I have enjoyed my conversation with Bryce Walker regarding the discipline of biblical studies (see my last entry, “Further discussion on biblical studies.”), and I am excited to see that a handful of other bloggers have joined us (see “Bailey, Kirk, Frost, and Walker on biblical studies.”), but today I want to venture away from giving a direct response to provide a caveat regarding the relationship between historiography, historical method, and “the past.”
I decided to write this post after receiving a few questions from Bobby Grow. I want to make sure that I am understood when I talk about “the past” or “history” and historiography and historical method. Now it is true that scholars conclude that something happened in the past based on the results of their historical method. According to Merriam-Webster historiography is “the writing of history based on the critical examination of sources, the selection of particulars from the authentic materials, and the synthesis of particulars into a narrative that will stand the test of critical methods.” Historical method are the tools/criteria used to do historical work. While we use a particular approach to understand history it is not one and the same with the events themselves, obviously. Yet historiography and historical method is essential for doing good history, whether one is writing on the Babylonian Empire or the modern United States, whether writing a biography on Gengis Khan or Steve Jobs. There has to be checks and balances for saying things about the past.
While some jest that all historical work is essentially “historical fiction” because historians can’t explain everything that happened in the past there is a sense in which the discipline remains our best method of understanding and explaining the past. This is not to say that historians are objective, nor is the work of historians infallible, but our understanding of history is better because of the methodology, not worse. As I have said, yes, our telling of Julius Caesar crossing the Rubicorn while marching toward Rome may be subjective, and it may be told from many angles, but I am quite sure that no one has suggested he sat on a unicorn and I don’t know of anyone who outright denies that the event happened.
So historiography is fallible as the historians who use various methods, who interpret the sources, and who reconstruct the explanatory narrative–but fallibility and subjectivity are not baseless relativism.
When I do historical studies on Jews or Romans in the first century, early Christianity, Saul of Tarsus, or Jesus of Nazareth I do it as a committed Christian. I have to admit that I am confessional. Of course, I have presuppositions and bias that color my research. That doesn’t mean that I don’t try to be as objective as possible. Rather, I am acknowledging that pure objectivity is impossible. An atheist who does historical work may be more comfortable with the naturalistic assumptions of historiography, but she is bias as well. Everyone is bias!
Yet part of the task of doing historical work is know that there is a fine line between what historiographical method can tell us about what happened in the past and the unsettling reality that there could be things that happened that we could never determine to have happened when using our methods and tools.
This is one reason that I struggled with Michael Licona’s The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical Approach. Personally, I found his arguments for the resurrection convincing, but I feared that he was begging the question by stretching historical method into areas and presumptions that we wouldn’t allow for Muslim or Buddhist scholars who are trying to prove some of the more outlandish claims of their religion. In other words, I don’t think I can use historical method to prove that Jesus has been resurrected and ascended to the right hand of God the Father anymore than a Muslim can use historiography to claim the the Prophet Muhammad received the Quran via supernatural dictation. Christians and Muslims can have good reasons for believing this or that, but historiography is critical by nature.
Historical method limits what historians can say confidently about past events. Sometimes this is hard to recognize when we read works of history because often the narrative constructed by a historian may be based on their personal conclusions but it could have far exceeded what they can know by means of strict historical method. Often critical scholars like Marcus Borg and J.D. Crossan say more (in my opinion) than can be verified by their method. So do confessional, critical scholars like N.T. Wright, and there is nothing wrong with creating a narrative that one thinks explains the data. But, for example, E.P. Sanders when he used strict historical methodology came up with this very short list of things we can know about Jesus of Nazareth (from Jesus and Judaism: a good summary from where I borrowed the below list, can be found here):
- Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist.
- Jesus was a Galilean who preached and healed.
- Jesus called disciples and spoke of there being twelve.
- Jesus confined his activity to Israel.
- Jesus engaged in a controversy about the temple.
- Jesus was crucified outside Jerusalem by the Roman authorities.
- After his death Jesus’ followers continued as an identifiable movement.
- At least some Jews persecuted at least parts of the new movement, and it appears that this persecution endured at least to a time near the end of Paul’s career.
Craig A. Evans has added a few more points. For example, he is convinced that we can know that people believed Jesus to be an exorcist and a healer (which is different from saying that we can know Jesus was an exorcist and a healer).
Some Christians has an allergic reaction to historiography because they equate the above list with being the only things that could be true of Jesus of Nazareth. This is not so. There are more things that can be true, but we can reach them using historiography.
Can we use historical method to prove the resurrection? I don’t think so. I appreciate the works of Wright and Licona on this topic, and I find their work convincing, but honestly it does move from strict historical method to personal conclusions. There is nothing wrong with this, critical scholars do it, but we should be honest about what is happening.
There are things that can be safely deduced by means of historical method that lead me to favor the proposal the the resurrection of Jesus happened in space-time: the lack of body produced by critics of Jesus’ disciples, Saul’s conversion, James’ conversion, the rise and spread of the Christian movement. These don’t guarantee the resurrection by any means, but if someone is inclined to believe the resurrection happened these things enforce that belief. If someone is not inclined they are easy to dismiss.
So historians cannot say Jesus walked on water, or exorcised demons, or raised Lazarus from the dead. We can say people believed these things happened, or people remember things happening that they interpreted to have been miracles, but whether we personally believe these things is a step of faith, not something verifiable by means of historiography.
In fact, historical method should reach the conclusion that Jesus’ resurrection is impossible, because it is, if God didn’t intervene in history. Of course, Christians claim that the resurrection is not something people could discover by deduction (it is revealed, since God apocalypsed into human history), nor is it something that happened before, or since, so the Christian confession of the resurrection as something that stands against the way things usually work is fully compatible with the claims of historians that the resurrection is something that may be beyond historical verifiability. This doesn’t mean that the resurrection did not happen. It means that it was so unique if it did happen that there is no naturalistic methodology to verify that it did.
the archives near Emmaus 
We need to be careful here. Historiography is not the *methods* that historians employ to analyze the past, or to discern what happened. Historiography is in its most basic definition, “the history of writing history.” In other words, it is what other historians have said about particular events, or, their methodologies involved in making their argument. So the question here is a methodological, or historical theory’s based question: can historians using their methodology, make decisions about if supernatural events occurred in the past.
Michael Licona’s book is a historiography, because in his book he takes a look at what other historians have concluded about Jesus, and critiques their conclusions and methodologies involved. Likewise, when I write a historiographical paper, or include a historiographical section in my research papers, I am looking at what other historians have said about the topic, and explain some weaknesses in their approach, but I am not necessarily talking about what criterion historians should use to do their job.
Between
I think historiography as the “history of writing history” is a narrow definition. I have seen it used to describe methodology as well. Of course, there is a thin line between talking about how people have done history and those methods and what they mean to present historians. Our study of how history has been done bleeds over into how we do it now. How history has been done influenced how we do history or whether we reject older methods. I understand the point you are making though.
If you were to parse the study of historiography as a study of how we’ve done history from current historical methods what would you call our methods? Or if you were to parse the descriptive form the prescriptive what would you call the prescriptive?
I’m thinking maybe historical method? (For example, there is no doubt that Licona’s work on historiography looks at how its been done, but that influences how he does it, right?) Maybe that is the best parse: historiography from historical method?
Ok, so I edited it, parsing it this way. It does conceptualize better. Thanks for the insight.
I would say historiography involves methodology, and possibly, depending the nature of the research project, critiquing that methodology, but *is not* the methodology itself. Most history done today, and probably how most students are taught would be more of an empirical based methodology. However, there are other popular schools of interpretation, i.e. feminism, post-modern, marxist, political, psycho-analytical, oral history, etc. Each with their own unique methodologies, presumptions, and focuses.
I’m sure you’ll recognize some of the major schools of interpretation in how one approaches theology/biblical studies. 🙂
Good points.
By the way, do you recommend a good book advocating mainstream approaches/methods?
The Houses of History by Anna Green and Kathleen Troup provides a real basic intro to the various 20th century schools of historical thought, providing a brief introduction of their history and what they focus on. They also provide a snippet of written work of a historian who interprets from that perspective, to sort of give the reader a taste of that particular school. It could have been done better, but I haven’t seen too many works that really go through the various approaches all at once. Another work is History and Historians, by Mark T. Gilderhus. Something more advanced would be What Is History? by EH Carr. From Reliable Sources by Martha Howell and Walter Prevenier is a pretty good intro to methodology.
Another thing worth considering. This is specific towards ideas similar to what Bobby Grow is positing ( theo-logical/Christ-logical interpretation), which would actually qualify as a historiographical approach. It would be more of a speculative approach, something along the lines of Mircea Elide’s cyclic vs. guided-linear history, Marx or Hegel’s dialectic, and most recently, Fukuyama’s The End of History. So really, your conversation with Bobby Grow would qualify as a historiographical conversation whether all parties at hand realize this or not.
Very true. Thank you for the recommendations! I’ve been considering J.M. Banner’s ‘Being a Historian’ and Mary Fulbrook’s ‘Historical Theory’ for a few weeks now. Any interaction with those?
I haven’t, although ‘Historical Theory’ looks like it could be a good one from what I was able to skim through on the Amazon sample. John Fea’s ‘Was America Founded as a Christian Nation’ is a good introduction book as well. Especially once you see what he’s doing with the information throughout the book, and aligning it with some of the criterion historians work with.
Interesting post (and discussion).
To throw in my 2 cents, I’m a Christian and also approach my historical research (including research on earliest Christianity) as a methodological naturalist; not to be confused with ontological naturalism. Far from seeing a problem or inherent “contradiction” here, I think all Christians, including evangelicals, should also approach their historical research likewise as methodological naturalists.
The entire enterprise of historical inquiry is predicated upon methodologically naturalist assumptions: we use evidence that is accessible to our observational abilities and arguments about it that are up for debate and criticism. This is, in fact, the basis of all specialized academic inquiry into our environments. Try thinking about this for another field: would you want to fly on an airplane designed by an engineer whose engineering methodology involved “supernatural” assumptions that required him to modify the basic empirical and hypothesizing methods that aeronautical engineers work with in practice? I’m fairly confident that even the most ardent American evangelical apologists against “naturalism” would not choose such an airplane — well, unless they needed some apologetics capital in the eyes of certain people : ).
Bringing this back around to historical study, we do not admit supernatural explanations into our empirical research precisely because they cannot be used in a communally critical empirical investigation. They cannot be falsified, adjudicated, assessed, tested, quantified, etc. Again, if we stay away from our “close to home” examples of studying religion and the Bible, this is obvious to everyone. Let’s say someone else argues that Obama effectively won the 2008 US Presidential election and is now the President — seems like a fair empirical observation and associated hypothesis given the events since November 2008. But let’s say that I retort with, “you only think that because you have anti-supernatural presuppositions; in fact, just as the vision the god Denkarri sent me last night indicates, this is all an illusion and Sarah Palin is and has been president since 2008…” Anyone could argue anything with supernatural explanations — they stop inquiry.
We don’t usually think about the academic (non) value of supernatural explanations because what we Christians usually mean in our apologies for supernatural explanations isn’t the admissibility of supernatural explanations in general, but the admissibility of our supernatural explanations. And, of course, our supernatural explanations seem quite plausible to us.
But when matters are put this way it’s easier to see another basic academic flaw in such an approach: it actually amounts to assuming we are right at the outset of investigation; or, put more in terms of the specifics of biblical studies and history of early Christianity, it amounts to privileging the claims of the sources that we like and/or consider authoritative. While such an approach is theologically appealing to many of us, it’s worth pointing out that, from the standpoint of any kind of empirical methodology, such an approach is utterly arbitrary, self justifying and (worst of all when it comes to doing history) a hindrance to doing accurate historical research.
An additional benefit of everyone adopting methodological naturalism, beyond that it’s how we already operate in all other inquiry in our lives (and thus it’s actually just being consistent), is that this forces us to be explicit about exactly when and why we do use supernatural explanations. Sticking with Brian’s example, let’s say we want to discuss the resurrection of Jesus. I too think the resurrection happened, but I don’t think I can get to that from standard historical inquiry. In order to hold that position I’m utilizing certain supernatural claims…and it’s important for me to be clear and honest about that, especially because that thus means that when I’m advocating Christ’s resurrection I am no longer operating within the field of academic history, but (for lack of better terminology) a some kind of field of theological history.
Perhaps there is a way to do critical academic history that involves the possibility of supernatural explanations. I haven’t seen it, but it would involve a way to make such explanations and assumptions themselves topics for debate.
Anyway, my (long) 2 cents…
Stephen,
Herbert Butterfield http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Butterfield , attempted to involve in his academic history.
to involve *supernatural explanation (like providence) in his academic history.
I share Brian’s concern with miracles and the supernatural. I haven’t read Licona’s book yet (the things huge), but I am familiar with his argument from watching his debates and reading his other two books; and my concern has always been other religious supernatural events— this is my concern with Reformed Epistemology as well. This problem, of course, could be eliminated by presupposing Christianity— however, Licona’s purpose (at least from his other works) is to argue for the resurrection without presupposing Christianity. So, I think for now, the safest thing for historians to do is to just stay out of the supernatural, leave things short and sweet —- like E.P. Sander’s list above — and allow the theologians and philosophers to provide the meaning and value of the historical data, or the likelihood of miraculous events. It can be tough enough as it is, for historians to locate the “natural” causes of historical events— i.e. the cause of the French Revolution.
Stephen
I think you provide a convincing argument for why Christians should not seek to incorporate the supernatural into their historical method. It is similar to the argument against scientist doing it. It is fine for a scientist to have reasons for belief in God or God’s activity, but if they inserted God into their research every time something was difficult or hard to explain, while this might be true, it altogether ends scientific investigation. Likewise with historical investigation.
Between
Agreed.
In Lincona’s book, the miracles of Jesus are among the highest confidence of certainty ideas there are due to the attestation of some non Christians in ancient sources.
Multiple sources are among his criteria along with other ideas.
Patrick
Personally, I do believe Jesus did miraculous works. Likewise, I think Licona makes a solid apologetical case. The question is whether historical method should be naturalistic. I tend to think that it should for the reasons given by Stephen above, though I am not opposed to an apologetical defense of Jesus’ miracles.