Memory and the Reliability of the Gospels
What can psychological research teach us?
A key argument for the reliability of the Gospels is that they are based on eyewitness accounts. But Bart Ehrman, an agnostic New Testament scholar, points out:
“The Gospels are ultimately based on memory… At every stage of this ‘remembering’ experience (mainly: remembering what someone else said), people are trying to recall something that happened to them (or that they heard). Memories are faulty. That’s a problem when dealing with oral traditions in circulation for decades.”
Ehrman uses psychological research to argue the Gospels are composed of distorted and unreliable memories.
For example, his book, Jesus Before the Gospels, cites a study by Neisser and Harsch (1992) looking at university students’ memory of the Challenger disaster.
The students’ later responses are often confused. Many can’t even remember filling in a questionnaire at the time of the disaster. Ehrman concludes psychologists have shown we cannot trust our memories.
Avoiding cherry-picking
However, it is misleading to consider an individual study in isolation. A later study by Neisser (1996) helps identify factors affecting memory.
He found Californian students’ had near-perfect accuracy (96–99%) remembering an earthquake in Loma Prieta (California) 18 months later. But, Atlanta students had a less accurate recall (55% accuracy) for the same earthquake.
These findings have been replicated multiple times, for example by a study on the memory of the Marmara earthquake in Turkey. Er (2003) included a bigger (665 people) and more representative (i.e. not just students) sample of people.
Six months later, people who lived in Marmara had near-perfect accuracy in their memories of the earthquake. Yet people who lived in another city (Mersin) had much less accurate memories of the events.
Can we trust memories of events happening 30–40 years ago?
Another key argument from Ehrman is that we cannot trust memories of events that happened a long time ago:
“Mike [Licona] wants to argue that it is not at all implausible that writers living 40–65 years after the fact might well remember in detail things that happened in Jesus’s life…I’m afraid this is one area where Mike simply does not know the scholarship… We may remember something as clearly as the day we experienced it. But the memories are often wrong.”
But Ehrman’s argument has many limitations. Most importantly, he backs this claim up by citing the Neisser and Harsch study we assessed above.
A study by Berntsen and Thomsen (2005) is more relevant for assessing long term accuracy. They assessed memory of the invasion and liberation of Denmark during World War II between 63–68 years after the events.
They compared people living through these events with members of the psychology faculty who were not yet alive then. The contrast between groups was compelling:
- Older Danes witnessing the invasion and liberation remembered these events with surprising accuracy. Most correctly recalled the weather on these days. They also remembered accurately whether these events happened on a Sunday or workday.
- Recall was lower for more specific details. People were less accurate at recalling the actual day of the invasion and liberation. They also had less accurate recall of the precise day the invading Germans required households to draw their curtains. But older adults’ memory of these specific details were still more accurate than those who did not experience the events.
- False memory (giving the wrong answer to questions about these wartime events) was very rare for most questions.
- Those connected to the Danish Resistance Movement had more accurate memories than those who were not connected to the Resistance Movement. Further highlighting the importance of being closely connected to events.
Do people often mistake events they imagined from what happened?
Ehrman, in his debate with New Testament historian Richard Bauckham, argued that the Gospels contain examples of false memories. He quoted a study to support this claim.
Seamon et al (2006) took 40 undergraduate students on a campus tour. Half of the time, they were asked to perform familiar (e.g. check the Pepsi machine for change) or bizarre (e.g. propose marriage to a Pepsi machine) actions. The other half were asked to imagine performing these actions. Ehrman summarizes:
“It turns out that 2 weeks later after they interview the students, when they ask students ‘do you remember doing this? Do you remember going down on one knee and proposing marriage to the Pepsi machine?’ If the student had simply imagined doing it two weeks later they remember actually doing it. (from around 19:00 on the video).’’
It was rare for participants to believe imagined events happened
When looking up the study I was expecting to see very high rates of “false memory.” Yet, the data shows the opposite.
On average, participants believed they had performed imagined events for 7–12% of actions. So, on average, they correctly remembered imagining events 88–93% of the time.
Ehrman’s summary does not reflect what the study found. We should be aware that we sometimes can confuse imagined actions with what happened. What the study doesn’t show is this is a common problem.
The data shows a high level of accuracy for recalling events
People were asked to recall from 72 actions/imaginations over 2 different sessions:
- On average 78–91% correctly recalled performing a ‘bizarre’ action — this was a little lower for ‘familiar’ actions (on average 64–77%)
- On average only 2% claimed to have performed an action that they had neither performed nor imagined
Psychological research and the reliability of the Gospels
Bart Ehrman’s work highlights the potential for psychological research to inform how the Gospels were put together. He is right to point out that research shows the limits of human memory. But the data is more nuanced.
A traditional criticism of the Gospels is that they were written by Jesus’ followers — so less reliable than “neutral” sources. But psychological research shows that if we want accurate recall of events we should ask those closely involved.
Ehrman is right that we often make mistakes when trying to remember things that happened long ago.
But research shows that not all memories are equally unreliable. Key events — like living through World War II — are accurately recalled over 60 years later. It’s reasonable to expect similar levels of accuracy for a life-defining event like witnessing Jesus’ resurrection.
