April DeConick has conjectured about the most important elements of the future of biblical studies as an academic discipline. She even made me wonder if I should try to find some way of starting to learn Coptic while I’m still a masters student. Not sure how I would achieve that, though. Another thing that caught my eye was that she highlighted “Social Memory theories.” This is what she says:
The third on my list is Social Memory theories. Again, we as biblical scholars are about fifty years behind in our knowledge base. I don’t know why this is, since Social Memory theories have been picked up by historians long before we biblical scholars even heard of the existence of these theories. These theories have enormous implications for biblical studies because they explain how and why traditions form and shift, are preserved and erased. They help us with historiographical problems, really proving in my opinion that history recounted is never the history that happened but only the history remembered by people for reasons contemporary to the community remembering. Think about what this means for early Christian writings.
DeConick believes that Social Memory theory helps to show that the documents of early Christianity are not historically reliable. I have heard others point to Social Memory theories in support of the historicity of the Gospels. As for me, I am less concerned with historicity as with meaning. In other words, at this point, I’m more interested in what Social Memory theory reveals about why the early Christians emphasized certain things and how that shaped their community life (as much as that can be known). How did the emphases of memory in the community change over time and why? It seems that memory happens in a different way as time goes by. First, it is oral tradition. Then probably a mix of oral and written. After a while, it is written memory, but what of the masses of illiterate Christians? It seems that, for them, Jesus was remembered in the Eucharist. What does that mean? I have a lot of questions about memory and meaning.
