Do People in Oral Cultures Have Better Memories?

[00:00:01] Do people in oral cultures have better memories? [00:00:05] Written by Bart Ehrman, read by Ken Toutch? [00:00:10] Do people in oral cultures remember things better and work hard to memorize what they learn? The other night I was hanging out with a friend and she started talking, in a context unrelated to the New Testament, about how oral literate cultures always worked so hard to preserve their communal memories of the past by passing along traditions that would not change, since, of course, they had no way to preserve them in writing. I simply nodded my head and let her get on with it. I was tempted to tell her that I had written a book about memory, how it works and sometimes doesn't, how oral cultures preserve traditions and sometimes not so well, etc. I decided not to mention it to her. Didn't matter in the context my book Jesus before the Gospels is, in my personal opinion, the best book I've written that almost no one has read. I gave it a bad title, plus my publisher wasn't that interested in it and didn't do much to push it. The COVID was awful, but I still liked it and still do. Hey, books are kinda like your children. You love each and every one of them. Anyway, after our talk, as I was thinking through some of the things I discussed in the book, I wondered if I had ever dealt with the topic of oral culture on the blog. I looked, and yes, indeed, it's obviously come up sometimes, but I've never given it the kind of sustained attention it deserves, given its importance for understanding the gospels of the New Testament. So I've decided to excerpt from bits from the book over the course of a few posts. The book itself delves into lots of other interesting stuff as well, including what we know about eyewitness testimony from both psychological and legal perspectives psychological studies of memory, which I find unusually fascinating sociological views of collective memories involving memories of social groups, and, at significant length, how all these kinds of analyses relate to what we can say about the gospels and Jesus. But for here, I'll excerpt the bits dealing with what we actually know about oral cultures. It's not what I used to think we know. [00:02:21] Are memories stronger in oral cultures? I have been told many times, not by memory experts, but usually by undergraduates who have heard this from someone else, that the reason most of our memories are not very good is because, unlike ancient people, we live in a literary culture. In oral cultures, people's memories were stronger because they had to be. They had no written texts to rely on. This question is obviously of enormous significance for our study of the traditions of Jesus that were in circulation by word of mouth, over the 40 to 65 years between his death and our first surviving records of his life. If people living in oral cultures, by the very nature of things, or because of the special efforts they made, preserved their memories accurately from one telling to the next, from one person to the next, from one generation to the next, then the fact that our gospels were written decades after the events they narrate should have no real bearing on the question of whether some or many of these traditions had been altered, amplified or even invented during those intervening years. According to this view, the memories of Jesus among non literate people would have been faithfully preserved so that we can trust that what was later written about Jesus'life was what really happened. [00:03:44] In evaluating the case, it is important to concede that extensive literacy does make some kinds of memory less important. It is certainly true that if we can write down and look things up, we no longer need to memorize as much. These days, we do not even need to write most information down. We can just google what we need. As a result, our minds are freed up to do much deeper and sophisticated work. Thus, it is no accident that advances in science, technology, engineering and math have always happened in highly literate cultures. The question is whether that also means that people in nonliterary cultures have better memories, since, after all, they have to remember more in order to get by. Those who think so argue that in oral cultures, people tend to memorize things almost automatically. For that reason, they can pass down traditions by word of mouth without changing a thing from one person to the next, year after year, decade after decade, century after century. Jesus and his disciples, according to this argument, would have preserved their traditions accurately because that's simply what happens in oral cultures. [00:04:55] Is this true? [00:04:57] The first thing to stress is that it is certainly not true for biological reasons. The neuronal structures in the brain of someone living 2000 years ago in Galilee were not much different from those of someone living in New Jersey today. As cultural anthropologist Jan van Sina puts the matter, so far there exists no proof that there is any inborn difference in cerebral faculties between the various races of man. [00:05:25] The consensus among both anthropologists and cultural historians, in fact, is quite the opposite of what we might assume about oral cultures. As orality expert David Henegie indicates, people in oral cultures generally forget about as much as other people. And because that is the case, people in such settings are at extreme disadvantage in comparison with those of us in literary cultures. If they forget something, they lose it forever. For us, it is usually not lost, since we can look it up. Moreover, in writing cultures it is possible to see if something is remembered accurately. We can check an oral report or a written account against a written record. Subsequent written sources, for example, multiple editions of a textbook, can, in theory, be compared with each other to see what has been changed over time. Not so in oral cultures. As Hennegie points out, oral tradition destroys at least parts of earlier versions as it replaces them. The thesis of this chapter is that traditions in oral cultures do not remain the same over time, but change rapidly, repeatedly, and extensively. That is especially important when considering the traditions around Jesus in circulation in the early church among people who were, by and large, illiterate during the first 40 to 65 years of Christianity, before our gospels were written. To set the stage for a consideration of the oral habits of early christians in particular, we need to consider what we know about oral cultures in general and the ways they tend to preserve their traditions. For that, we may turn to some fascinating scholarship of the early 20th century that addressed issues of orality and literacy. [00:07:17] I'll pick up here in the next post.