Fake News: Martyrdom of Peter and Paul

[neilgodfrey]

Neil

Your remarks about Father Garraghan were discussable, and maybe we'll return to those, but the situation of Josephus is remarkable, too.

I would estimate that Josephus had a few interests in the immediate aftermath of the Jewish War that could have shaped his testimony at that time. Furthermore, when he wrote his later works, he had the benefit of his earlier written testimony to "refresh his recollection."

I agree that prompt recall is potentially more accurate than much later independent recall through unaided personal long-term memory. The case of Josephus, however, seems to caution us that a later date doesn't necessarily mean uniformly lower reliability.

I linked to a specific case where it is argued that time has modified Josephus's memory in order to present less reliable history. Memory inevitably shapes events to suit present needs.

I only mentioned Garraghan because (a) he specifies 20 years and (b) he was recommended (though perhaps unwittingly) by James McGrath as some sort of authority of historical methods -- and (c) the argument he makes is consistent with the standard advice given students about to undertake serious historical research and commendations by practising historians such as Richard Evans.

[neilgodfrey]

My point though is that the hostile bias per se of the source does not of itself give rise to doubts so much as a late appearance of evidence.

Hostility regarding sources does in itself raise doubt. It provides an epistemological quandary that requires resolution before one can use the material. Is the hostile witness manifesting their bias in the material they present? This can be answered in many cases when the material itself bears no tendentious views. Tertullian is hostile to Marcion, though most of what he provides from his source does not evince significant problems. Hostile mediation can have adverse effects on the passed on material through selection, leaving out things that perhaps is difficult to respond to or favorable to the source's cause or even just lacking interest to the hostile tradent. None of this necessarily reflects on the transmitted material, but there is no way of knowing, while the text remains overtly liable to hostile intervention, intervention not suggested with a non-hostile tradent.

I don't deny hostility or partisanship of any kind needs to be taken into account in order to know how best to use information.

By "hostile bias per se" giving rise to doubts "not so much as" the "late appearance of a source" I was thinking in particular of the case of Hitler's suicide.

Had the Russians (a source hostile to Hitler) withheld the evidence and only declared the evidence for the suicide much later -- surely questions would have been raised as a consequence of the delay.

Rightly or wrongly I understood that "we" first learned of the suicide from Russians who were surely a "hostile source" re Hitler. Hence "hostility per se".

(Information in any document, ostensibly partisan or not, needs to be tested against some type of independent or external measure.)

[neilgodfrey]

Richard John Evans :
-- In Defence of History (2004)

Happily RJE finds a friend on the biblical side of historical interests in "minimalist" Niels Peter Lemche who similarly points historians back to the Rankean basics in The Israelites In History and Tradition, 1998.

[iskander]

Richard John Evans :

' The application of philological techniques to historical sources was a major breakthrough. Ranke's principles still form the basis for much historical research and teaching today. History Special Subjects in many British universities offer a basic training in source-criticism; students are examined on extracts or ' gobbets ' from set documents and are expected to comment on them in terms of their internal consistency, their relationship to other document on the same subject, their reliability and their usefulness as a source . Questions of authenticity and attribution continue to be vitally important in historical research...

All these things have belonged to the basic training of historians since the nineteen century , and rightly so...'

[spin]

I don't deny hostility or partisanship of any kind needs to be taken into account in order to know how best to use information.

By "hostile bias per se" giving rise to doubts "not so much as" the "late appearance of a source" I was thinking in particular of the case of Hitler's suicide.

Had the Russians (a source hostile to Hitler) withheld the evidence and only declared the evidence for the suicide much later -- surely questions would have been raised as a consequence of the delay.

Rightly or wrongly I understood that "we" first learned of the suicide from Russians who were surely a "hostile source" re Hitler. Hence "hostility per se".

(Information in any document, ostensibly partisan or not, needs to be tested against some type of independent or external measure.)

Sorry, I misunderstood: I took the comment ("My point...") as coming back to the thread topic.

[iskander]

Richard John Evans :

' Clearly history is not a science in the sense that chemistry or biology are sciences. It cannot submit its data to scientific experiments; it cannot repeat its own experiments; it cannot control its materials. Wanting these, it will be said that of course history is not a science in any useful sense of the word. Yet it is equally clear that history uses or aspires to use the scientific method. That is, it tests all things which can be tested, and holds fast to what it finds to be true, in so far as it is able to make any findings at all. But how does history ’test’ things? What are the techniques of testing? How does it know when it has arrived at 'truth’ or even when it has achieved agreement of ‘facts’?

The chemist does not inject his personality, his beliefs and prejudices, into the chemicals which he uses in his experiments; how does the historian rid his materials of such foreign ingredients? Indeed can the term ‘scientific method’ ever mean the same thing in history that it means in the exact sciences?

Should it perhaps give place to a more realistic term such as ‘critical method,’ and should ‘scientific’ history yield to 'technical’ history? '

NB. Perhaps it should give place to a more realistic term such as ' educated opinion'.

[andrewcriddle]

It is somewhere in here that I see what I think is an unjustifiable difference in standards between most historians of biblical topics and the historians of most other areas.

Richard John Evans, historian of modern Germany, is one of my more recent readings (there are quite a few others) who writes of the basics of historical method:

They had to stick to ‘primary sources’, eyewitness reports and what Ranke called the ‘purest, most immediate documents’ which could be shown to have originated at the time under investigation, and avoid reliance on ‘secondary sources’ such as memoirs or histories generated after the event. Moreover, they had to investigate and subject to the critical method all the sources relating to the events in which they were interested. -- In Defence of History (2004)

Primary sources; from the time in question. [Strictly speaking, physically literally from the time in question -- that was the original meaning of primary sources. Copies of manuscripts are not primary sources by that standard.]

That excludes as secondary (with all that 'secondary' entails) anything that comes after the time in question.

But for sake of argument let's take surviving manuscripts of Josephus . . . .

Even when we look at the testimony of persons who are recollecting events they were personally involved in twenty years earlier we arguably find tendentious changes in memory. Josephus is a classic example since we can compare what he wrote in the immediate aftermath of the war with how his memory had been changed by life-circumstances/interests and pressures twenty years later.

I see no justification for lowering justified methodology when dealing with topics for which our evidence is relatively sparse. The sparseness of the evidence obliges us to ask questions that are limited to the ability of the nature of the evidence to answer.

For good or bad this is a criticism of ancient history as generally carried out not just a criticism of biblical and early Christian studies.

There are a few cases in the ancient world where enough primary sources (narrow sense) survive to allow historical reconstruction based almost entirely on such material. In general this is just not so.

From sometime in the European middle ages surviving documents become abundant enough to allow the historian to concentrate on narrowly defined primary sources. Before that one has to use more lenient standards.

See MI Finley Ancient History Evidence and Models for a discussion. (Finley believes that ancient historians have been too credulous of their sources but he is mainly criticising things like belief in the list of the Roman kings, the earliest surviving evidence of which is centuries later.)

Andrew Criddle

[DCHindley]

When I evaluate a secondary source (as this has to consist of over 90% of what has survived), I mentally remove the author's "color commentary" on matters such as motives and ethics of the protagonists from the narrative and see what kind of straightforward account is left. These stripped-down narratives are what I prefer to compare and contrast to ferret out historical nuggets.

FWIW, Neil had cited some modern historians comments about Hayden White's methods in the "How do you tell fiction from history?" thread, in which the persons quoted use quite a bit of "color commentary," which is all about how ignorant and stupid the other parties are. This tells me more about the person doing the reviling than the person being reviled. For instance, it is my experience, having read most of what he has produced, that White does not talk this way about those he disagrees with.

DCH

[neilgodfrey]

For good or bad this is a criticism of ancient history as generally carried out not just a criticism of biblical and early Christian studies.

There are a few cases in the ancient world where enough primary sources (narrow sense) survive to allow historical reconstruction based almost entirely on such material. In general this is just not so.

From sometime in the European middle ages surviving documents become abundant enough to allow the historian to concentrate on narrowly defined primary sources. Before that one has to use more lenient standards.

See MI Finley Ancient History Evidence and Models for a discussion. (Finley believes that ancient historians have been too credulous of their sources but he is mainly criticising things like belief in the list of the Roman kings, the earliest surviving evidence of which is centuries later.)

Andrew Criddle

Fortunately not all ancient historians have been so naive. I think especially of Steve Mason's most recent interpretation of Josephus's account of the Jewish war of 66-70 in which he first establishes the nature and character of Josephus's narrative to understand "what it is" and "what Josephus is doing" by writing it -- rather than naively accepting it as a chronicle of events written to answer our questions.

Mario Liverani brought to task his fellow ancient historians for their "lazy" way of taking Hittite inscriptions at face value to recreate Hittite history. Eric Cline has made similar criticisms, iirc.

"Generally" ancient historians limit the questions they ask and seek to answer according to the nature of the sources available.

[neilgodfrey]

FWIW, Neil had cited some modern historians comments about Hayden White's methods in the "How do you tell fiction from history?" thread, in which the persons quoted use quite a bit of "color commentary," which is all about how ignorant and stupid the other parties are. This tells me more about the person doing the reviling than the person being reviled. For instance, it is my experience, having read most of what he has produced, that White does not talk this way about those he disagrees with.

DCH

I don't recall anyone I quoted talking about the "ignorance" and "stupidity" of anybody. Certainly I don't recall citing anyone who "reviled" White. (I don't recall ever reading of any critic of White's work "reviling" him. I only recall respectful discussion and even tributes to where he has contributed to the profession.)

Can you point me to the culpable comments, please? Thanks

Nor does it sound like my style to be pointing to colour commentary commentators ..... (Although I sometimes use color bolding here to draw quick attention to key points for those who don't have time to read carefully longer paragraphs.)