After Larry Dinkens on the Bible Memory Goal site mentioned Jerry Lucas as a source for Bible memorization, I realized that I should have gotten a copy of his Remember the Word so I did. And it’s a good thing because his attempt at creating a system for memorizing the gist of the Gospels is groundbreaking. He follows the four books from verse to verse picking out important themes and tying them together in associations that connect in basic stories.
I have been working on developing the same type of system without knowing how Jerry did his. I prepared about 600 pages of material backed by psychological studies to understand what the best system would be for getting to the same point that Jerry has published. Right now I am in the middle of John and I think it’s going well.
Jerry writes about 50 basic pages of a summary of using the Major system and substitute words from what was written in the book he co-authored with the late Harry Lorayne, The Memory Book (1975). But if you don’t know that book, you should find a place in your library for at least a used copy.
He then spends about 250 pages on many non-relevant associations which are hard for me to remember. His mind must have been a beautiful place to live because he was able to capture all these seemingly random and bizarre pictures and keep them there. Without relevancy and more reinforcement I wasn’t able to continue a line of study without my current system. Here’s an excerpt from Luke 9:
Find the Cross looking at a jar wrestling a ham. Jerusalem. (verse 51) A Western Union messenger wearing a dunce hat is standing next to the jar and ham. (verse 52) A large fire is about to consume a small village to remind you of verses 53 through 56. Next you see a Cross along a road (verse 57) A fox coming out of a hole rests its head on a coffin that has the “FATHER” on it. On the coffin is a bird nest. (verses 58, 59, and 60) The man wearing a dunce hat has one hand on a plow while he waves good-by to a house. (verses 61 and 62) Strengthen all your associations when you review the picture and the explanations.
These sections are about Samaritan opposition and the cost of following Jesus. The keywords do relate to the verses but I have issues. My reviews don’t stick when I do this. What I found was missing was what I call literary logic, a necessary part of helping you to remember how the story flows from keyword to keyword and that requires a relevant story to back it. The actions from visual image to visual image have to make sense in a story and not just be a list of associations carreening left and right with objects and people popping up at random. Also, we need a good techinique on reviewing which has been explored heavily in psychology.
At the end of the book, he mentions that his verbatim method is just tying in peg words relating to the verse numbers. That’s what I think works the best with this type of system too.
I don’t know anyone who has tried this system but here on this forum, there might be some folks who have so I’d love to hear your experiences with this book if anyone has any. It’s a great historical book for a system to learn the Bible and I hope to stand on his shoulders a little when I finish mine.
On one of the Memory podcasts they were talking about this and the person doing it ran in to memory issues and needed to back it up with mnemonics.
I wonder if you would be better off with the journey method?
I do wonder if that was the point of Labyrinths in churches.
@Minotaur, if you can remember what podcast you heard that on, I’d be interested in checking it out. My New Testament mnemonics are based on a story (journey) method and I wouldn’t be able to remember what I want without that.
I don’t think labyrinths would be appropriate terrains for memory work since they don’t have any unique features. However, they make great meditation and reflection areas so that you can do lectio divina. The method of divine reading (lectio divina), is a traditional monastic practice of reading the scriptures carefully and slowly, meditating on them to allow the Holy Spirit to illuminate them or placing yourself in the story to understand it better but not doing theological analysis, praying about them for direction in your life and then contemplating in silent prayer about the verse.
I had the book (and cards) at one point (many years ago now). At that time, I did memorize the Gospel of John essentially word for word.
I found it relatively easy to remember because the explanations in the book followed the illustrations on the cards. This might have been b/c the images were in a spatial relationship to each other on the cards.
The word for word part came just from being very familiar with the biblical text. A friend of mine was stunned at the time when I recited essentially word for word the first 4 chapters of John as he followed along in the Gospel itself.
He previously thought I was just reading the first chapter from John over the phone. Hence the recitation in person for 4 chapters.
I liked his system in the book for picturing the book and chapter. He only lists the words for the 4 gospels at the beginning of each gospel he goes through in detail. Does anyone have a list of the remining new testament book/chapter words?
Jerry certainly used more modern methods for memory tools than have been written about before. But he unfortunately stopped after the gospels. In my first post I mentioned working through John and I’m happy to say that I completed the NT with book, chapter, and theme mnemonics. It’s the only list that I know of.
I also made list of images for each chapter of the Bible, but they are largely untested. New Testament version is here: New Testament - Google Sheets
What you might want to try: find summaries for each chapter of the Bible, and see if you can compress each summary down to one unique image per chapter. Here’s one that I use, where each chapter was originally summarized as a tweet: Bible Summary - Matthew
Labyrinths - if you think about what you wrote that is basically a form of memory practice. Also in Memory Code those famous paths in the desert maybe memory places and they have to be much harder to use.
Also the Gospels are the same story from 4 points of view however the rest of the Bible is a lot more disjointed than that. Just look a psalms which might be really interesting from a memory point of view.
And his work is really really good. If you want something to put in your collection or be part of your daily study… Get Doug’s book… Thanks Doug, I really appreciate the way you think through this all. Keep up the good work. Amazon.com