Historiography

By:  Erick Nelson
Last Updated:  October 23, 2000

Question

"Why should we believe any historical accounts, especially those that were written a long time ago by people who may have been biased?"

Guidelines

Inscriptions and Artifacts

I was talking to Bob Passantino about verifying NT accounts in various ways by comparing them to secular history, and I stopped and asked him "How do we know that ANY of the accounts is accurate in any way? What's the starting point." (We had up 'till then been taking some accounts as the standard, etc.) His response was excellent. He said "inscriptions and artifacts" (or something like that. We have, for instance, a pretty good idea that some emporer really lived if we have statues of him, inscriptions of tributes to him, inscriptions on his tomb, etc. In many cases, it strains credulity to think that people would go to the trouble of chiseling rock and building tombs in order to fake out posterity. It's kind of like the Rosetta Stone.


"No Ax to Grind" Principle

(I made this principle up, but there has to be a real name for it somewhere). There are lots of letters, records of monetary transactions, etc. which aren't "historical accounts" in the strict
sense. For instance, I read dozens of Mormon diaries at the university library at BYU where the people mentioned hearing Brigham Young sermons where he pronounced the "Adam God" doctrine (Mormons now generally deny that he taught this). They weren't trying to *prove* that this doctrine was taught, they often just mentioned it in passing. Whatever their ax to grind, it wasn't THAT.

Similarly, Irenaeus wrote to an old friend, Florinus, that he should come back to the Lord, and talked about their mutual experience of Polycarp, how they used to listen to him talk about his (Polycarp's) discipleship under John the Apostle. Now, Irenaeus wasn't trying to convince Florinus of this fact - his ax to grind wasn't in proving the Polycarp was connected to John, he was using this common knowledge to suppor the real ax he had to grind, namely getting Florinus to repent and return to Christ.


Eyewitness Evidence

There are recognized legal standards of dealing with eyewitness evidence, hearsay, etc., which are based on common sense notions, and assume that a person is conversant with his own experience. If eyewitness evidence didn't count, we'd have a hard time running court-rooms at all (not that it works so well in real life, but that's another issue).  Since we can't directly cross-examine eye-witnesses who are dead, there are standards for dealing with this, too. We must take into account whether they were really present, in their right minds, etc., and also bias, whether they'd profit from a lie, etc. etc.


Publicly Observable Evidence 

Any historian, when trying to give an account of the facts, should ultimately derive his account from publicly observable evidence - that which can be verified by other researchers. He ought to be clear when speculating about motives, etc., as opposed to relating external events.


Corroboration, Collateral Evidence

This kind of goes with #1 and #2, but is not as foundational, if you will. Ramsay (early 1900's) wrote a terrific book about Acts, from the viewpoint of an archeologist. I don't know that he was a believer, either. He says that the shorelines and customs changed in certain ways from 30-40 AD and 80-100 AD, and that the writer of Acts got everything right from a 30-40 AD perspective, which would be unlikely or even impossible in a later writer. Several references which used to be mocked as unsubstantiated have since been confirmed by archeological finds. The response to this is sometimes that a later writer used verbatim earlier travel diaries, thus achieving "versimilitude"
(realism) - so there's always a way to wiggle out of this a bit. 


Agreement in Independent Accounts

If two accounts agree on a fact, and if they don't have a clear bias in that regard, and if they are independent, then it's more likely that they are telling the truth.