Unreliability of Eye-witnesses of Doctor Who

I posted yesterday on Doctor Who and the Jesus Tradition in response to James McGrath and Judy Redman. James now has More on TV and the Jesus Tradition and I would like to pitch in with a good example of the unreliability of eye-witness testimony in relation to Doctor Who.

Recently, Alex Kingston reappeared on the new Doctor Who, reprising her role as the mysterious River Song, a character from the doctor's future first seen a couple of year's ago in the tenth doctor story "Silence in the Library" / "Forest of the Dead".  She reappears at an earlier point in her timeline but a later point in the eleventh doctor's, in "Time of Angels" and "Flesh and Stone".  As part of the associated publicity with her return, she did several interviews about Doctor Who and in one widely quoted interview she reflected on her memories of watching the series as a child.  She has a vivid memory of one episode when the daleks appeared on the London Underground, and she explains it in this short video from BBC America:



Alex Kingston's contribution starts at the 37 second point. This is my transcription:

There was an episode many, many, many, I mean decades ago, where the daleks took over the London Underground, and I still, if I'm travelling by the Underground train system in London, I will look down that dark hole and sort of expect to see a dalek coming out of it and so it did something to my psyche.

So there we have it -- an eyewitness reminiscence of an episode watched on television from back in the day.

Except that there is no such episode. No episode of Doctor Who exists in which the daleks take over the London Underground. What Alex Kingston is remembering is probably "The Web of Fear", a second doctor story broadcast in six parts in February and March 1968. Only the first episode is now extant, from which this is taken:



The characters on the London Underground are the Yeti and not the daleks. Alex Kingston may have conflated this episode in her mind with the second Doctor Who film Daleks' Invasion Earth: 2150AD, which was often on television back in the day -- I remember it well from my childhood. The daleks appear in that film, as does the London underground, but not together.

It turns out that others also have this false memory -- a comment on the page "My Life as a Dalek" from a certain Allan Jennings reports something very similar to what Alex Kingston says:

I saw the daleks 40 years ago and I still feel uncomfortable travelling on the London Underground. Every time the wind blows ahead of the train, I expect a dalek to come out onto the platform. My children consider I am mad but how do you get rid of the feeling of fear? I went to an exhibition a few years ago and just to be in the same room as a dalek was enough to make the hair stand up on the back of my neck.

It is interesting to see the same false memory occurring in different witnesses; perhaps they have both heard it suggested and have found it plausible, subconsciously working it into their own vague memories of the actual episode, "The Web of Fear".

Doctor Who and the Jesus Tradition

OK, I admit it.  Mention Doctor Who alongside the Jesus tradition and you will drag me in.  What Judy (Doctor Who as a test case for human memory?) and James forget, though, is that the doctor could help us out with the Jesus tradition, or at least what happened at the first Easter. 2009's "Planet of the Dead" made it clear that the doctor was there at the first Easter (and isn't it odd seeing David Tennant again, as the tenth doctor? Only so many months ago and already it feels like ancient history). If only he had not got interrupted. The relevant bit of dialogue is about four and a half minutes in:



While we are being a little frivolous, I might add that I also brought up Doctor Who in this context to the following effect back in December 2008 (More SBL Dating discussions).  This was in reaction to April DeConick's discussion about the importance of contemporary memory experiments with undergraduate students recounting materials in English:

I sympathize with the desire for memory experiments but I am highly sceptical of our ability to recreate the necessary conditions for providing useful information on the way that memory worked in the first century. As I mentioned in the session, one of my favourite television programmes is Doctor Who, and in a recent episode, the doctor and Donna went to Pompei in 79. I would have loved to have joined them and to conduct some experiments there. But as I also mentioned in the session, there are indeed useful experiments that we can do, using the texts that we have. As some of my readers will know, I have been an advocate for developing tests on Synoptic (and other related) theories with a view to seeing whether they work or not. Given our current state of knowledge, and tools available, serious work on the ancient texts we have is preferable to experiments on our contemporaries.

What James McGrath's and Judy Redman's posts provide, though, is a reminder of the importance of the interpretative community in the discussion and remembering of key materials, the fan community in Doctor Who, the first tradents in early Christianity. The tough thing with the comparison, though, is the cultural difference between a community that can check their facts via the DVD collection and a community whose only major consultative process is to remind themselves of what they think they know by looking at the Hebrew Scriptures and talking.

Update (01.37): here is a further thought.  Perhaps one could do experimental work on the lost episodes, i.e. the episodes of the first and second doctors' eras, in the 1960s, that were wiped by the BBC.  We could allow people to listen to reports on the episodes, to talk to those with memories of them, but not to listen to the surviving audio. That might provide an interesting analogy for the oral period, avoiding contamination from fresh viewings of the old episodes.

Contemporary Memory Experiments and Jesus Traditions

April DeConick makes two fresh contributions to the ongoing discussion of the use of contemporary studies on memory and their use in shedding light on antiquity, human memory is THE factor and I was surprised too. I have been waiting for the book in which her article appears to arrive at Duke before adding another comment in this discussion, hence the gap since my last contribution on this topic.

The new article is April DeConick, "Human Memory and the Sayings of Jesus" in Tom Thatcher (ed.), Jesus, the Voice and the Text: Beyond The Oral and Written Gospel (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2008): 135-80. The article is similar in several respects to the earlier piece Robert K. McIver and Marie Carroll: "Experiments to Develop Criteria for Determining the Existence of Written Sources, and Their Potential Implications for the Synoptic Problem," JBL 121 (2002): 667-87 though it improves on that one in avoiding some of its logical errors (for which see John Poirier, "Memory, Written Sources and the Synoptic Problem: A Response to Robert K. McIver and Marie Carroll", JBL 123/2 (2004): 315–322) and in the extent of its realization that "the synoptic problem is mainly a problem of literary dependence" (178-9). McIver and Carroll appeared strangely lukewarm on this issue (especially 683; cf. Poirier 316), though in the end they list several passages that they regard as establishing some kind of literary dependence. DeConick* adds several more (179), though she does not reflect on the fact that the passages she gives are different in nature on her preferred (Two-Source) Theory, direct borrowing (Matt // Mark and Mark // Luke) versus mutual dependence on a third document (Matt // Luke double tradition), an issue that is important because of the high verbatim agreement in these passages (cf. Poirier 317; cf. my blog post on the degree of verbatim agreement in Q).

But the discussion of the Synoptic Problem is peripheral in DeConick's article, where the main focus is on pre-Synoptic traditions, and in particular the question of how memory might have functioned in the transmission of those traditions. So is it possible for experiments with contemporary students' memories to shed light on the memories of the bearers of early Christian traditions about Jesus? I am sceptical about the experiments for the following reasons:

(1) The difficulties of transferring the data. Like McIver and Carroll, DeConick is sanguine about her ability to transfer the results from the experiments to the ancient world. In the conclusion to her article (entitled "What does it all mean?"), for example, the new experimental data is used in order to refute Rudolf Bultmann -- "In this case, the data says that Rudolf Bultmann's form-critical theory about orality was incorrect because his assumptions were wrong" (177). I admire this confidence, but I do not share it. The ways in which the memories of contemporary students are formed and trained are so different from the ways in which the ancients' memories were formed and trained that we simply cannot read off the results from one onto the other. We do not do it when we conceptualize ancient compositional practices and we should avoid it too when we conceptualize ancient memory.

(2) The difficulties of setting up the experiments. There is a related problem. It is not just that we have direct access to the modern mind and only indirect access to the ancient mind through the literary deposits, but it is also that we don't know how to replicate the conditions in which the ancients in general or the evangelists in particular worked. In one of their experiments, McIver and Carroll provided financial incentives for their subjects to repeat a joke word for word (674) and DeConick directed those in her experiments to repeat the materials "as accurately as possible" (142-3). But how far and in what way does this replicate the way in which early Christian tradents worked? Were they attempting to remember and retell what they heard "as accurately as possible", whatever we might mean by that?

(3). The text-based nature of the experiments. DeConick's experiments appear to work with a very text-based model. As far as I can tell from the descriptions of the set up of the experiments (e.g. 142-3), specific, fixed texts were always involved. The students either listened to the text on a tape, or they read it. Unless one thinks that early Christian tradents were at all times performing from a fixed text, what we are dealing with here is therefore quite different from early Christian tradition. Our best guess about the transmission of tradition in the pre-Synoptic period is that the process was a dynamic one in which material was communicated, not read aloud. It is important, in other words, to distinguish between memory of communicated tradition and memory of a text that has been read aloud.

(4). The use of unfamiliar material. DeConick's experiments used texts that would be unfamiliar to the students, a version of Thomas 75, a version of Thomas 97 and the Infancy Gospel of Thomas 10.1-2. The choice of these texts is understandable -- DeConick wishes to avoid contamination from previous memory (143). The difficulty with these choices, though, is that it sets up an experiment in which the students are immediately operating at a distance from the material that is being conveyed to them. In the transmission of early Christian traditions, this experience may have obtained at least once for every hearer, but that one off experience would be replaced subsequently by repeated hearings of the same, now increasingly familiar material. DeConick rightly discusses both short term memory and long term memory, but does not discuss the progress from unfamiliarity to familiarity, in interaction, repetition and creative re-interpretation. In other words, the students' brief exposure to unfamiliar texts is unlikely to replicate the early Christian tradents' encounters with the traditions they subsequently carried.

(5) Composition and creativity. The experiments' focus on memory, and the instruction to the students to attempt to engage in accurate reproduction, means that there is no room to factor in parallels to the creative, compositional work of the evangelists and, for that matter, of the tradents before them. The same difficulty obtains in McIver and Carroll's article -- distance from the source text is measured largely in terms of memory distortion with little attention to attempting to replicate the evangelists' own creativity. (See further Poirier, especially 318 and 322).

Lest I appear too sceptical, too harsh on what are, after all, innovative and interesting studies, let me finish with a positive word. The ancient historian's constant battle is the attempt to understand and describe a world that is so very different from ours. One of the weapons in that battle is the well chosen, contemporary analogy. Sometimes, in our bid to describe and analyze what is distant, we need good analogies. The experimental data on contemporary students' memories might well provide the kind of analogies that aid our attempts to do ancient history. They can help us to craft good questions, to make clear contrasts and to remind us where our evidence of the ancient world is wanting. It is important, though, to remind ourselves that contemporary analogies are always partial, often limited and sometimes misleading.

* I am employing what I take to be academic convention in talking about April DeConick's published work using her surname, where the emerging blogging convention is to use first names when talking about blog posts. I mention this lest anyone thinks that I have developed some unwelcome frostiness!

Problems with studying memory in antiquity

On The Forbidden Gospels blog, April DeConick follows up her earlier post (discussed here, More SBL Dating Discussions) with a fresh post entitled SBL Memories 3: Become More Scientific. The first half of the post appears to be aimed at a kind of fundamentalist view according to which Jesus' words were recorded with verbatim accuracy in the Gospels, a view in which (of course) I have no stake or interest, so I will pass over it. About half-way in to the post, though, April turns to the section of my paper on the "missing middle" in Thomasine parallels with the Synoptics, drawing special attention to Thomas 57, the Parable of the Wheat and the Tares. April's disagreement with me here is based in part on a critique of an imagined model that I do not work with and which I regard as untenable:

What is the evidence that writers who have a literary document in front of them from which they are copying ever leave out the middle because they are rushed? Just based on logic, I would think that literary copying would be otherwise. That the copyist would be more careful to preserve the material he is using, that he is working slowly, that he can stop and go back and double check, and that he can erase and correct. Such is not the case, however, when an author is relying on human memory, when he cannot double check a written source.

Few writers who think that Thomas is familiar with the Synoptics are using a model of scribal copying, whereby the author of Thomas has a literary document in front of him. (Perrin may be an exception here, but see my comments on his work). The way I imagine the process is of familiarity with the Synoptics by means of memory through regular reading aloud (by himself or others).

April goes on to make several interesting observations about studying memory, and it is here that the real interest in the post lies. I will withhold any lengthy discussion until I have had the chance to read April's new article on the topic (I have the book in which it appears on order), but I will make a comment about the classic she mentions, F. C. Bartlett, Remembering: A Study in Social Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995; original ed., 1932). Bartlett's fascinating experiments with memory bear on the topic, not least given that one of his examples (72-3) features a "missing middle" similar to the one I have been illustrating in Thomas. It is worth mentioning that Bartlett was testing his subjects' memory of a written text. He gave his subjects a text called "The War of the Ghosts" and asked them to read the text a couple of times, and then he tested them for recall of the piece after selected periods of time, with interesting results, including a good example of an individual retelling the story without its middle section (in his first retelling, 20 hours after his reading of the text). I might claim that this coheres with my own view on Thomas's knowledge of the Synoptics, but alas, I have to confess that I can't help thinking that it does not recreate anything like the conditions that may be in view in antiquity, with communal texts read aloud by the literate to the community over a period of time, not a single unfamiliar text read by a modern individual and then recalled. Given my curmudgeonly scepticism on the transference of such studies to investigations into memory in antiquity, I am loathe to make anything of Bartlett's studies for our studies of issues like Thomas's familiarity with the Synoptics, even though they would help me, but I will concede one important point. Analysis of the way that moderns attempt to recall texts can at least stimulate our reflections on antiquity, even if that reflection ends up being about contrast more than comparison.

More SBL Dating Discussion

April DeConick responded to my paper, Dating the Crucial Sources in Early Christianity (Handout; Blog Series on Dating), at this year's SBL Annual Meeting, in the second meeting of a new consultation on Cross, Resurrection and Diversity in Early Christianity, and now she offers some useful reflections on that response on her Forbidden Gospels blog, SBL Memories 2: Dating Our Sources. One of the things I like about April DeConick's writing is that she often gets me thinking -- she has a great way of approaching subjects from a distinctive angle.

In the current post, April speaks of division in the academy and I think the implication is that we are on different sides of that divide. One side uses "older models" that are now "being seriously questioned" while April emphasizes "three major shifts in the field" that "must be taken very seriously" (though she goes on to enumerate four). In spite of the talk about division, there are actually several areas here where we are in agreement. In each of the four categories, I will begin with our agreement and then make clear where we differ. Let me add a quick word too on "older models", to use April's term. I too am in favour of questioning older models, though they are not always the same ones that April wishes to question; sometimes April works with some older models that I wish to question. And sometimes, of course, the old wine is good.

(1). As April mentioned at the session, she agrees with my post-70 dating for Mark and so too for Matthew, Luke and John. This is an important agreement because it establishes a working model for dating the crucial works, Paul well before 70, the Gospels after. April's sketch, however, expands to inclusion of hypothetical sources and earlier versions of documents, which I avoided in favour of discussing the materials to which our texts bear witness. Unlike me, April is conservative on the existence of Q, and even speaks of different versions of the text, and their provenance. I am also sceptical about the existence of kernel Thomas. I have not done enough work on James and the Didache to express a firm opinion on whether or not they post-date 70. So April's pre-70 block is much more richly populated than mine. I would love to be able to share her confidence in that area, but I remain sceptical about the survival of key materials from the earliest period.

A further difference is that the model I discussed in the paper was a genealogical one. Where April organizes documents into groups, I attempted to sketch sequence, Galatians post-dating 1 Corinthians, Matthew post-dating Mark, Luke post-dating Matthew, John post-dating the Synoptics and so on. The reason that this kind of work might be helpful is that it can map the evolution and development of ideas from one literary work to another. Working on relative dating in this way is tough because we simply have to get our hands dirty engaging in study that a lot of us would rather avoid, Synoptic Problem, Pauline chronology, John's relationship to the Synoptics and so on. But the potential pay off is major and the work is worthwhile.

(2). April's second point, about textual criticism, echoes my own warnings on this subject, which I am happy to repeat:

It is easy to engage in this kind of discussion without thinking through the broader issues of what it means to talk about “texts” and “literary works” in antiquity. It is a somewhat hackneyed to point out the obvious facts that none of the autographs have survived and that there were no printing presses, but textual critics rightly remind us to behave like we actually know that that is the case. Too often, we lapse into treating our scholarly constructs as if they are the actual artefacts that they can only aspire to be. At the very least, we need to keep reminding ourselves in discussions like this that we are not dealing with fixed points and known entities but with reconstructions and approximations. (3)

Nevertheless, with the appropriate cautions in place, it is also worth reminding ourselves that the texts are all we have. The situation is no different here than it is for any other set of ancient texts. We are dealing with manuscript witnesses. Indeed, in many respects the situation is a great deal better for scholars of early Christianity because of the relative earliness of the textual evidence as well as the richness of the manuscript deposit. We have to work with what we have, and what we have is pretty good.

April offers a valuable caution against "basing our conclusions on 'same' words here and there", but as I mentioned in the session in response, this is why we should also look at patterns of agreement and disagreement, tracing parallels in structure, order, theme, motif and imagery as well as the more minor parallels in wording. My own caution in this area, previously expressed in discussions of the Synoptic Problem, and especially of the Minor Agreements, is that one should be wary of appealing to conjectural emendation as a means of resisting texts that are difficult for one's theory, not least given the fact that absent textual evidence is as likely to have caused further problems for one's preferred theory as it is to have provided solutions.

(3)-(4): I will take these together since they are closely related. I sympathize with the desire for memory experiments but I am highly sceptical of our ability to recreate the necessary conditions for providing useful information on the way that memory worked in the first century. As I mentioned in the session, one of my favourite television programmes is Doctor Who, and in a recent episode, the doctor and Donna went to Pompei in 79. I would have loved to have joined them and to conduct some experiments there. But as I also mentioned in the session, there are indeed useful experiments that we can do, using the texts that we have. As some of my readers will know, I have been an advocate for developing tests on Synoptic (and other related) theories with a view to seeing whether they work or not. Given our current state of knowledge, and tools available, serious work on the ancient texts we have is preferable to experiments on our contemporaries.