Jesus in Memory: Traditions in Oral and Scribal Perspectives

Introduction

Introduction Samuel Byrskog 1 Memory and Tradition The present book is about memory and tradition, and a host of related issues. The relationship between the two is far from evident. Modern society venerates various sites of artificial memory that distance traditional knowledge and information from human memory while turning our minds into a blur of diverging impressions and sensations. In the Western world the printed book page is the primary site of information, and it is perceived to represent the stability and durability of communication . Computerized information technology competes successfully in the arena of artificial memory and influences us in unforeseen ways. The plurality and fragmented character of its messages collides with our desire for stability and coherence in communication and threatens to collapse into an impressionistic fusion of fiction and reality. Human memory has been emptied of its structuring elements and become the battleground of a vast array of conflicting modes of information. It takes sustained and disciplined effort to lay open the existential and communicative importance of the mnemonic structures of the human mind and recover the inextricable bonds between memory and tradition. Memory can be many things. At a time when writing was virtually unknown and everything depended on the spoken word, it was a venerated goddess. Mnemosyne was born when heaven and earth united and 2 B Running head 2 B Samuel Byrskog it was she who gave birth to the Muses (Theog. 53–63, 133–36). When Hermes discovered the lyre, he sang the story of the immortal gods and honored Mnemosyne as the first one among them (Merc. 429–30). During the legendary Golden Age kings and poets were endowed with the gift of Mnemosyne and privileged to enter into a special relationship with the Muses. The reasons for the prestige of this Greek Titaness were manifold. The absence of writing was a contributing factor as it precluded any sense of external, diachronic development and fostered a blending of past, present, and future that was mediated and negotiated mnemonically. Memory and tradition were symbiotically united in all aspects of life. Human memory was the structuring force of life in a world of myths. This vital and mythical union was nourished especially in circles that were separate from the mainstream Greek polis-centered cult. Inscriptions of possibly Pythagorean origin on the so-called Orphic gold leaves indicate fascinating notions of how the dead were longing to drink from Mnemosyne and warned against forgetting.1 A noteworthy, although not direct, analogy is Pausanias’ description of the ancient underground oracle of Trophonius at Lebadea (western Boeotia). Visitors to the subterranean chasm, it was believed, were made to drink from the rivers of Lethe (“forgetfulness,” “concealment”) and Mnemosyne. After their ascent the priests placed them upon the chair of Mnemosyne, not far from the shrine, so that they may ask the visitors about all that they had seen or learned (9.39.8–13). Memory was the fountain of life for those who sought eagerly to experience the mysteries. To remember was to live, to forget was to die. Memory became the essential link to the past. There emerged a neverending struggle to protect it from distortion and to prevent the threat of forgetfulness. Plato feared that the invention of the alphabet would make students rely on external characters which, not being part of themselves, would discourage the use of memory within them (Phaedr. 275a). In his treatise De Memoria et Reminiscentia Aristotle insisted that true recollection arranges the past according to the sequential structures of images imprinted on the mind and creates a sense of temporal distance between the past and the present. The rhetoricians made memory into a matter of honor and shame. Quintilian would not write anything which he did not intend to memorize (Inst. 10.7.32), and he shared with several other orators an interest —albeit somewhat reticent—in the old mnemo-technical repertoire believed to have originated with Simonides of Ceos in the sixth and Introduction B 3 fifth century B.C.E. The honor attached to it produced several exaggerated accounts. Seneca the Elder, a skilled rhetorician, boasts that in his youth he was able to repeat two thousand names that were read to him and that he could recite in reverse order over two hundred verses that his fellow student told him. To him, this was a true miraculum (Controversiae 1 pref. 2). His boasting is a reminder...