Thursday, November 16, 2023
Why trust the early Christians' memories?
Skeptics (of Christianity and skeptics in other contexts) often try to cast doubt on the reliability of human memory. Michael Jones (InspiringPhilosophy) has posted a couple of videos that make some good points about the reliability of the earliest Christians' memories of Jesus and their memories more broadly (here and here). Other points could be made as well. For example, I've written about the many documents relevant to Jesus' life that predated the gospels, meaning that there was more than memories and oral tradition to go by at the time when the gospels were composed. See here regarding early documents related to Jesus' childhood and here on early documents related to his resurrection, for instance. And see here regarding the evidence that the earliest Christians thought the apostles were given the ability to produce scripture, meaning that more than ordinary memory was involved (e.g., John 14:26).
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I've written about the many documents relevant to Jesus' life that predated the gospels, meaning that there was more than memories and oral tradition to go by at the time when the gospels were composed.
ReplyDeleteBut then you have the problem when Rome can claim to "remember" a profound event that was lacking in actual testimony for hundreds of years.
Before Mary's bodily Assumption into heaven was defined, all theological faculties in the world were consulted for their opinion. Our teachers' answer was emphatically negative... Altaner, the patrologist from Wurzburg¦had proven in a scientifically persuasive manner that the doctrine of Mary's bodily Assumption into heaven was unknown before the 5C; this doctrine, therefore, he argued, could not belong to the "apostolic tradition. And this was his conclusion, which my teachers at Munich shared.
But...subsequent "remembering" (cf. Jn 16:4, for instance) can come to recognize what it has not caught sight of previously ["caught sight of?" Because there was nothing to see in the earliest period where it should have been, before a fable developed] .." (Joseph Ratzinger, Milestones (Ignatius, n.d.), pp. 58-59).