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”.