Truth Remembered
Among the many differences between the Gospels and the Epistles, it is possible to overlook what should be, perhaps, the plainest of them all: the significantly greater role of memory in the Gospels. In contrast to the immediacy of the Epistles (especially Paul's), the truth we find in the Gospels is essentially remembered truth.
Almost in passing, some Christians commented on this feature early in the second century. In our first extant reference to the Gospels, Papias of Hierapolis observed that the Evangelist Mark, "having become the interpreter of Peter, wrote down accurately, though not in order, whatever he remembered of the things said or done by Christ." A few years later, Justin Martyr described the Gospels as memoirs composed by the apostles.
It is a fact that roughly a generation separated the life of Jesus from the earliest of the Gospels, probably Mark. Now, if we regard Mark's work and the other Gospels as memoirs, this should count for something in how we read them; we should recognize, for instance, that the information they contain was not recent or fresh. If Mark had written thirty years earlier, his work would not be a memoir.
Memoir vs. Martyrion
To illustrate my point, perhaps a literary contrast may be in order: Around the year 156, the Christians at Philomelium in Asia Minor, learning of the recent martyrdom of Polycarp, the bishop of their neighbors in Smyrna, requested of the latter an account of that event. In response, they promptly received one of the most precious of ancient Christian records, The Martyrdom of Polycarp.
Now, that work, that eye-witness account of a martyrdom, was not a memoir, because the story it told, for all its worth and glory, had taken place only recently. It was properly tagged a martyrion, or "testimony," not a memoir, because the information in it was fresh and immediate.
In a memoir, we expect something else. No one writes a memoir about what happened yesterday; he may write a "memorandum" (literally, "something to be remembered"), but not a memoir. The truth standard of a memoir is not "getting the details exactly right." It is not the unadorned precision we strive for in a context where accuracy counts for everything—a forensic setting, for example. Neither Boswell's Life of Johnson, I think, nor Edith Wharton's A Backward Glance is likely to be mistaken for a courtroom transcript.
Wisdom & Witness
What we want in a memoir is the thoughtful wisdom of maturity. If a memoirist is worth reading, it is usually the case that his understanding of the remembered truth has been deepened and enhanced during the subsequent passage of time and through the repetition of riper and wiser recollections. The memoirist not only remembers; he has already remembered many times. Indeed, he remembers his memories.
We all know that the significance of a given memory may only emerge long after the event that gave rise to it. Events, as well as the memories of events, are related—by way of effect and other associations—to other events and later impressions. Almost all human things are better assessed in the light of their subsequent history. A memoir represents the past remembered and re-remembered. The author of a memoir will incorporate not only the distant event, and not just the distant experience of the event, but also the subsequent unfolding of that event and that experience.
We all know that the Gospels assimilate the very distant past; they do this explicitly by appealing to Israel's previous history and the testimony of the prophets. What I want to suggest here is something a bit subtler and more implicit; as records of the deeds and sayings of Jesus, the Gospels also express the constantly experienced memory of those things. This is what makes them memoirs.
Since the Gospels are also the infallible Word of God, we must not neglect to consider their relationship to the witness of the Holy Spirit. When Jesus told the apostles that this witnessing Spirit would bring to their "remembrance all things that I said to you," he implicitly framed the very idea of apostolic memoirs. And the Gospels have shaped and still inform the inner mind, the identity, of the Church. We hand them to the next generation as—in an extended sense—our own memories.
Patrick Henry Reardon is pastor emeritus of All Saints Antiochian Orthodox Church in Chicago, Illinois, and the author of numerous books, including, most recently, Out of Step with God: Orthodox Christian Reflections on the Book of Numbers (Ancient Faith Publishing, 2019).
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