Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

Nevertheless, there is the goal that Vidal had for his novel, which he implemented by real and extensive research - including earwitness testimony transmitted through his own family. Classify that, dichotomizers. That the first sentence should be thought to pose a problem for "dichotomizers&qu...

Hayden White opened this thread and I have some further words of White that go to the heart of what I think is of most interest to members here. My impression is that most of us are interested in questions of factual events, whether such and such actually happened, or if so and so thought or did suc...

RJE , In defence of History Afterword page254 " "The criticism came from many different angles . Critics seemed to disagree fundamentally about many of its [ RJE's book] central theses. Such disagreements raise once more the question of how far the readers put meaning into a text , and ho...

Carrier's comment on the procurator-prefect issue re Pilate in On the Historicity of Jesus , p. 345 However, we must dismiss the argument that Tacitus can’t have been citing government records because he gets the office of Pilate wrong, mis-identifying him as a procurator when in fact he was a pref...

History and historical fiction have much in common, as we've discussed. That doesn't imply that I hold that there is literally no difference ever between them, nor that all instances are unclassifiable. What are some instances that you do think are "classifiable"? How do you distinguish b...

Holocaust deniers do not usually question that these and other ugly events happened. IIUC they would mostly agree that hundreds of thousands of Jews were either directly killed by the Nazis or died as a result of ill treatment. What they (wrongly) deny is that the Jews were victims of genocide, del...

I was reporting on the policies of the opposition, you can speak for the government :) Not sure if you were addressing this to me, but if you read the bulk of the Silencing the Past by Michel-Rolph Trouillot, not just a couple of paragraphs, you will see that the idea that history is merely educate...

"Good recovery"? You made a witty and artful answer to my objection against your imparting a genocidal perspective to a historical novelist's remark about an aesthetic aspect of history, which I had quoted with (smilied) approval. In American English, you were complimented for your art an...

iskander wrote: ↑Tue Aug 01, 2017 8:33 am
NB. History is an educated opinion

You have not yet finished reading Richard Evans' In DeFence of History -- you have not read the last chapter, 8, "Objectivity and It's Limits"

But it is possible to write a fictional work in the style of a historical one. Indeed it is. Much of Herodotus is fiction even though it is mixed with "Histories". He appears to have fabricated some sources. So is Thucydides' description of the Athenian plague based on his imagination. Th...