Here's a gem PP. On '8 Really Good Reasons Why Christianity is True'. The man who writes the blog has a part for historical evidence of Jesus. He doesn't actually make an argument either, just links to another site. It links to an online ministry that tackles the criticism of the bible not being reliable as a source of evidence on it's own. He argues that the Jews "of the first century of the Christian era possessed a unique ability to remember and record the statements of Jesus of Nazareth that would be deemed almost impossible by modern readers. The ancient Jews of Israel had developed sophisticated memory techniques to remember every word of a discourse by their rabbi. Their ability to recount verbatim long speeches or teaching would astonish modern teachers and critics of the Gospel record. Over the centuries the religious leaders of Israel had developed advanced memory techniques to enable their students to remember in remarkable detail every single statement of their religious teachers." There's some great material here.
The ancients (and even more recent peoples) did have lots of tricks for remembering things. Christian clerics in the 12th and 13th centuries spent about half their time learning how to remember bible stories verbatim, etc. But to use the ability as the reason such stories weren't written down sooner is a bit silly. Either someone eventually remembered that they knew how to write and decided to put their new skills to work, or someone needed an excuse as to why nobody (even the educated ones) bothered to scribble down a few things concurrent with jc, I dunno.
Also, the part where the four gospels differ a lot in the details does not bode well for this excuse. If half a century later the story was that distorted by the four dudes who had heard it second hand, then bragging about accuracy is sort of the wrong thing to do.
The exhortation that the words of jesus were so impressive and important that it only took five or six decades for people to decide it was worth recording on stone or papyrus or an early Apple II is not the stuff that gives me cause to be excited. I'm too busy trying to figure out how naked mole rats, who cannot survive long in an open atmosphere, made it through the year on the ark. When someone can answer that one definitively, I'll start listening to their other excuses with a bit more interest.
Addendum: The clerics of a thousand years ago learned how to memorize stuff, but they had stuff to memorize. That's much different than remembering accurately something that was told to you as a story. Humans are famous for getting things wrong via human memory time and time again. How do you fact check stuff fifty years later, yet again 2,000 years later. Can't be done. Especially when there are no facts in the first place.
