Hey guys! One of my main goals for mnemotechnics has been to memorize the New Testament. Obviously, there’s a lot of data there. At first I tried to come up with some sort of comprehensive system to memorize whole books at a time: I thought it would be cool to do something like an artificial memory palace with a wing for each book, chapter, etc. I abandoned this pretty quickly after realizing how dang many loci I would have to build myself(Romans alone has 433 verses, some of which are very long and would need a few loci on their own). I started trying to do a chapter or two at a time with different methods. I memorized Philemon(shortest epistle, 3 chapters total) using a journey around my house. The issue with this was that I didn’t encode for chapter:verse references(hadn’t created my PAO yet), and that using one-locus-per-verse my loci were just so crowded that recall was awful even with frequent revision. I memorized Titus Chapter 2 using the story method, which was a little more effective, but the story was just too long for good recall, even though I did find the story method good for reciting the passage all at once. I also didn’t encode Titus 2 for chapter:verse references. Overall, I found that creating memorable images was really difficult because the New Testament(mainly the epistles) constantly goes back and forth between concrete advice to the letters’ recipient, and abstract theological concepts.
Recently I’ve abandoned my master plan, and my hopes of a sprawling memory palace.
I realized that I read my bible every morning, and each day I usually come across a verse or two that I’ve read a million times and can paraphrase easily, but would really like to memorize. This has led me to try a more a la carte verse-by-verse method, and it’s been working really well.
Using James 2:11 and Philippians 2:3 as examples, the gist of my new method is this:
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I generally use a PAO system for chapter:verse reference, but I don’t use people from my list; I use whoever comes to mind first when I hear the book’s title. For James it’s my friend James, for Philippians it’s the chef–Philip–from the restaurant I work at over the summer. The place is not a locus in the sense of the palace or journey method. I use the same place as a general background for every image within the book. I’ve just been choosing whatever location comes to mind first when I hear the name of the book. For James, it’s my old middle school William James middle. For Philippians, it’s the restaurant where Philip and I worked.
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use the Action from your PAO for the chapter, and the Object for the verse number. James 2:11 turns into: James SigNing a TaTToo. Philippians 2:3 turns into Philip SigNing a SeMi(truck).
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don’t stress about creating images that relate to the meaning of the verse, unless one comes to you easily. Sounds-like images have become my bread and butter. Also, if you’ve been a Christian a long time like I have, odds are that there are hundreds of verses you can already paraphrase or finish if someone else gives you the first few words. For this reason, I don’t crowd my memory with word-for-word images; I just take whatever few words someone else would say to get me started, and encode those keywords.
Example
James 2:11(HCSB version) says: “for He who said ‘Do not commit adultery’ also said ‘Do not murder.’ So if you do not commit adultery, but you do murder, you are a lawbreaker.” I know I have to use James signing a tattoo in my image to get my reference right. I know that everything is going to take place at the main staircase of my old middle school. I also know the verse is about God saying something, so the first thing that popped into my head is James “signing” a tacky Mike Tyson face tattoo on a big stone Olmec head(they just seem ancient and mysterious to me so for me it’s a good image for God). Coming out of the Olmec head’s mouth is a bunch of babies stacked on top of each other in a trench coat pretending to be an adult(this is how he says “adultery”). The top baby is drinking from a big glass bottle of “Redrum,”(The Shining reference, this is how I encode for the word “murder”).
I’ve only encoded for the first sentence, because if I hear the first sentence I can finish the second without a problem. My images also have very minimal logical connection or order(this one might be the most logical image I have so far): I don’t worry about grammar or even word order. As long as the babies in a trench coat and the bottle of Redrum are present somewhere in the image I know where I’m headed.
The reason I like this system is two-way recall. If someone recites the verse I can find the reference: I hear “He who said” and “adultery” and “murder,” which are sufficient to cue the image where all these things are present. Once I have the image in my head, I also see James is there, and he’s signing(ch2) a tattoo(v11). If someone asks me what James 2:11 says, I just build the image in my head piece by piece, “well I know James is there… and he’s in William James… and he’s signing… a tattoo… what’s he signing? Oh, an Olmec head, which is saying etc etc.”
I like going verse-by-verse because: 1) if there’s an easy passage with one hard verse, I can memorize all the easy ones and come back to the hard one when I come up with an image 2) I don’t have to come up with a connection between verses, which takes some pressure off of me because that’s one less association to build 3) it’s easy to put one verse on an Anki flashcard for review
I didn’t spend a lot of time organizing this post. I just needed to take a study break and thought I might share something that’s helped me. I hope it’s helpful for you too!