Keep this in mind when you think of Jesus

Collective memory, a term coined by sociologist Maurice Halbwachs in the early twentieth century, is a shared understanding of the past. Unlike history, collective memory can be based on something other than historical fact. And while history reproduces the past, collective memory more often represents it. This is because collective memory is malleable—its understanding of the past shifts not with the revelation of new historical facts, but rather with changing notions in the present. While historians and scholars look to ‘history’ to understand the past, for most of the public, collective memory defines their interpretation of the past.