The generative force of memory: early Christian traditions as processes of remembering

Biblical Theology Bulletin, Spring, 2006 by Werner H. Kelber

This article seeks to carry forward recent work on social or cultural memory in relation to the early Christian tradition. It develops the concept of a memorially empowered tradition which operates less as transmission of traditions, and more precisely as a functioning social memory, e.g., as a dynamic driven by the desire to keep Jesus' words alive by making them communicate to the present. Memory understood as a continual process of commemorating activities, intent on remembering the past while simultaneously addressing social identity in the present, is seen as the grand motivating force of tradition.

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The virtual absence of memory both as an analytical tool and as hermeneutical category in Jesus and gospel research has rightly been lamented by Kirk and Thatcher (25-42), and their insightful analysis of this deplorable state in biblical studies merits our close attention (esp. 29-39). I have in two previous articles on the role of memory emanating from Jesus and flowing into the Gospels likewise reflected on this inattention to memory and observed that in "most quarters of the scholarly guild [of New Testament studies] mnemosyne simply is not a relevant issue" (2002, esp. 58; 2005). For the longest part of its history, modernity's scholarship of the Bible has managed--with one notable exception--to operate without a developed concept of memory.

We need not revisit here internal developments in biblical scholarship that have contributed to the demise. Important as these analyses are in illuminating the virtual disappearance of memory from the horizon of biblical and especially New Testament scholarship, we should not lose sight of dimensions that may help us comprehend the present situation in the larger context of the history of memory. For memory has a deep history, and we need to understand its demise in relation to this history. Widely viewed as the centralizing authority of civilized life in ancient and to some degree in medieval culture, memory was traditionally assigned a principal role in rhetoric, until it was gradually deprived of its primary status, taking on auxiliary functions in the ethical, metaphysical and eventually historical disciplines. In medieval culture, memory became integrated into prayer, meditation and moral philosophy, until early modernism proceeded to absorb it into dialectic and logic. Divested of its honorable position of being the birthplace of civilization, memory was thus denigrated to a peripheral province. In these broader historical terms, modern biblical scholarship and its prevalent disregard of memory reveals a historical indebtedness to a distinct intellectual legacy of the gradual marginalization of memory. Biblical studies, presenting itself as historical criticism, took on the nimbus of a science and actively participated in the so-called documentary revolution for which tradition and texts, including biblical texts, were increasingly intelligible without recourse to memory.

The seriousness of the dilemma appears all the more acute if we take cognizance of an exceptional revival of memory work that has taken place internationally in the humanities and social sciences. Roughly since the 1960s, the work of memory has been carried forward with almost obsessive intensity in a great variety of fields such as anthropology, political science, literary criticism, medieval studies, cultural studies, sociology, ethnic studies, philosophy, history, and other disciplines, elevating memory to virtually programmatic significance and generating a diverse body of theories and a plethora of studies on memorializing/commemorative/remembering activities in human culture. In fact, with such an abundance of specialized and interdisciplinary memory studies are the humanities and social sciences now confronted that we risk losing an integral vision of the topic. Biblical studies, it bears repeating, appear to have been largely unaffected by these developments.

In a number of ways, New Testament and memory studies would seem to represent mutually attractive and supportive disciplinary approaches. On the one hand, insofar as Jesus research and gospel studies deal with both oral and scribal materials that are in terms of composition, performance and reception deeply rooted in oral/rhetorical cultural contexts, it is difficult to see how one can grasp the early tradition without a developed concept of memory. Jesus research and gospel studies cry out for an integration of memory studies. On the other hand, memory studies raise a host of hermeneutical, philosophical, social, and linguistic and media issues, many of which would seem to be of fundamental concern to biblical studies. Among those issues one might mention the enigma of the present (or representation) of the absent past, the tradition of the ars memoriae, the entanglements of memory and imagination, the role of image (and imaging) in the process of remembering, the problem of forgetting, the phenomenon of multiple commemorative activities, the cultivation of inwardness from Augustine to Husserl, the notion of a socially shared memory introduced in modernity by Halbwachs, crises and traumas of memories, the representation of the historical personality as an Erinnerungsfigur, and others. A (re)introduction of (some) of these memorial features may prove helpful in casting fresh light on the workings of the Jesus tradition, illuminating them as processes of remembering.