The Power of Memory: Aborigines, Atheists, and the Authenticity of the Gospels

Power of Memory

Never doubt the power of memory. A few years ago I ran across an amazing story (“Ancient Sea Rise Tale Told Accurately For 10,000 Years“) in Scientific American. It details how aboriginal Australians have preserved, via oral tradition, accurate information about geographical features that have been underwater since the end of the last Ice Age. That was circa 10,000 years ago. The article is fascinating for its own sake. It also shows, however, some of the limitations of the modern skeptical, ostensibly scientific (but more accurately “scientistic”) worldview.  Not only that, it has some relevance to our Faith, and particularly to the question of the veracity of Scripture. In fact, the amazing memories of Australia’s oldest inhabitants can inform our defense of the authenticity of the Gospels.

What’s a Few Decades?

Let’s start with the scriptural question.  A common line of attack by well-trained atheist enthusiasts is that the books of the New Testament weren’t even written down until 30-60 years after the death of Jesus. How can we expect them to be reliable?  There are a number of good answers to this.  I used to point out to my skeptical students, for instance, that I had been married for over 30 years (now going on 40). Nevertheless, I still remembered the events of my wedding day quite well, and also events of my childhood and adolescence even further back.

My parents still remembered things that had happened 70 years prior, or more.  Yes, the average life span was far lower two thousand years ago than it is today. At least, as best we can determine. Nonetheless, there were still plenty of people who lived into their 70’s and 80’s. That means that when scribes first wrote the Gospel accounts the events they contained were still within living memory.

Concrete Evidence

It’s also a fact that people in ancient societies had much better powers of memory, as people in less literate societies do today. That’s because they needed to rely on memory much more than we do.  It should be no surprise, then, that in the 19th century Heinrich Schliemann disproved the rationalist scholars. The “experts” had insisted that the Iliad and Odyssey could not possibly have any real historical background, they were “just myths.” Schliemann went out and excavated the sites of Troy and Mycenae, right where Homer’s epics said they would be. Note well: both poems existed for centuries in oral form before they were written down.  

Likewise, in the early 20th century Milman Parry refuted the scholarly assertion that it was impossible for ancient rhapsodes to memorize with accuracy long epic poems such as Homer’s works when he located and recorded Croatian bards who accomplished similar feats of memory.  

Without Written Language

And now we see Aborigines who have transmitted information accurately over not merely decades, but millennia:

Without using written languages, Australian tribes passed memories of life before, and during, post-glacial shoreline inundations through hundreds of generations as high-fidelity oral history. Some tribes can still point to islands that no longer exist—and provide their original names.

That’s the conclusion of linguists and a geographer, who have together identified 18 Aboriginal stories—many of which were transcribed by early settlers before the tribes that told them succumbed to murderous and disease-spreading immigrants from afar—that they say accurately described geographical features that predated the last post-ice age rising of the seas.

Cross-Generational Scaffolding

There’s more to these examples, however, than simple powers of memorization. I found this passage from the Scientific American article about the Aborigines very intriguing:

“There are aspects of storytelling in Australia that involved kin-based responsibilities to tell the stories accurately,” Reid said.  That rigor provided “cross-generational scaffolding” that “can keep a story true.”

In other words, older people who know the story will correct the storyteller who messes it up. It’s a “kin-based responsibility” because these stories are a crucial part of the group identity. They tell people who they are, and to forget is to become nobody. How much more important to “tell the stories accurately” if they are about God-become-Man, and to forget means eternal oblivion? How about when the elders checking the storytellers’ accuracy were eyewitnesses? Or, when the storytellers themselves were witnesses or even participants in what they were describing?  

The Rational Conclusion

     Believing Catholics, of course, trust in the guidance of the Holy Spirit in preserving the truth, but that won’t help to convince those who don’t share our Faith. Natural reason, however, and the available evidence, show that the earliest Christians were not only quite capable of preserving the story of Jesus accurately, but also were extremely unlikely to do otherwise.  That, at least, is the rational conclusion: what evidence can the doubters offer to the contrary?

(I published an earlier version of this Throwback Thursday post 12 February 2015)

Feature image above: photo by Lefteris Pitarakis, from website https://www.ancient-code.com/