Did the Early Christians Forget Jesus?
Scholars of memory – from such fields as psychology, sociology, and anthropology – have long known that we not only forget things (all the time), we also misremember them or even invent them in our heads. How does that apply to the memories of Jesus among his early followers before the Gospels were written? Did the eyewitnesses to Jesus’ life sometimes forget what he said and did? Did they misremember? And when they told stories about him, did the people who heard the stories – and the people to whom those people told the stories, and the people to whom those other people told the stories – alter the memories? Did they sometimes, or often, invent false memories?