One nephew of mine asked about the relationship of memory
and history. Because this has been an important topic in biblical studies since
the turn of the century, I’d like to do a post on the subject.
1. Memory is recalling experiences from the past. These may
be either your personal experiences or else the experiences you’ve heard or
read from other people, including formal education. The recalling may be random
or organized and may involve merely recalling or both recalling and retelling.
2. History is a subset of memory. History is the selective
retelling and/or recording of memories (recalling of experiences from the past)
that have significance. These are told by a speaker or writer who has a
particular point of view which will somehow shape and color the retelling. The
experiences may or may not have happened as the history teller says. The
retelling involves oral history in pre-literate societies and includes
documents in literate societies. When history tellers believe that there is
such a thing as truth, they typically strive to be “objective” and
evidence-based. However, point of view and selection of which evidence to tell
remain.
3. Historians of all stripes now accept this as a truism:
“All history – meaning all the historians write, all historiography – is an
inextricable combination of fact and interpretation, the empirically observable
and the intuited or constructed meaning.” — Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as
Eyewitness Testimony (Grand Rapids,
William B. Eerdmans, 2006) PDF version p 12.
4. History can be told through various forms, including
poetry. For instance, as a child in Midwestern United States, I learned this school
age rhyme:
In fourteen hundred ninety-two
Columbus sailed the ocean blue.
He had three ships and left from Spain;
He sailed through sunshine, wind
and rain.
He sailed by night; he sailed by
day;
He used the stars to find his way.
5. Families, ethnic groups, societies, and nations typically have histories that serve as a self-identity for the group. In the U.S. we have
“the American story.” Religions and cultures provide an overarching framework by which individuals may view reality. In postmodern theory this framework is called a metanarrative (a grand history or grand story). Postmodernism proposes a grand narrative of the end of all grand narratives in favor of small, local narratives. It thereby has its own metanarrative and, as a philosophy, is self-refuting.
•History and the
Gospel.
Because of my interest in biblical studies, I would to add several
particulars.
6. In an address to the International Congress of Old
Testament Studies meeting in Edinburgh
in 1974, M. H. Goshen-Gottstein of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem did a
survey of academic Bible study from 1500 to 1974 [1]. This is one of his
conclusions (and I paraphrase): Since World War II, in order for Jews (liberal
and conservative), Christians (liberal and conservative), unbelievers and
atheists to have harmony in the academic study of the Bible and in their scholarly
meetings, the various disciplines related to Bible study deal only with
secondary issues rather than the main issue, which is: what is the message of
the Bible?
For Jews, Goshen-Gottstein cites an old midrash which said,
“Since the Holy One, praised be He, foresaw that the nations are going to
translate the Torah and read it in Greek, and they will say ‘We are Israel’ . .
. He said unto them: ‘You maintain that you are my children? . . . Only those
who guard my ‘mysteries’ are my children.’ What is that? The Mishnah.” [2]
In the New Testament Jesus Christ said, “The (Hebrew)
Scriptures . . . testify about me” (John 5:39). Goshen-Gottstein wrote:
It should be borne in mind that no
system of biblical theology can exist in
vacuo. Exegesis cannot be divorced from theology—and vice versa. . . . Franz Delitzsch [spelled out the very truth,
which] Luther had expressed centuries earlier: if the exegete ceases even for
one moment to disregard the presence of Christ in the Old Testament as an
exegete, he ceases being a Christian. [3]
Unbelieving humanists say with the pre-Socratic philosopher, Protagoras,
“Humanity is the measure of all things.” That is, no truth exists except what
individuals or groups deem to be the truth. Atheists adhere to materialism and deny
any possibility of miracles or revelation from God. “The Cosmos is all that is or
was or ever will be.” [4]
[1] M. H. Goshen-Gottstein, “Christianity,
Judaism, and Modern Bible Study,” Supplement
to Vetus Testamentum 28 (1975), pp 69-88.
[2] Ibid., p 75.
[3] Ibid., p 81.
[4] Carl Sagan, “Cosmos: A
Personal Journey” (TV series), 1980, Episode 1.
7. In “Story as History – History as Story; The Gospel
Tradition in the Context of Ancient Oral History” (2000) Samuel Byrskog shows
that Greco-Roman historians – such as Thucydides, Polybius, Josephus, and
Tacitus – believed that true history could be written only while events were
still within living memory, and they valued as their sources the oral reports
of direct experiences of the events by participants. And it was better yet that
the historian was one of those participants. [Bauckham, PDP version p 15]
8. In the New Testament, the four gospels and Acts have the
genre of ancient biography and history. In 2006 Richard Bauckham, New Testament
professor at St. Andrews University in Scotland (now emeritus), came out
with a book, “Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony” (referenced
above.) I now quote from an unpublished lecture of Bauckham’s available on his
website as “Denver.pdf.” The lecture was given after the publication of the
book. Bauckham says:
The first point I want to make is
that the Gospels are not based on what detached observers of the events said,
but on what participants in the events remembered and recounted. One modern
response to that could be to say that it’s very subjective, isn’t it? Wouldn’t
it be much better to hear the evidence of uninvolved observers?
Well, ancient historians certainly
did not think so. What they valued was the testimony of eyewitness participants
in the events, people who could speak of the events, as it were, from the
inside. Moreover, this is what oral historians today are after: they want to
know what it was like for people involved in the events. The detached observer
often doesn’t remember much anyways, while there’s a lot that we simply could
not know about historical events except from insiders.
Such insiders are, of course,
people who were affected by the events. In the case of the events narrated in
the Gospels, for those who told the stories. In the book [Jesus and the
Eyewitnesses] I use as a kind of parallel the modern example of testimony by
survivors of the Holocaust. [Without the testimony of survivors, we wouldn’t
know what it really was like.]
9. Skeptics use ridicule as the tool of choice to defeat
people who dare to defend biblical history as true history. For example, Philip
Davies, Emeritus Professor, University of Sheffield,
England, denies the
historicity of Abraham and the patriarchs, Moses and the Exodus, Israel’s wandering in the wilderness and
conquest of Canaan. He is doubtful about the
existence of David and Solomon. In the article, “Biblical History and Cultural
Memory” (April 2009) http://www.bibleinterp.com/articles/memory.shtml he writes:
For it is still the common popular
view that the Bible relates real events, and this belief is the result of
complacency, laziness, and poor education about the Bible among those for whom
biblical scholarship is alien (this includes a few of my university
colleagues). Nevertheless, among biblical scholars, we should recognize that
the major differences in evaluation of biblical narratives between
“conservatives” and “radical” (or whatever the terms) can nearly always be
identified with the role and importance of the biblical story as part of
contemporary Jewish or Christian cultural memory.
That is to say, only skeptics know what the real events of
history are. All the rest of us are either complacent, lazy, and poorly
educated or else we are scholars driven by religious ideology. In contrast,
educated skeptics are, in the field of history, as pure as the driven snow and
their thinking is free from ideology.
The first step of the Gospel is humility and that first step
is one step that no skeptic will take. Jesus said (Luke 18:10-14):
Two men went up into the temple to
pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee, standing by
himself, prayed thus: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other men,
extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice
a week; I give tithes of all that I get.’ But the tax collector, standing far
off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying,
‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’ I tell you, this man went down to his house
justified, rather than the other. For everyone who exalts himself will be
humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted.
The skeptic walks the earth and proclaims, “I am so very
thankful that I’m engaged, diligent, and well educated, and that I’m not like
those Christian scholars over there on and off campus: humble and praying,
‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner.'"
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