From the chapter ‘You Can’t Take the Bible Literally,’ Timothy Keller shares. . . .
“Richard Bauckham has compiled a great deal of research by psychologists on the marks of recollective memory. He looks at the marks of eyewitness accounts of events and how they differ form speculative or fictional accounts, or of composite historical reconstructions. Recollective memory is selective—it fixes on unique and consequential events, it retains irrelevant detail (as Lewis observes), it takes the limited vantage point of a participant rather than that of an omniscient narrator, and it shows signs of frequent reversal.17 Bauckham then shows these same marks in gospel narratives. Vivid and important details can stay with you for decades if frequently rehearsed and/or retold. Factor in the fact that disciples in the ancient world were expected to memorize masters’ teachings, that many of Jesus’s statements were presented in a form that was actually designed for memorization, and you have every reason to trust the accounts.
Bauckham also looks to the anthropology for evidence that the gospel writers did not feel free to embellish or fabricate words or events in the life of Jesus. Critical scholars from earlier in the twentieth century assumed the early Christians would have used a relatively fluid process for transmitting popular folktales and that they would have felt free to change the tales from the past in order to correspond to their present realities and situation. Bauckham, however, cites Jan Vansina’s study of oral traditions in primitive African cultures, in which fictional legends and historical accounts are clearly distinguished from each other and much greater care is taken to preserve historical accounts accurately. This finding undermines a hundred years of critical gospel scholarship.
Gospel scholars, from the form critics onward, [believed] that the early Christians in the transmission of Jesus traditions would not have made any distinction between the past time of the history of Jesus and their own present because oral societies do not make such distinctions. This is untrue.18
As I write today, there seem to be a flood of what David Van Biema of Time calls “Biblical revisionism” following the footsteps of Dan Brown and The Da Vinci Code. He refers to the recent claim that Jesus’s tomb has been found, and that he married Mary Magdalene and had children. Other scholars have published books claiming similar new insights from the Gnostic gospels. More seem sure to come. Van Biema quotes Publishers Weekly senior editor Lynn Garret. “But they didn’t make the best sellers lists and the authors didn’t go on The Daily Show.”19
All these revisionist histories completely ignore the growing body of careful scholarship that shows there were a very large number of eye witnesses to Jesus’s live who lived on for years. As British scholar Vincent Taylor famously remarked, “if the skeptics about the Bible are right, “The disciples must have been translated into heaven immediately after the resurrection.”20 That is the only way that legendary elements could have come into the story of Jesus by the time the gospels were written, but that did not happen. So, ironically, as the popular media is promoting accounts of Jesus’s life based on the highly skeptical Biblical scholarship that rose a century ago, the actual foundations of that scholarship are eroding fast.21 ~Timothy Keller, The Reason for God (Penguin Books, 2008,2018), 111-13
To be continued. . .
(Posts with a preamble asterisk are for a more general audience and not specific to teachings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.)
