Reviewed by Paul Clark March 2025
This is perhaps the most ground-breaking of Bart Ehrman’s books. It is about the gospels as records of how early Christian communities remembered Jesus. What is ground-breaking is that Ehrman doesn’t just rely on his knowledge of the Bible and history, as do most scholars in the field. He has also delved deep into what psychology, anthropology and sociology teach us about memory, both how individuals process memories and how communities hold onto the memories that are important to them.
The book is slow to take off, but it is definitely worth persevering because it gives the reader a patient, methodical, brick-by-brick demolition of the idea that the gospels provide an accurate record of the life and works of Jesus.
To start with individual memory, the most pertinent finding of psychological research is that our brains don’t store something like video recordings of events, which we can retrieve and replay when we remember. Rather, our memories store just a few snippets of information. When we remember an event, we use these snippets, plus guesswork that is influenced by other memories and our present situation, to reconstruct the event we are remembering. Next time we remember that event, this reconstruction will be used to help us re-reconstruct, so it is possible that any error in one reconstruction will be amplified in subsequent reconstructions.
Psychologists have long known just how unreliable eyewitness testimony can be, and Ehrman cites research that shows how suggestible people are and how easily false memories can be induced.
The book looks at when the gospels were written. Most scholars accept that Mark, our earliest gospel, was written around 40 years after the crucifixion. Matthew and Luke were composed at least 15 years after that (possibly much later in the case of Luke), and John dates from 60-80 years after the death of Jesus.
The great majority of scholars also accept that we don’t know who wrote any of the gospels, but it is pretty certain that none of the authors were eyewitnesses to the events they describe. Jesus and his immediate followers were Aramaic-speaking peasants hailing from a community where some 97% of the population were illiterate, but all four gospels were written decades later by highly literate speakers of Greek. Ehrman considers it very unlikely that any of the authors had even met an eyewitness.
The gospel authors certainly had some written sources: Matthew and Luke used Mark extensively and may have used a now lost source that scholars have named Q. John may or may not have used one or more of the other gospels. However, it is widely agreed that their ultimate sources were decades-old oral tales of the sayings and deeds of Jesus.
Conservative Christians insist that in cultures where the great majority were illiterate, people had better memories than we do now. They had to, since their memories were the only records they had. It is certainly the case that the Greco-Roman world developed some brilliant techniques for remembering, many of which are still used by memory champions today.
However, Ehrman cites research comparing the memories of people in oral cultures with those in literate cultures. And the result is clear: there is no difference. People in oral cultures are just as forgetful as we are.
But, say Christian apologists, pre-literate communities are careful to keep their “history-memory” accurate and unchanging from generation to generation. Unfortunately for them, Ehrman shows that this too is wrong. Anthropologists have studied the way people in oral cultures preserve their traditional stories and found that these stories change with every retelling. They can change quite dramatically over time, since there is no written original against which the latest versions can be checked.
Ehrman doesn’t restrict himself to the four canonical gospels. We have many others, the apocryphal gospels, which haven’t been accepted by the church but which have nonetheless influenced Christian tradition (Mary riding on a donkey, for example, comes from the Proto-Gospel of James).
What Ehrman says is that every gospel, canonical or apocryphal, represents the “history-memory” of a community of Christians. Their ultimate oral source isn’t unfiltered eyewitness testimony. It is more likely to be someone whose “cousin had a neighbour who had once talked with a business associate whose mother had, just fifteen years earlier, spoken with an eyewitness who told her some things about Jesus.”
He says that just as our personal memories of the past are filtered through our present circumstances, so the “history-memory” of these Christian communities was filtered through their circumstances at the time.
Thus a major theme of Mark is the hidden Messiah: Mark’s Jesus wanted his true identity kept secret. The author of Mark, after all, was wrestling with the fact that in Jewish tradition, the Messiah wasn’t supposed to be killed. He was supposed to sweep aside Israel’s enemies and establish himself (or God) as king of the world. For Mark, Jesus had to hide the fact that he was the Messiah so that he could suffer and die for us. Only after that could he return in clouds of glory and defeat Israel’s enemies as per Jewish tradition. (Mark’s author believed this return was imminent.)
Matthew’s Jesus is very Jewish indeed. The community that gave birth to this gospel was fighting a rearguard action to insist on the Jewishness of Christianity. The author of Matthew wanted gentile converts to submit to Jewish law, including circumcision and Jewish dietary requirements.
Luke’s community was dealing with the fact that Jesus still hadn’t returned, as Christians had been imminently expecting for decades. Their gospel lays great stress on the inclusivity of Jesus, his sympathy for the poor and marginalised.
For the author of John, “the Jews” were very much the enemy. His Christian sect had been excluded from the Jewish community, and his Jesus, far from keeping his true identity secret like Mark’s, seems to have spoken of little else.
Ehrman ends his book with a plea to unbelievers. Though he has conclusively demonstrated that the gospels aren’t in any sense an accurate record of Jesus’ life and sayings, this doesn’t mean they are worthless. They are superb literature. They are also a goldmine for historians, both those seeking to understand early Christianity and those attempting to glean what we can know about the historical Jesus.
They are also the “history-memory” that has shaped Christianity and, through it, for better and for worse, the world we live in today.
If you have enjoyed this blog post, you may enjoy my novel The Omega Course, which uses fiction to explore the origins of Christianity and the Bible. Click here for details.
Paul Clark 