"Memoirs" of Earliest Christian Cultic Legends

Anglican apologetic writer (undeserving of the designation “scholar”) Richard Bauckham in his Jesus and the Eyewitnesses perpetuated the faith-bolstering theory that since Papias and Justin Martyr described earliest gospel texts as ἀπομνημονεύματα, this term implicitly determined their mode and genre as “memoirs of the Apostles,” that is, recorded living memories of Jesus’ original students. Aimed at a predominantly faith-anxious public market, this book with its litany of absurd theories went on to sell countless copies and is to this day held up by pseudo-intellectual believers as grand justification for their indulgence in such tales as presenting reliable footage of first-century supernatural events.

While such tales were indeed embraced with belief, such was the point of cultic legend through all times and societies, particularly in the Roman Hellenistic world. He and others would have humankind accept the canonical Gospels (none of the others, mind you) as histories. The Greek term, however, arose as cognate to the common verb ἱστορέω, that is, to conduct a critical inquiry of the evidence. A “history” in antiquity thus was the product of such rigorous research with the aim of presenting true accounts of past ontological events. The problem, however, with those who seek to foist this descriptor onto the canonical Gospels: Nowhere did the early Christians refer to the canonical Gospels as histories or use them in that manner. This term above, moreover, often translated by them as “memoir,” did not indicate or imply the presence of anecdotal memory, be that genuine or fraudulent. Rather, the term denoted how something or someone was to be honored in cultural memory, that is, their social memorabilia or memorialization. This would often include legend and outright myth, what the Germans term a person’s Nachleben. The culture exalted or damned the memory of the Caesars, for instance, either by bestowing on them divinity (divine birth, divine powers, divine ascension, etc) or by lampooning their image, defacing their statues, restriking their numismatic images (i.e, their coins) etc. 

As an additional window into the use of this specific term ἀπομνημονεύματα, consider that Tatian, Justin Martyr’s contemporary and top student applied the same term to the vast swath of Greek mythology in his Oratio ad Graecos. Here is a brief translation of relevant segments of book 21:

For we are neither being silly, Oh Greek people, nor announcing nonsense, when we proclaimed that a god was begotten in human form. Those rebuking us must compare your mythic stories with our narratives.

[Tatian shows silly / incoherent aspects of some Greek tales]

Looking, therefore, to the memoirs of your people, you must also likewise read them as mythic tales. On the one hand, we are not being silly, while on the other, you babble your own stories.

[Tatian continues to exhibit examples of alleged “silliness” in Greek legends, myths, and sacred tales]

Another instructive example of the connotative use of this term in ancient texts comes from Diodorus Siculus, Bibliotheca Historica 1.14 wherein the historian described the cultic legends of the goddess Isis having miraculously created and handed on to the Egyptians the first use of wheat and barley as a people. This was their cultural “memory” or sacred etiological myth for origin of their most distinctive crop as a civilization, commemorated annually with festivals.

We must, therefore, distinguish earliest Christian exaltation of Jesus in community cultic storytelling and legend from any claims of bonafide historical record. The Gospels were chock full of tropes and literary patterns drawn from Hellenistic and Jewish legend, myth, and folk-belief. Those literary signals determined for their readers the intended explicit genre and modality of these texts as cult performant, that is, a common blend of legendized history and historicized mythology, the “memory” of which providing the charter tales of the cult.

--------------

Connect with Dr. Miller on Facebook.

Dr. Miller, author of Resurrection and Reception in Early Christianity (Routledge, 2015), is a humanistic critic of contemporary religion and a trans-disciplinary research scholar exploring the cultural and literary nexus between classical antiquity and the social origins of earliest Christianity. His published work focuses on the mythological roots of the New Testament Gospel portraitures of Jesus, the sacralized founding emblem of the Christian religion.