"Gospel Quest" (or The Jesus Timeline)

[Mudhammam]

Your parents are also perfectly capable of being completely wrong about what they think they saw, heard, felt, or thought 40 years ago.

http://phys.org/news139159412.html

The work by psychologists at the University of St Andrews shows that the human memory can be remarkably fragile and even inventive when it comes to remembering past events, often completely rewriting 'autobiographical belief'.

I mean, it seems so basically obvious to me that it hardly needs explaining to people, yet it does.

That reminds me that recently my brother did a sit-down interview with my 104 great-grandmother, who is of sound mind (though she can't hear for shit--my brother had the questions pre-prepared for her) and after the interview my grandma (her daughter) leaned in to my brother and said something to the effect of, "You know, I don't think she's remembering such and such correctly. Such and such event didn't happen, or it didn't happen like that." And like you said, that's in a person's own life, to say nothing of the transmission of stories, the "telephone game."