Memory and Narrative – and Time

This article seeks to develop the recent attention to memory by outlining a hermeneutical approach that links memory closely to philosophical reflections on referentiality, narrativity and temporality. From insights of modern and ancient theories of memory, the the present approach insists that memory is referential in that its images are held to derive from outside memory, that it is narrative in that it is believed to picture a socially conditioned reality, and that it is temporal in that it depends on time in order to navigate between the past and the present. This hermeneutical approach is form-critically and rhetorically relevant, because it becomes visible in the uses of forms taught in the Progymnasmata, especially in the attempt to present them with convincing clarity, as seen in the combination of two chreiai and one diēgēma Mark 1:29–39. Further study of the hermeneutics of memory will redirect our concept of history and reveal the extent to which memory served the early Christians in their search for existential meaning and identity.