If you’ve been reading here for any length
of time, you’ve almost surely noticed that in attempting to understand the
meaning of the any given Bible text, I am reluctant to allow too much weight to
the opinion of historians.
This is not because I automatically suspect
all historians of having agendas, even though the politicization of history is
arguably more pervasive than the politicization of science. Science deals (or
ought to deal) in events we can replicate experimentally, and should in theory
be far less likely to cede territory to the circumscriptions of PC ideologues
than should the humanities.
But practitioners of the hard sciences are now
demonstrating almost daily that even they cannot always be trusted to stick to
the facts. It would be imprudent for us to exercise greater faith in
historians, notwithstanding their relabeling of history as a “social science”.
So the Story Goes
So, no, my lack of enthusiasm for the work
of historians is not just my suspicious nature talking, and my reserve is not
unique. Respected Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld sheds some
light on the work process of his fellow historians finding their feet in the
early 1970s:
“A good story was true and accurate and integrated as many other stories as possible. If you were really up to date, you would base it not just on old books but on some sophisticated tool like carbon dating or air photography. But a story it remained. The reason for telling it, if any, was to fill ‘gaps’ in existing knowledge. The fact that these gaps only existed in the minds of a few professional scholars was ignored.”
— Martin van Creveld, Clio & Me: An Intellectual Autobiography
Or, as Elvis Costello delicately put it, “History repeats the old conceits.” And as van Creveld appears to have absorbed
by osmosis, in his field the governing metric for a successful paper is
not truth but something else:
“I had always been worried that my work might not be original, given that each story I picked up seemed to have been covered already by so many different historians.”
Apparently the key to success for a
historian is originality. Who knew?
Novelty as an End Game
With novelty as the end game, less
principled historians might be tempted to advance questionable-but-intriguing
hypotheses even in the face of the established facts. Van Creveld found a
practical solution that allowed him to retain his integrity while still being
original:
“Shifting the emphasis to questions enabled me to evade that problem. After all, the number of questions is infinite.”
Or as he later notes, quoting an old Dutch
proverb: “A single fool can ask more questions than ten wise men can answer.”
Van Creveld is apparently not the only
respected historian who’s discovered this trick, and it explains something I’ve
encountered repeatedly in researching the opinions of secular historians on the
Old Testament: for every consensus historical view, you always find a plethora
of Dickie Opposites sharing their own contrary and sometimes outright bizarre
conclusions. Such departures from historical orthodoxy are usually couched as
musings rather than dogma. As van Creveld observes, this permits the writer to
incorporate sufficient novelty in his thesis to create a stir while leaving
himself the escape hatch of merely having posed a perfectly innocent and
plausible question in the event his historical theory happens to
fall flat.
In Search of the Flaky Outlier
In their desire to make an impact, I suppose,
younger historians are not crazily dissimilar to journalists. Which means that in the day of the Google search, every heresy-monger and his great aunt can easily find themselves a flaky outlier with a master’s/PhD combo to validate their
offbeat notions about New Testament culture and rationalize why Paul or Peter didn’t actually mean what he appears to mean.
Kinda leaves the truth-seeker out in the
cold, doesn’t it? Or at least walking around in an almost impenetrable fog
of conflicting viewpoints, most of which he is unqualified to comment on with
authority because they concern the work of “experts”. Those who are ignorant of
the practices within the field can be forgiven for thinking that a consensus of
learned opinions ought to settle a matter once and for all. But first, try
finding one!
I have greatest confidence in historical
conclusions that can be demonstrated exclusively from within the pages of
scripture itself. Inspiration is our greatest safeguard from speculation, whimsy, originality and creativity,
all of which are detrimental to the search for truth.
The Holy Spirit I trust. Even translators I
trust. English Bible translation teams have a remarkable knack for drawing very
similar conclusions about the meaning of the same ancient texts time after
time, as any perusal of Bible Hub’s parallel versions tool demonstrates conclusively.
But historians? The jury is still out.
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