1. Many New Testament scholars have abandoned the traditional criteria in support of memory studies. Can you explain why this is the case and how one would use memory studies in biblical studies?
There are still scholars who advocate for the criteria of authenticity, such as Burr, Authenticating Criteria in Jesus Research and Beyond, 2023, and Zolondek, The Quest for a Historical Jesus Methodology, 2023, and others.
But there are many scholars who have abandoned the criteria, such as Hooker’s 1972 article “On Using the Wrong Tool” or Dale Allison’s 2009 article, “How to Marginalize the Traditional Criteria of Authenticity,” and in particular, Keith and Le Donne, eds., Jesus, Criteria, and the Demise of Authenticity, 2012. There are various reasons why scholars have left the criteria; I think Chris Keith would say the criteria are tied to form criticism, which basically said that pericopes, meaning a passage or unit of text, were tied to literary forms (such as parables or pronouncement stories or miracle stories) and these literary forms influence their shape, and so since form-criticism is now generally seen as outdated, then if the criteria are connected to that, then the criteria go as well (Metts’s article “Neglected Discontinuity between Early Form Criticism and the New Quest” in Jesus, Skepticism & the Problem of History responds to that claim, as did Holmén, “Seven Theses on the so-called Criteria of Authenticity of Historical Jesus Research”).
Another issue with the criteria depends on how you define authenticity. Does authenticity mean something is free of interpretation? In this case, a kind of postmodern hermeneutic says everything is a matter of one’s perspective, so nothing is authentic. Others understand authenticity to mean that it probably goes back to the historical Jesus.
Others have said the criteria do not produce the desired results, with so many different versions of Jesus being produced from them (Joel Archer has a 2025 article in the Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus titled “Consensus, Disagreement, and the Criteria of Authenticity,” which argues that a lack of consensus is not a good reason to reject the criteria).
I might add that one reason that some scholars have called for the criteria’s rejection is that they haven’t engaged some of the best work on the topic, such as Bock and Webb, eds., Key Events in the Life of the Historical Jesus, 2009 or most of the work written on the subject since Keith and Le Donne, eds., Jesus, Criteria, and the Demise of Authenticity, 2012, they treat it as a settled matter.
Some voices warn of the potential misuse of the criteria; for instance, with embarrassment, they might say well, it wasn’t embarrassing enough to exclude it, or how can one be sure multiple attestation is independent? This is more of a call for their careful use rather than total dismissal.
So, the relevance of the criteria is still ongoing. The so-called “Next Quest” largely wants to do without them, and the so-called “Fourth Quest” utilizes the criteria and incorporates John.
Anyways, your question also asked about memory. My book Resurrection Remembered reports on the debate concerning the criteria but doesn’t weigh in on it. In part, because I would say individuals such as NT Wright, Mike Licona, William Lane Craig, and others have made a good case for Jesus’ resurrection using the criteria, so I wanted to say if one doesn’t use that methodology then what can be said about Jesus’ resurrection. And the main other approach is to use memory studies. There are, of course, scholars who say that a memory approach is also a dead end (such as Paul Foster’s 2012 JSHJ article “Memory, Orality, and the Fourth Gospel: Three Dead-Ends in Historical Jesus Research”; Crook, “Matthew, Memory Theory and the New No Quest,” 2014; van Eck, “Memory and Historical Jesus Studies,” 2015. For a partial response, see Keith, “The Narratives of the Gospels and the Historical Jesus,” 2016.
You also asked, “How would one use memory studies in biblical studies?” Havukainen, The Quest for the Memory of Jesus, 2020, has argued that there is no one single way to do this; instead, those who advocate a memory approach have suggested a number of different ways forward. And in that sense, my work was no different. I tried to build upon others, especially one of my supervisors, Robert McIver (Memory, Jesus, and the Synoptic Gospels, 2011), but I consulted more recent work from the psychology of memory, and almost no one in biblical studies had interacted with the philosophy of memory, so I made use of that field.
But the short answer to your question of how to use memory in biblical studies is to find a text that aims to convey historical memory, such as the tradition of Jesus’ death and resurrection in 1 Cor 15 (compared to, say, the fictional story of the prodigal son in Luke 15), of course even this is a bit too simplistic because even a fictional story like the prodigal son can still be studying as a memory since its first telling. You’d ask how the story functions, even if you weren’t asking where the prodigal lived and his name. But in the case of an event that is thought to be historical, say Jesus’ death, you can ask both where and when it happened, and you can study the oral history of how this non-fictional story has been passed down.
2. 1 Cor 15 is said to be an early oral saying. Can you explain why scholars think this?
Like most things, not all scholars think this is the case, but most think there are good reasons to affirm that 1 Cor 15:3–7 is an early oral tradition. The reasons include that the terminology of παρέδωκα “passed on” and παρέλαβον “received” are technical terms used by Greek and rabbinic schools for training others in tradition. So, Paul is saying that this was something he was taught (v.3) and, in turn, taught the Corinthians (v.2–3), and he says this is what all the early Christians preached (v.11).
Further, there is non-Pauline vocabulary, suggesting Paul isn’t likely the author. Phrases such as “for our sins,” “according to the Scriptures,” “he was buried,” “he has been raised,” “on the third day,” “he was seen,” and “by the Twelve,” are all not of Pauline style. There is also some parallelism, further suggesting it was a creed.
There is debate over whether it was originally one creed or it is two combined creeds, the first ending at v.5, but this doesn’t really matter as either way, there is early oral history to examine.
As for when this creed originated, it is generally thought that Paul received the creed in either 32/34AD (cf. Acts 9:9–20, 26–29) or, more likely, 35/36/37 AD on his visit to Jerusalem (cf. Gal 1:18) when he visited Peter and James. Dale Allison’s The Resurrection of Jesus, 2021; argued that we can only be sure that the creed was composed before Paul authored 1 Corinthians in the 50s, and in terms of proof, that is correct, but it remains more probable that it is within years of Jesus’ crucifixion. The late James Dunn was confident that the tradition “was formulated as tradition within months of Jesus’ death” (Jesus Remembered, 2003, 855).
So, in short, it is generally thought that 1 Cor 15:3–7 is an early oral tradition.
3. Do you think 1 Cor 15 or something like it was recited frequently? If so, what implication does that have for it being a reliable memory?
It is likely that the tradition about Jesus’ death, burial, resurrection, and appearances were frequently being recited. Some of the reasons for this include that Paul says in 1 Cor 15:3 that this was of first importance, which could mean either that it was among the first things that Christians were taught or that it was the most important thing Christians were taught in which case it would have been central. Further, that is what we see in the Gospels and Acts: after seeing the risen Jesus, the disciples can’t stop talking about it, even to the point of being persecuted. If you compare some of the speeches in Acts, such as Acts 13:28–31, with 1 Cor 15:3–5 and even the Gospels, such as Mark 15:37–16:9, you have the same basic structure of Jesus’ death, burial, resurrection, and appearances. Other support includes the fact that the church was meeting on Sunday, the day of the risen Lord. Or the celebration of the eucharist was done in remembrance of Jesus’ death and resurrection on a frequent basis. Or even that it was the culture of the time to share and tell stories, and this is the central story of the early Christians.
The implication of frequently reciting something is that studies on memory indicate that repeated recall reinforces a memory. This means it is unlikely that this will be forgotten, which means that this memory will be more reliable. This is to say, whether you think the Gospels were written down a few decades after the events, it is very likely that the Christians were talking about these stories all the time. It wasn’t like they stored it away in long-term memory, and then, just before their deaths, they tried to remember what happened many years ago.
4. Do you consider there to be social aspects to the memory behind 1 Cor 15? If so, does this make the saying more likely to be accurate?
The term social memory can be used in different ways, so it depends on what is meant by that, but in short, yes. The creed of 1 Cor 15:3–7 wasn’t Paul’s individual memory; it was something that the early Christian social network taught Paul, and he taught the Corinthians, and Paul indicates that this was what all the Christians were teaching.
Whether this would make it more accurate depends. For instance, Bart Ehrman likens the oral tradition to the telephone game in which someone tells his wife, who tells the neighbors, and then they go on a business trip and tell others in another city, in all sorts of contexts, and so Ehrman argues the stories get changed and decades later were written down by someone who heard it from someone, who heard it from someone. So, if Ehrman is right, this type of social context wouldn’t give us much reason to trust the accuracy of such stories. Scholars such as Craig Keener have critiqued Ehrman on this (see Keener’s Christobiograpghy 2019). However, I weirdly argued that Ehrman’s model is relevant but just not to the traditions surrounding Jesus’ resurrection. This is to say, Ehrman is probably right that some stories were shared around like that, but I think it is unlikely that those stories were the ones that made it into the New Testament. At best, they are probably more like some of the stories found in the so-called gnostic writings. Whereas, for the creed of 1 Cor 15, it was of first importance, and there were probably even eyewitnesses, teachers, and apostles who were passing along this tradition. They were more likely doing it in what is called the formal controlled model that scholars like Gerhardsson or Richard Bauckham have defended. So, in that model, there are the social aspects of designated teachers, passing on a designated tradition, which is likely to be accurate.
5. Are general gist memories reliable?
Like most things, there are different opinions about this. The general view would be that the gist is generally reliable. However, some argue that even the gist can be mistaken (Zeba Crook is close to this). It is correct that the gist can be wrong, but it is not usually the case. What matters is more, do we have any particular reason to think in any particular instance that this particular gist memory is either right or wrong? And so, in the case of the creed of 1 Cor 15, that is just the general information; it doesn’t have the details like the Gospels do, so it is the gist of Jesus’ death, burial, resurrection and appearances. My book Resurrection Remembered looks at about 21 different factors that could affect memory, and a few of them are indecisive, but on the whole, there is good reason to think that if Jesus rose from the dead, it could have been accurately remembered.
6. Why not think Paul and early Christians were just making things up?
Firstly, I want to know why someone thinks this is the case. Basically, I would say because most scholars think that the early Christians were sincere in their claims, they might be sincerely wrong, but they don’t seem to be simply fabricating it all. Second, the early disciples were in a position to know the truth, and liars do not make willing martyrs (on whether the early Christians faced persecution I recommend Sean McDowell, The Fate of the Apostles, 2nd ed., not to mention there is evidence for this in the NT such as in 1 Cor 15:32 with Paul facing wild beasts, which I think James Ware, The Final Triumph of God, 2025 is probably right that it should be understood literally). Paul himself says in 1 Cor 15 that if Christ is not raised, then Christians are, of all, most pitied; he seems to think this really happened, and if he is making this up, he has a lot to lose, even eternal punishment. Also, it is not so simple as to say that Paul just invented this because he received this from others, and this is what all the earliest Christian literature testifies about that Jesus died and rose again, including more than just the 27 books of the NT also works like the Didache or the apostolic fathers. Further, there are non-Christian historical documents as well, such as Josephus, Tacitus, Roman, Pliny the Younger, and others, that talk about Jesus’ life and death in historical terms.
I have a forthcoming journal article with JETS called “Resurrection Misremembered?” that discusses this a bit more, but another issue is that there were many places where if it was just the case that the Christians were simply invention stuff, then we would expect them to do it a lot more, such as with the controversy around circumcision in Gal 2 and Acts 15, why not just makeup that Jesus said such and such.
If someone is going to argue this, they should really be looking more at the later gnostic scriptures and say Jesus never really said this to the actual Judas or Thomas…
7. Why not think the disciples had some sort of hallucinations and the encounters with Jesus got added on to as years passed?
Again, the burden of proof is on the person making this claim, but some of the issues are that the hallucination hypothesis doesn’t explain what happened to Jesus’ body. Nor does it explain the appearances to the groups. It doesn’t do a very good job of explaining the individual appearances either because the appearances of Jesus are multimodal, meaning they involve several senses, such as sight, sound, and touch, and that is very rare for hallucinations.
The hallucination hypothesis involves a fair bit of speculation about the psychology of historical individuals, saying Mary Magdalene must have been prone to hallucinate or that Peter was guilty instead of feeling liberated that he had wasted three years following a false messiah who was now crucified. And there is even more issue with trying to do this to Saul/Paul, who was a persecutor of Christians.
Further, Matthew Levering (Did Jesus Rise from the Dead?, 2019) has stated that hallucinations are consistently interpreted to be, at most, communications of comfort about the departed, not as resurrections. Related to this, the early Christian writings do not describe this as some sort of ethereal experience; rather, they use the Jewish language of bodily resurrection from the dead.
All this to say, the hallucination hypothesis is improbable.