Abstract:
This article explores the effects of cognitive and social memory theory on the quest for the
historical Jesus. It is not the case that all memory is hopelessly unreliable, but it is the case
that it commonly is. Memory distortion is disturbingly common, and much worse, there is no
way to distinguish between memories of actual events and memories of invented events. The
Gospel of Matthew was used to illustrate this very difficulty. This article also draws attention
to the fact that although numerous criteria have been developed, refined and used extensively
in order to distinguish between original Jesus material and later church material, those criteria
have long been unsatisfactory, and most recently, because of the effects of thinking about
memory theory and orality, have been revealed to be bankrupt. Since memory theory shows
that people are unable to differentiate accurate memory from inaccurate and wholly invented
memory, and since the traditional quest criteria do not accomplish what they were intended
to, this article argues that scholarship about Jesus has been forced into a new no quest.
