A little while ago I asked, “How far back is ‘living memory'”? I got some interesting answers, but, far more interesting, Tom Schmidt was inspired to dig out some family memories of his own. His post here deserves to be read by us all. It includes mention of memories of both C. S. Lewis, and the US Civil War.
C. S. Lewis died in 1963. That’s almost 60 years ago. Yet it does not seem very long ago, and meeting people who met Lewis is far from improbable. We have a wealth of information about him.
Yet 60 years after the death and resurrection of Jesus in AD 30 is AD 90. I think that most of us would feel that by AD 90 the number of living witnesses might be getting thin. But quite probably we are wrong to think so, simply by analogy with C.S.Lewis.
thank you for this Roger, I did fix how the pictures display.
Roger, I can’t resist commenting even though it’s an old post because it’s a concept lost on those who diss Christianity. I even had a Jewish woman tell me that Josephus couldn’t possibly have known anything about Jesus because he was born in 37AD. A little arithmetic tells us that in 130AD or even later, there were folks still around who knew someone who had seen Jesus.
I was eleven years old in 1956 when I saw Samuel Seymour live on the TV show I’ve Got a Secret. He had vivid memories of Lincoln’s assassination. I made special trip to the National Museum of Funeral History in Houston, Texas mainly to see a hair from Lincoln’s head. Time is a continuum. It doesn’t start and stop except for those who have a problem with Christianity.
Thank you for sharing that memory! That shows how easy it is, for an anecdote to pass down the years.
A dictionary of Biblical archaeology states that it is impossible to be sure but, “The fact that Suetonious describes in his Lives of the Caesars, the appearance of emperors a century before his time, opens the remote possibility that the Catacombs of Sts. Nereus and Achilles could just possibly have retained a thread of memory…the head and bust of Christ form a medallion in the vaulted ceiling, reflecting the early Christian practice of covering the faces of the dead with a handkerchief bearing the likeness of Christ.” Edward M. Blaiklock, Likeness of Jesus, The New International Dictionary of Biblical Archaeology, p.270-271.
Though the Shroud of Turin is a fake, there’s a photo of the Catacombs image on a shroud website:
https://www.shroud.com/pdfs/sn100Feb97Part29.pdf