They make many good points relevant to this subject, and I'm not going to quote them on every one of those points. I'll just give some representative examples.
Before I quote some examples, however, I do want to summarize some of their other points. We should distinguish between memory studies done in a setting such as the twenty-first-century United States and what would be likely to have occurred in an oral culture like first-century Israel, in which much more emphasis was placed on developing memory skills, people weren't relying on modern technology to keep records for them, etc. Modern skeptics shouldn't assume that their own poorly developed memory skills reflect the memory skills of a first-century Jew. We also need to keep in mind that oral cultures are capable of distinguishing between different types of information and differing degrees of importance associated with those types of information, just as we're capable of making such distinctions. The fact that a culture doesn't have much concern for accurately preserving information about one subject doesn't prove that they would be equally unconcerned about accuracy on all other subjects. And the ability of a modern court witness to remember some details of the physical appearance of a crime suspect he saw unexpectedly for a few seconds isn't comparable to the ability of an ancient Jew to remember something he heard Jesus teach many times with a prior expectation of hearing Jesus teach. Eddy and Boyd discuss these and other significant qualifications in some depth. This post isn't meant to be a substitute for reading their book.
But here's some of what they write on the subject:
According to legendary-Jesus theorists, these early oral Jesus traditions were only loosely (or, in the case of Christ myth advocates, not at all) rooted in actual remembrances of Jesus and were very susceptible to legendary accretion. Word of mouth is not a trustworthy means of disseminating information in the best of circumstances, it is argued. And it is even less reliable when one is dealing with "naive and mythologically minded" people like the early Christians. Thus it is reasonable to conclude that much (if not all) of the Jesus material we find in the Gospels is rooted in the imagination of early Christians, as opposed to historical reality....
Early form critics such as Bultmann took it for granted that folk traditions consisted almost exclusively of short vignettes. How could longer narratives, to say nothing of epics, be remembered and transmitted intact orally? While this view is still prevalent today among many in New Testament circles, a significant number of folklorists, anthropologists, and ethnographers over the last several decades have justifiably abandoned it. The reason for this reversal is that empirical evidence has shown it to be demonstrably wrong. A large number of fieldwork studies have "brought to light numerous long oral epics in the living traditions of Central Asia, India, Africa, and Oceania, for example." Hence, as the famed Finish folklorist Lauri Honko recently noted: "The existence of genuine long oral epics can no longer be denied." In fact, amazingly, scholars have documented oral narratives whose performance lasted up to twenty-five hours carried out over several days....
Honko himself has witnessed one oral narrative whose performance ran seven days...
[Joanna] Dewey has pointed out that an oral narrative the length of Mark would take at most two hours to perform, which, as we have seen, is relatively short by the oral-narrative standards. What is more, as oral narratives go, Mark's narrative would be relatively easy to remember and transmit. "Good storytellers could easily learn the story of Mark from hearing it read or hearing it told," she writes. And from this she concludes that, "given the nature of oral memory and tradition...it is likely that the original written text of Mark was dependent on a pre-existing connected oral narrative, a narrative that already was being performed in various versions by various people."...
In order to understand and assess accurately the new forms of memoric skepticism [skepticism about the reliability of human memory] operative today, one must understand the intellectual influences and contexts that have given birth to them. The "crisis of memory" that began to be widely announced in the 1980s and 1990s can trace its seeds to the general collapse of confidence in human knowledge that followed the debacle of World War I. It is no coincidence that the same time period that gave rise to memoric skepticism in its individual (F.C. Bartlett) and collective/social (Maurice Halbwachs) forms also fostered the rise of similar skepticism in historiography (Carl Becker), sociology of knowledge (Karl Mannheim), and New Testament studies (Rudolf Bultmann). As [Barry] Schwartz notes: "These men appealed so greatly to the West because their views resonated so closely with the cynicism of the post World War I worldview and ethos: 'the world is not what it seems.'"
The interdisciplinary spirit of skepticism included a strong suspicion - and commitment to the unmasking - of the always-already-present ideological/political motives behind claims of historical "truth." Over the decades, this trend has been fueled by such intellectual forces as Marxist historical analysis, poststructuralist deconstruction, Foucault's "genealogical" historiography, and a variety of other postmodern intellectual impulses and intuitions. With each of these forces comes a bias for the new, the contingent, the aporia, and a bias against the traditional, the connected, and the stable....
Memorization as an educational technique was ubiquitous in the ancient world. As any good oral teacher would do, Jesus himself clearly taught in ways that facilitated remembrance of his words....
In sum, the ancient, orally oriented world - unlike the Western, post-Gutenberg, (post)modern world within which contemporary memory experiments are conducted - offered a context within which memory was valued and memorization and its techniques were intentionally studied and practiced....
Schwartz goes on to express his concern about the effect of hyperskeptical social memory theory upon Gospel studies in no uncertain terms: "Theories that dismiss the Gospels as screens on which church leaders projected their agendas are instances of intellectual dandyism...but since they resonate with the taste of a cynical age, their burden of proof is light."...
Even Daniel Schacter, a memory theorist known for his work on the distorting effects of memory, can offer a generally positive assessment of the matter: "On balance...our memory systems do a remarkably good job of preserving the general contours of our pasts and of recording correctly many of the important things that have happened to us" (pp. 237, 252-253, n. 58 on p. 253, 256, 278, 283-284, n. 54 on p. 284)
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