Ehrman's New Book

Professor Ehrman is one of America's leading biblical scholars. He is brilliant, and writes well. He can be, at times, taken a being polemical. Recently, he spoke at our local community college, and I attended. The lecture wasn't too surprising, and many people had great questions. I was excited to see local Fresnans engaged in the New Testament. Also, I fanboyed a bit. Toward the end of his discussion, he mentioned about engaging into memory studies. I found this to be huge! I was interviewed by the school's newspaper and made that a point: memory studies is growing and the fact that Ehrman is taking this approach speaks volumes. My first introduction into memory studies was through The Jesus Blog. The contributors are some of the brightest scholars in Europe and US. (I am particularly a fan of Professor James Crossley.) The collectives discussion in memory studies seems to be some of the first to bright it into practice. These people are the frontiersmen (and women) of memory studies in New Testament, if you will. So, their voice (I feel) is to be regarded highly in reviewing Ehrman's book. Unfortunately, it doesn't look too well. The book wasn't released yet, and I have other reading to do before I get to his. (I recommend any of his books.) Here is a bit of the review of the introduction:
I was part of the early wave of Jesus historians and NT scholars who have turned to questions of memory—and especially social/collective memory—in order to recalibrate the study of Jesus and Christian origins. I care about this topic, and adding a name as big as Bart D. Ehrman to the list of historians recognizing the importance of memory in some way justified my own work.

At this point, I've only read Ehrman's Introduction (pp. 1–16), so I'm not yet ready to praise or critique the volume. But we can note how Ehrman approaches his subject, recurrent patterns in his discussion, and the expectations he establishes for the rest of the book.

Ehrman says early on that he spent "about two years" spending his free time "doing nothing but reading about memory" (2). He specifically mentions three areas of memory studies: cognitive psychology (the study of individual memories), sociology (the study of social memory), and cultural anthropology (the study of oral cultures and unwritten traditions). These are all very good and vibrant areas of research; NT scholars are vigorously engaging each of these fields (individually and in various combinations), so Ehrman's voice joins a chorus-in-progress.

And so I was surprised by his presentation of NT scholarship as a whole, which (as I've said) has increasingly engaged questions of memory over the last decade-plus.

The more I read [about memory], the more surprised I became that so many scholars of the New Testament—the vast bulk of them, so far as I can tell—have never explored this research, even though it is so fascinating and most immediately relevant. Even those New Testament specialists who have delved into such fields have in many instances limited themselves to just one, or possibly two, of them. But they are all important. (3)

In the Introduction, Ehrman does not refer to any "New Testament specialists who have delved into such fields," so I cannot evaluate his claim. Moreover, throughout this introduction he cites only one work of one memory theorist (Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National Memory [University of Chicago Press, 2000], the first volume of sociologist Barry Schwartz's two-volume work on American memory of Lincoln). The Introduction, in other words, does not offer very much to substantiate either Ehrman's claim to have read broadly ("for about two years now") in memory studies or his claim about NT specialists. This is, however, only the Introduction, and I hold out hope that more meaningful and substantive engagements will come in the remaining chapters.

When Ehrman does acknowledge that "this book will not be the first to address such issues" (12), he links his work with Rudolf Bultmann and the form critics and never mentions contemporary scholarship on questions of media, memory, and testimony. He laments that "there is not a single book available on the topic for a general-reading audience, a book that explains the form-critics' views or delves into the issues they [!!] raised in an non-technical (and interesting!) way" (13; my italics and exclamation marks). If Ehrman were providing a nontechnical, interesting survey of contemporary NT scholarship on memory and media, I would cheer. I am disappointed, however, to find that he seems to intend to present the nearly century-old work of the form critics, with the subtle (but false) implication that he's the first to do by appealing to memory studies.

Read the rest!