... There is no doubt that memory theory contributes to our study of the transmission of Jesus material, but it is too often used uncritically to buttress the general reliability of the Gospels. Such an approach ignores an important facet of memory theory, namely memory distortion. This paper investigates the relationship between redactional activity and memory distortion.

Garments are a social obligation in a dressed society, and going without clothes is generally to risk social punishment or some degree of social exclusion; the common dream of appearing naked in public is interpreted as a nightmare. The contrast of nakedness and dress communicates some of the most basic differentiations of human experience: death and life, weakness and power, savagery and civilization. Naked bodies may be described in terms of Judith Butler’s category of the abject; without the social categorization of clothing, naked bodies are abjected, removed from codes of cultural intelligibility, yet still have the discursive power to disrupt. This paper will explore the notion of the discursive abject in the context of clothed and unclothed bodies in the synoptic gospels; examined within this framework of the abject, Jesus’ commands regarding the clothed/unclothed performance of the body have important unexplored social consequences.

The exposed female body is a familiar trope of the prophetic rhetoric, with the power to incite, shock, shame, disgust, arouse or inspire an audience. Viewing a naked body is an interactive experience between the one who sees and the one who is seen, in which gender is a significant factor. How one perceives a naked body varies according to the gender and sexual orientation of the subject as well as the object. This paper offers a gender analysis of the naked body based on Jeremiah 13 in which the male prophet and female Zion are asked to strip. In the first part of Jeremiah 13, God commands Jeremiah to wear, remove and then bury a soiled loincloth. The subject shifts in the second part to address Zion whose body will be exposed. Using the work of Michael Satlow, who asserts that the meaning of the naked body is context-dependent and that female nakedness is understood differently than male nakedness in the ancient world, I suggest that the exposed male body functions differently than the female body in Jeremiah and throughout the Prophets. This difference reflects the role of the prophet as the embodied word of God. Whereas the naked female body functions as a rhetorical device employed by the prophets to shame and incite their audience, the male naked body is a sign from God to be read and interpreted.