Le Donne on Bird on Social Memory

Anthony Le Donne has a post over at The Jesus Blog  where he notes my tacit endorsement of social memory as a hermeneutical framework for studying Jesus traditions. I have to confess that ever since I read the work of Anthony Le Donne and Chris Keith that I’ve had a side interest in the area. While I’ve never intended to apply for membership in the social memory mafia, working with my Ph.D student Ben Sutton, who is doing social memory in Luke-Acts, certainly pushed me to try to appropriate social memory insights into the formation of the Jesus tradition.

On the question of apologetics, well, HGBJ is an “apologetic” for a big bang approach to the origins of belief in Jesus’ deity over and against Ehrman’s own sketch. I don’t think social memory is an apologetic device, rather it is a framework for understanding how memories are both retained and refracted by groups and cultures.  So the apologetic thing is a bit of a red herring if you ask me. Call me an apologist if you like, but the question remains, who has the best model to explain all the trajectories and features of devotion of Jesus in the early church.

If you want to know what all the fuss is about, then start with Le Donne’s book The Historiographical Jesus:

The Historiographical Jesus introduces a new theory and approach for studying the life of Jesus. Anthony Le Donne uses the precepts of social memory theory to identify “memory refraction” in the Jesus tradition—the refocusing distortion that occurs as the stories and sayings of Jesus were handed down and consciously and unconsciously framed in new settings with new applications. Recognition of this refraction allows historians to escape the problematic dichotomy between memory and typology. The author focuses on the title”Son of David”as it was used in Jewish and Christian traditions to demonstrate both how his new theory functions and to advance historical Jesus research.