad situation, and the unhelpful mockery and stereotyping of it, I have a more refined hypothesis to suggest.
Specifically, I am wondering today whether some adult persons who are indeed rather intelligent may sometimes develop a cognitive predisposition for processing verbal discourse as predominantly if not strictly semantic information. In other words, I wonder if we might be able to demonstrate that some adult brains have a measurable deficiency in forming mental models of situations being narrated (and/or described) by verbal discourse. If so, then it would seem natural to suppose that such adult persons would be more likely to rely on labels and categories in explaining their views, while adhering rather dogmatically to stock phrases and boilerplate sound bites.
If so, it would seem somewhat futile to urge such people to engage their imagination while reading. One can neither easily nor adeptly perform skills which require muscles atrophied through lack of use.
Getting back to Paul and the Corinthians, I must remind myself that first century Christians as a group were largely ignorant, almost wholly uneducated, and not often blessed with even modest intelligence. To such people, the tentmaker form Tarsus proclaimed optimistically that inclining themselves towards the divine was a worthy activity, one that held promise of rewards that go beyond any kind of familiar human experience.
For the sake of my projects, however, I feel more daunted than ever. It is one thing to urge narratological reconstruction when speaking to those who have been acculturated to avoid thinking imaginatively about the words of the New Testament. It is another thing to promote this procedure when speaking to those (and yes, I mean professional scholars) who may be cognitively disinclined to engage in this kind of imaginative thinking.
As Dunn said with orality decades ago, here is another default setting that we need to reset.
Even if your hermeneutic of the Gospels considers "ideal readers" or "the authorial audience" instead of reconstructing actual first century readers and hearers, we should not assume that early Jewish/Christian knowledge about their own recent history would equate to a list of key facts. Their word of mouth style of posterity was quite unlike a wiki stub cribbed from an old World Book, and I mean different not only in form or format. I mean that ancient historical knowledge was quite different than our modern concept of factual knowledge as something learned from official sources who verified the information before passing it down. The difference is also more complex than simply imagining that ancient people were generally more susceptible to authoritarian pronouncements and biased spin, because that also happens to some degree in officially verified publications. That common danger has never not been part of telling stories about the past.
The difference I am getting at starts with Dunn's notion that we need to reckon with a culture of orality but I believe it goes farther. We need to think about memory and storytelling. Specifically, we need to think about the fact that our limited cognitive capacity means that only simplified explanations had the potential to gain widespread adoption as "common knowledge" about what happened in the past.
For example, consider the contrast between the stories Josephus tells to his audience of upscale Roman elites, on the one hand, and the stories Josephus reports had been told among common folks back in Judea and Galilee.
To explain the fall of Jerusalem to his privileged peers, Josephus offers a complex set of justifications that rely on various factors of culture and politics, ultimately suggesting that the governing class in Jerusalem didn't mean to oppose Rome until they were forced into it by the spontaneous guerilla assault on that insufficiently prepared Legion from Antioch. (Obviously, I compress greatly; but see Mason's History of the Jewish War, 2016.)
To explain the Nabatean conquest of the fortress at Gamala (Gamla), Josephus tells us, folks in Galilee said that God was punishing Herod Antipas for having executed John the Baptist.
Although I feel confident that such extreme superstition did not characterize every single historical explanation which circulated among Jewish and Christian people of the first century, I do mean to suggest that something like that level of simplicity was a prerequisite for a story to gain widespread acceptance, or at least to be recognized as the norm of historical knowledge. Thus, if an savvy author was writing to an audience of common folks and said author wished to refer to historical events, the target knowledge would need to be simple. I mean the FORM of that story would need to be simple.
Briefly, now, here are just a few specific suggestions as to how this might affect our interpretation of some material in the Gospels.
(1) The parable in Luke 19 is less likely a reference to the singular story about Archelaus and more likely a reference to the larger pattern by which that kind of thing happened repeatedly. That is, many rulers of Judea had sailed to Rome to be granted the rule back at home, including Herod the Great, Herod's oldest son Antipater (unsuccessfully), Archelaus, Antipas (twice, both times unsuccessfully), Agrippa I (who successfully gained the rule of Trachonitis from Caligula and later received the re-unified kingdom from Claudius), and more. Thus, it is far more likely that common pattern (and not the one relatable factoid that Lukan scholars picked up while studying Matt 2:22) which provided a targetable bit of historical knowledge for the writer of Luke to expect from their ancient audience.
(2) John 2:20 cannot be a reference to anything which required the audience to get out a reference book and perform careful arithmetic. If the number "forty-six" has any hermeneutic significance, my bet is that it was meant to evoke 'a few less than 49', thereby associating the crucifixion of Jesus with the year of the Jubilee (although whether the author meant that symbolically or literally, or both, would obviously require a whole other discussion). My point is whatever historical idea the author was trying to reference, it needed to be simple, obvious, and immediately retrievable.
(3) Repeated Gospel references to John the Baptist as one who "came before" and "prepared the way" involve a simplified chronological schema which implies a basic sequence no more complicated than 'one before the other'. On this basis, I have previously argued that Bauckham's argument about John 3:24 is misguided to suppose that one allusion in John could prompt a verbatim recall of Mark 1:14 as a specific textual reference.
(4) Even more broadly, the simplified narrative structure of the basic synoptic storyline is largely built upon another simplified schema with embedded chronology. If the audience knows in advance that Jesus became popular in Galilee and got killed in Jerusalem, they would naturally expect the storyline to begin in Galilee and move to Judea only in time for that death. If this was indeed the likely expectation of most audiences, it could help explain why the earliest writers of narrative Gospels chose to simplify the story structure of Jesus's ministry period, in that way.
(5) Finally, the one about which I was previously dissertating: the writer of Matt 2:22 could most reasonably have expected those references ("Herod... Archelaus... Judea... fright... Galilee") to evoke only the most impactful events from that overall time frame. Thus, rather than cherry picking a few details from Josephus's account or finding some criteria for deciding how much of that written history might have also been common knowledge, I reconstruct the matter in multiple stages.
(example 5, continued) FIRST, from a LITERARY perspective, I extrapolate the vision of events which Josephus apparently had in mind and attempted to convey (e.g., the division of Herod's kingdom was Augustus's original idea and it was not even suggested until Herod had been dead for several months). SECOND, from a HISTORICAL-CRITICAL standpoint, I scrutinize the authorial vision of Josephus (e.g., reconsidering causative factors more comprehensively) and reconstruct my own view of KEY EVENTS as they actually unfolded (e.g., the people of Judea and Galilee spent a year living in complete ignorance about who if anyone was going to emerge, from the ongoing chaos and violent upheavals, as the new overlord of the land of the Jews). THIRD, from the standpoint of social and cognitive memory theory, I perform a PSYCHOLOGICAL reconstruction, this time considering which events (from among those which actually transpired) would have been the most likely to leave a mnemonic traces on a cultural level for decades to come (e.g., Passover pilgrims returning to Jerusalem each year, for many years, undoubtedly would have remembered the massacre of Archelaus each time they walked through the streets where the smallest of children were the first ones to be trampled, and each time they walked to the Temple where the protestors were first assaulted by the armed forces of Archelaus, the apparent king-to-be. FOURTH, on the basis of all the above, I can only then find a reasonable basis for reconstructing HERMENEUTICALLY that the writer of Matt 2:22 most likely expected their audience to believe a few key "facts" based on the general P.o.V. of Judean posterity (e.g., it had appeared from all angles that Augustus split the kingdom in response to the upheavals, and that Archelaus deserved his eventual banishment by Augustus, among other reasons, primarily because of the Passover massacre at his accession).
Here endeth my list of examples for today. Feel free to search the blog for previous thoughts on the five topics just reviewed.
Now, let me sum up the overall point and be done with this post.
Altogether, this kind of approach creates a lot of work, and the first reaction of some Gospel scholars may be to scoff dismissively, because what I propose will seem, to them, quite a stretch. Against that likely response, please consider that the popular alternative for centuries has been just to cherry pick a few verbatim factoids as purported by Josphus and then to magically impute those "facts" as the "knowledge" shared by ancient author and audience alike.
Realistically, I'll be doing well if I can even start this conversation, let alone get the last word. But maybe that is enough.
As Dunn said with orality decades ago, here is another default setting that we need to reset.
I went up to Jerusalem with Barnabas, taking with me also Titus… But not even Titus, who was with me, being Greek, was compelled to be circumcised. - Galatians 2:1,3
To support his bold claim that circumcision is no longer necessary for gentile Christians, Paul further claims that the saints in Jerusalem had met Titus without requiring him to be circumcised. For the second claim to support the larger claim effectively, Paul must have expected the Galatians (1) to know who Titus was, and (2) to believe that Paul's claims about Titus were true. The simplest explanation for Paul's apparent expectation is that Paul sent Titus to carry this letter.
Supposing Titus delivered Galatians can also explain why Paul references Titus without identifying distinctions. That is, neither "who was with me" nor "being Greek" denotes a unique referent. These phrases do not qualify as identifying remarks because many people could have been with Paul and many people were Greek. I return to the possible meaning of these two phrases below.
For context, please observe that Paul has obvious reasons for failing to identify Peter (1:18) and John (2:9), who require no introduction as Jesus's apostles, and also Barnabas (2:1), who requires no introduction because he helped Paul found the Galatian assemblies. As for James, "the Lord's brother" (1:18), Paul's identifying descriptor was undoubtedly mere disambiguation, supposing at least one of the following: e.g., that the Galatians had heard about James the apostle in the same stories they heard about Peter and John, or that James's prominence in Jerusalem was widely known, or that we take Paul to imply that Galatia's other recent visitors from Jerusalem were the same "men from James" who had also disrupted Antioch (2:12). As for Titus, however, we have no cause to suppose that Paul's gentile colleague was himself comparably famous among early Christians in Asia. To the contrary, Paul's acknowledgement that Titus's Gentile status had recently been at issue in Jersualem provides a strong reason to expect the opposite: that Titus was not generally famous among early Christians. This lack of evident fame also refutes the suggestion of F. F. Bruce that Paul was specifically refuting a rumor about Titus previously spread by the 'Judaizers'; if Titus was not famously well known at this point then Bruce's scenario should require Paul to explicitly clarify that he meant the same Titus about whom there were rumors. As noted above, "with me" and "Greek" do not specify one uniquely identifiable person.
Logically, the above considerations leave us with only two possible reasons why Galatians in four different cities might be expected to know who Titus was without requiring an introduction: either Paul knew that Titus had visited previously, or Paul knew that Titus was visiting concurrently. But if Paul believed Titus was not currently present then we would still expect Paul to clarify which "Titus" (of all the Tituses on earth) was the Titus about whom Paul was speaking. Therefore, the most likely reason, by far, for Paul to avoid identifying this Titus, is because Paul had sent this Titus to Galatia with this letter.
If we consider the scenario in depth, we find additional reasons to support not just plausibility but strong likelihood. For one, sending Titus offered Paul the strategic advantage of refuting his troublesome opponents by sending an eyewitness who could testify on at least some of the events being narrated in the letter. Instead of merely writing that Titus had met with the "pillars" in Jerusalem and yet remained uncircumcised, Paul could send the Titus himself to corroborate Paul's account. Beyond that, the Galatians could ask Titus questions -about Paul, about his visit to the holy city, about whom he met there - and if any man in Galatia remained skeptical about Paul's claims, then Titus had the option to reveal physical evidence.
Finally, supposing this strategic scenario provides a practical purpose for Paul's two ancillary descriptions, imbuing them with additional meaning. First, the phrase "who was with me" now conveys an implicit challenge. I'm telling you what happened, and he was there too. If you don't believe me, ask him. Second, the phrase "being Greek" denotes an ethnic origin that is not merely non-Jewish; for instance, a Samaritan who became Christian would not be "compelled to be circumcised" because Samaritans still considered themselves children of Abraham (cf. Acts 8:5-39). In this light, the most specific denotation in Galatians about Titus is the fact that Titus (like all Greeks) had not been circumcised in his life before turning to Christ. Taken thusly, "being Greek" is not merely Paul adding a detail but emphatically suggesting there is further proof here if you absolutely need it.
In conclusion, accepting that Titus carried the letter explains why Paul could expect the Galatians to know very little about Titus while also requiring no description of his identity. By sending and naming his eyewitness, Paul's supporting point about his larger claim becomes far stronger through personal testimony and physical evidence. The phrase "who was with me" no longer underscores a geographical coincidence which should have already been obvious (the guy I'm talking about who was there when I was, Titus, he was also with me) but now serves to qualify the man's testimony and commend his presence in Galatia as a trusted colleague. The phrase "being Greek," which also seemed a bit redundant as mere exposition, now finds a situated rhetorical purpose that serves Paul's strategic goals - not just for the epistle but directly for the mission. Paul does not introduce Titus as a co-worker, a trusted friend, or a traveling companion, but as a supporting witness, uniquely qualified to rebut the accusations of Paul's opponents from Jerusalem.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
One final consideration, if Galatians 2:1-10 indeed refers to the conference of Acts 15 (and I agree that it does), is that Titus could have carried TWO LETTERS into Galatia. In other words, if Titus was first present at the council of Jerusalem and then carried Paul's letter to Derbe, Lystra, Iconium, and Antioch of Pisidia, then Titus could have brought along a copy of Jerusalem’s letter as well. This would then provide one reason why Paul did not mention that letter in the text of his own letter, not that he necessarily carried or cared for that letter at all. Paul and Titus might even have thought it wise strategy to hold something in reserve.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
It is further likely, in my opinion, that Titus and Luke carried Paul's letter through Galatia together, and then kept going west to their pre-arranged rendezvous point, at a city they could not fail to locate because it stood next to the ruins of the most famous city in Asia Minor ("Troy"), and this would then explain why Paul found Luke in Troas after leaving Galatia and not feeling able to linger near Ephesus.
in Asia. Also, the fact that Acts never mentions Titus is irrelevant but if Titus and Paul were on Crete at some point, years later, then it was most likely Fair Havens, which would mean Luke deliberately left Titus out of Acts, perhaps for abandoning ship after Paul finagled his way into bringing three friends. In other words, if Titus was at Fair Havens with Paul then Titus could have been in other parts of Paul's journeys according to Acts. Also Paul did expect, after Corinth, to see Titus in Troas, and Paul's second journey he left one man in each city where they planted a new church (Luke in Philippi, Timothy in Thessalonica, Silas in Berea, and Paul himself stayed in Athens. Thus, it stands to reason that Titus was the man they left in Troas, which explains why Luke left out the origin of that church.
Last month I was able to present some of my research to the annual meeting of the International Society for the Study of Narrative, in a hybrid conference format (online and in-person). The title of my presentation was "Causality, Location, and Disruption as Accommodations for Remembering Sequences."
In the embedded video below (17:51), you may enjoy my enthusiastic discussion and substantive slideshow. The rest of this blogpost, if you keep scrolling, includes my abstract (285 words) and the "party favor" referred to in my talk, a supplemental handout entitled "Review of Cognitive Psychology on 'Construcive Remembering'" (1268 words, plus notes and references).
Video:
Abstract:
In a previous
ISSN presentation, “Causality as Mnemonic Accommodation,” I reviewed cognitive
science on memory and event sequence to support three nested claims. First,
remembering is constructive (Schacter 1996, 2013). Second, remembering temporal
sequences is most successful when recalled information happens to convey
temporal implications through natural logic or contextual detail (Friedman 1993).
Third, memories encoded as cause and effect imply their own sequence and unity,
facilitating efficient mnemonic reconstruction. Thus, causality helps us
remember event sequences coherently, whether recalling personal experiences, fictional
storylines, or historical emplotments.
After reviewing the
above, I suggest that physical setting can similarly accommodate the mnemonic
reconstruction of temporal sequence because movement between two locations necessarily
implies prior and subsequent order. Arbitrary developments distinguishable by
location can be mentally truncated as episodic material, and thereby sequenced
efficiently. Also, itinerary based storylines (e.g., Homer’s Odyssey or The
Wizard of Oz) provide an underlying structure within their larger emplotments.
Finally, I
suggest that disruption of any perceived equilibrium creates a mnemonic
boundary between time periods “before and after” the disruption. Thus, any
contradiction or reversal (e.g., dashed hopes, foiled plans, drastic failure, or
tragic irony) creates a powerful mnemonic association between the bygone hopes
or expectations and whatever impactful event has destroyed them. Thus, like any
trauma, disruption can redefine past and present, encoding the aftermath to
evoke what has been lost.
In summary, it
seems that memories which incorporate causality, location, and disruption each
imply their own temporal sequence in different ways, and these implications accommodate
the remembering of timelines and storylines. By enabling our minds to remember
whole sequences with less effort and greater efficiency, these cognitive accommodations
may help explain why plot, setting, and conflict (respectively) increase narrative
coherence.
Supplemental Handout:
Review of
Cognitive Psychology on “Constructive Remembering”[1]
In
researching “Memory for the Time of Past Events,” William Friedman (1993)
determined that successful attempts to remember “when” a personal memory
belonged—either with respect to some known event, or else with respect to a
recognized pattern of time—require only that recalled information must include
some contextual detail that conveys temporal implications. That is, recalling memories
which contain temporal information enables us to reconstruct a larger event
sequence through the active process of working memory, so long as mnemonic
content “connects” in some way with a specific point in time, or a known
sequence in one’s personal history. For example, recalling where you were on
9/11, or which presidential candidate you first supported, or the first holiday
after a loved one’s death; these kinds of details can help you piece together
the historical timing of remembered events. In such cases, the mnemonic content
itself indicates whether that content belongs before, during, or after some
other remembered event or known time pattern. In other words, “temporal
content” implies its own sequence.
The reconstructive aspects of Friedman’s
model are functionally aligned with current studies of Reconstructive Memory
(or, “constructive remembering”), which began F. C. Bartlett’s Remembering
(1932). Narratologists will know Bartlett for his foundational contributions to
schema theory but they may not know that Bartlett deliberately gave his
subjects confusing and unfamiliar material in order to maximize opportunities
for observing schematization (64-5), and that decision produced a few
surprising results. Unexpectedly, Bartlett found that his subjects remembered
details of the target story “constructively” and that subsequent recollections
(for months and years afterward) became increasingly “more connected and
coherent” when compared with a subject’s earliest retelling; Bartlett’s
subjects also demonstrated substantial instances of (in his terms) invention,
condensation, abbreviation, simplification, confusion, rationalization, and
other types of “unrealized distortion” (63-94). Because schema theory could
explain only some contents of these observed memory distortions, and not the
overall process, Bartlett’s experiment raised new questions about the nature of
remembering itself.
Early reception of Bartlett’s study was
heavily critical, with psychologists failing to replicate his results and challenging
his methodology.[2]
Fortunately, Ulrich Neisser’s Cognitive Psychology (1967) revitalized
the concept of constructive memory, comparing reassembled memories to
reconstructed fossils and arguing that “stored fragments are used as
information to support a new construction” (272).[3] Daniel Schacter (1996)
sums up Neisser’s view by saying, “only bits and pieces of incoming data are
stored in memory. These retained fragments of experience in turn provide a
basis for reconstructing a past event” (40). Neisser’s functional claims about
the fragmentary nature of recall are confirmed easily enough by common
experience of general mnemonic limitations: that recognition is easier than
recall, that memories are strengthened by repetition and recency, that
memorization typically requires study and rehearsal, and that such learning
tends to fade unless periodically reinforced. These basic strengths and
weaknesses of memory have been repeatedly affirmed by psychological research
(e.g., Kahana, 2012). Further, the claim that memory is reconstructive is now
widely affirmed as well (see, e.g., Wagoner 2017b), with even prominent critics
of Bartlett like Alan Baddeley affirming that “the reconstructive view” is
“associated with normal remembering.”[4]
Neisser’s functional distinction between
simple recall (the retrieval of semantic information and episodic fragments) on
the one hand, and constructive remembering (reassembling a whole from whatever
bits and pieces are recalled) on the other, can also facilitate discussion of Friedman’s
research about temporal content, considering that details of memory which imply
temporality are details which arise during “recall,” and the use of that
information in reconstruction thereby rounds out the process of “remembering.” In
reality, it may be that these distinct tasks often occur simultaneously or
interactively, but for mastering the basic concept it can help to think (as I
do in my presentation) of “recall” and “reconstruction” as separate stages of a
two step process.
What remains in contention in current
psychological research is the extent to which “normal” constructive remembering
necessarily results in distortions; on the one hand, extensive research by
Daniel Schacter and his associates has demonstrated undeniably that mnemonic
distortion is typical, significant, and not infrequently severe.[5] On the other hand,
researchers like James Ost & Alan Costall (2002) and Brady Wagoner (2017a,
2017b) have emphasized cases in which mnemonic accuracy does occur, such as the
“prodigiously retentive capacity” of Swazi cattle herders for the details of
their business, and that particular facets of collaboration can often improve
accuracy in remembering.[6] In addition, Wagoner
(2017a: 10) points out that construction “does not occur out of nothing” and
that “innovation in the present” requires “flexibly engaging with the past.”
Even Bartlett himself, in responding to critics, said, “I did not imply that
literal retrieval is impossible, but I did imply that it requires special
constricting conditions.”[7] Bartlett (93) also
confessed, “Detail is outstanding when it fits in with a subject’s pre-formed
interests and tendencies” although “it tends to take a progressively earlier
place in successive reproductions.”
In a balanced critique of Schacter,
Wagoner (2017a: 203-4) suggests that emphasis on distortions and errata is “not
in itself wrong but simply one-sided” and “limits the possibilities for
exploring the reasons and nature of change in remembering,” adding,
“remembering serves many other functions than creating accurate representations
of the past.”[8]
Bartlett (16) suggested that literal recall might have been evolutionarily
“detrimental” when survival depended on “a continuous play of adaptation
between changing response and varying environment.” In other words, we need our
memories to be useful.[9] We might underscore this
point with an even more basic point, that in order to prove useful, information
must be remembered. Thus, in the practical sense, distorted memory is
far better than no memory at all. As Bartlett (93-94) concluded, “the reduction
of material to a form that can be readily and ‘satisfyingly’ dealt with” is
essential because it provides some kind of “specific ground, frame, or setting,
without which it will not be persistently remembered” (emphasis mine). Constructive
distortions enable us to remember something rather than nothing, and researchers
should study these actual phenomena.[10]
Without question, we must embrace the fact
that literal accuracy appears by far the exception rather than the rule, but in
my view we must also realize that “distortion” describes a wide variety of
aberrations and alterations, ranging from simple abbreviation and summary to
confabulation and outright falsification.[11] Strictly speaking, the
concept of an “accurate synopsis” is oxymoronic and yet the practice of
providing one another with “accurate” synopses remains an essential requirement
of personal and professional communication, allowing for legal testimony,
medical status updates, personal accident reports, news articles, plot
summaries, and even basic directions. Human memory distorts the true past in all
of these cases, but many of these distortions do not significantly inhibit
critical thinkers from discerning details and aspects of truth in a given recollection
(or extemporaneous narration).[12] In fact, some recalled
details can be extremely informative, even without a fully reconstructed
context, as the following case illustrates profoundly. When professor of
psychology Christine Blasey Ford was called before the U.S. Senate in 2018, she
testified that certain details of her assault (some thirty years prior)
remained “indelible in the hippocampus” while “other details kind of drift.”[13] As reported, Ford’s
memory appears to evidence both fragmentation (bits and pieces) and distortion
(the special prominence of “laughter” is effectively caricature), and yet rational
observers widely declared that her testimony rang strongly of truth rather than
falsehood.[14]
It is within this understanding of memory,
with a balanced appreciation of both its limitations and strengths, that I have
conducted the research which I present March 3 (5:30-6:45p), on “Causality,
Location, and Disruption as Accommodations for Remembering Sequence.”
Notes
[1] Although
psychological discourse uses these two words together on occasion, the more
common categorical labels are “reconstructive memory” (e.g., Baddeley, Eysenck,
& Anderson 2009), or “constructive memory” (e.g., McClelland 1995). For my
purposes, I hope that “constructive” will evoke similar concepts already
familiar to scholars in the humanities, especially scholars for whom “reconstruction”
tends to imply critical judgment without autonomous creativity (whereas mnemonic
reconstruction may employ both). I also prefer “remembering” as a verb because
it centers the key notion that memory is a dynamic process.
[2]
Helpful surveys of the psychological literature and research history appear in
Waggoner (2017a, 66-73), Ost & Costall (2002), and Schacter (1995, 8-9). In
defense of Bartlett’s method with regard to “the non-ergodic character of
psychological phenomena,” see Jaan Valsiner’s Foreword in Wagoner (2017a).
[3]
Neisser (1967) also applies the paleontologist analogy to visual perception
(90, 92) and recognition (107, 109).
[4]
Baddeley, Eysenck, & Anderson (2009, 153; cf. 95, 180-1).
[5]
The classic study is Schacter (1995); see also Schacter, Addis, and Buckley
(2007) and Schacter (2011).
[6]
See Ost & Costall (2002): 248ff and Wagoner (2017a, 72-5).
[7]
Unpublished paper, cited by Ost & Costall (2002, 243) and Wagoner (2017a,
72). See also Bartlett (1932, 93-4).
[8] For
a promising (albeit indirect and partial) response, see Thakral, Barberio, Devitt,
& Schacter (2022).
[9]
Bartlett (294-296) discusses Maurice Halbwachs (1925), who pointed out that acts
of remembering are influenced by present situations; cf. Wagoner (2017a, 118-9).
For more on Halbwachs’s project, see LeDonne (2008, 41-50).
[10] That
is, as opposed to lamenting unrealized ideals; see Wagoner (2017a, 75-77); see
also LeDonne (2008, 50-64).
[11]
See, e.g., Schudson (1995), Moscovitch (1995), and Bartlett (1932, 63-94).
[12] I
would here cite historical theorists on methodology, but those references would
require an additional paper.
[13]
“’Indelible in the Hippocampus is the Laughter.’ The Science Behind Christine
Blasey Ford’s Testimony,” Time, September 27, 2018.
[14] I
myself remember a moment when Ford’s assigned questioner honed in on a precise
date for the alleged incident, which prompted a certain South Carolinian to throw
a tantrum, after which the questioner had gone.
References
Baddeley, Alan, Michael W. Eysenck, & Michael C. Anderson. 2009. Memory. East Sussex: Psychology Press.
Bartlett, F. C. 1932. Remembering. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Friedman, William J. 1993. Memory for the Time of Past Events. Psychological Bulletin 113(1), 44–66.
Halbwachs, Maurice. 1925. On Collective Memory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Kahana, Michael. 2012. Foundations of Human Memory. Oxford: Oxford, University Press.
LeDonne, Anthony. 2008. The Historiographical Jesus. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press.
McClelland, James L. 1995. Constructive Memory and Memory Distortion: A Parallel-Distributed Processing Approach. In Memory Distortion: How Minds, Brains, and Societies Reconstruct the Past, ed. Daniel L. Schacter, 69-90. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
Moscovitch, Morris. 1995. Confabulation. In Memory Distortion: How Minds, Brains, and Societies Reconstruct the Past, ed. Daniel L. Schacter, 226-51. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
Neisser, Ulrich. 1967. Cognitive Psychology. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.
Ost, James & Costall, Alan. 2002. Misremembering Bartlett: A Study in Serial Reproduction. British Journal of Psychology, 93, 243-55.
Schacter, Daniel L. 1995. “Memory Distortion: History and Current Status. In Memory Distortion: How Minds, Brains, and Societies Reconstruct the Past, ed. Daniel L. Schacter, 1-46. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
Schacter, Daniel L. 1996. Searching for Memory. New York: Basic Books.
Schacter, Daniel L. & Donna Rose Addis. 2007. The Cognitive Neuroscience of Constructive Memory: Remembering the Past and Imagining the Future. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 362, 773-86.
Schacter, Daniel L., Scott A. Guerin, and Peggy L. St. Jacques. “Memory Distortion: an adaptive perspective.” Trends in Cognitive Science. Cambridge, Massachusetts. October 2011. Vol. 15, No. 10.
Schudson, Michael. 1995. Dynamics of Distortion in Collective Memory. In Memory Distortion: How Minds, Brains, and Societies Reconstruct the Past, ed. Daniel L. Schacter, 346-64. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
Thakral, Preston P., Natasha M. Barberio, Aleea L. Devitt, & Daniel L. Schacter. 2022. Constructive Episodic Retrieval Processes Underlying Memory Distortion Contribute to Creative Thinking and Everyday Problem Solving. Memory & Cognition.
Valsiner, Jaan. 2017. Foreword: Active and Developing Patterns: Remembering into the Future. In Brady Wagoner. The Constructive Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wagoner, Brady. 2017a The Constructive Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wagoner, Brady. 2017b What Makes Memory Constructive? Culture & Psychology. 23(2),
