Social memory research has complicated the relationship between past and present because it is a relationship which finds expression in memorial acts such as storytelling and text-production.

 

This relationship has emerged as a dialectic in which “past” and “present” are mutually constitutive and implicating. The resultant complication directly affects the procedures and products of “historical Jesus” research, which depends particularly on the assumption that we can cleanly separate “authentic” from “inauthentic” traditions.

In Structuring Early Christian Memory Rafael Rodriguez analyzes the problems that arise from this assumption and proposes a “historical Jesus” program that is more sensitive to the entanglement of past and present.