As everybody knows, Christianity is a confession. That means that Christianity belongs to a very special type of religion, the religions which impose on those who practise them obligation[s] of truth. Such obligations in Christianity are numerous; for instance, a Christian has the obligation to hold as true a set of propositions which constitutes a dogma; or, he has the obligation to hold certain books as a permanent source of truth; or, he has the obligation to accept the decisions of certain authorities in matters of truth.
But Christianity requires another form of truth obligation quite different from those I just mentioned. Everyone, every Christian, has the duty to know who he is, what is happening in him. He has to know the faults he may have committed: he has to know the temptations to which he is exposed. And, moreover, everyone in Christianity is obliged to say these things to other people, to tell these things to other people, and hence, to bear witness against himself.
Foucault, Michel. "The Hermeneutics of the Self." Pp. 169-170 in Religion and Culture. Edited by Jeremy R. Carrette. New York: Routledge, 1999.
I have read the recent posts by Chris Heard (1 | 2) on the question of faith and its relationship to historical reconstruction as well as the posts to which they respond and that respond to them. As I read these posts, and reflect on my recent exchange with Keith Whitelam, I am reminded that there is certainly one area in which Dr. Whitelam and I are in complete agreement: the historical reconstruction of ancient Levantine culture, society, politics, and religion needs to come out from under the aegis of dogma and faith.
The arguments to which Chris responds are wholly irrelevant for the professional historian; and, I think Chris makes some good points to this effect. Historians are not out to prove the biblical text, give comfort or a foundation for their faith, or contemplate any of the mysteries of the divine. Historians are engaged in recovering the stories of the past. Historiography is a narrative of past events, cultures, societies, voices, and ideas; it is fellowship with the dead. As a professional historian, my highest duty is to fathfully and critically recover the voices of the dead that are silenced by time and decay. I do this because the past has a power and usefulness for humanity in its own right and silence or the act of silencing is very dangerous. As Elie Wiesel wrote, "to remain silent and indifferent is the greatest sin of all."
Certainly, I would argue there is a spiritual component to historiography. I believe that stories, testimony, and witness are a conduit to understanding human experience and therefore a conduit to understanding our collective interactions with and reflections on spirituality, religion, and faith. I am, therefore, not only an historian of events but also ideas and interpretation.
I also regard my career as an historian as a calling consistent with my Faith. Again, as Elie Wiesel once wrote:
Remembering is a noble and necessary act. The call of memory, the call to memory, reaches us from the very dawn of history. No commandment figures so frequently, so insistently, in the Bible. It is incumbent upon us to remember the good we have received, and the evil we have suffered.
I believe this holds true for history in general and not only our own personal experiences or those particularly horrific historical circumstances that Elie Wiesel had to remember. So, for me, history is an act of remembering and, in partaking in that act, I believe that I fulfill a biblical commandment to which I am enjoined as a Christian.
But, these spiritual components aside, I could not do my task as a historian if I allowed dogma to predetermine the results of my investigation whether for skepticism or gullibility. I do not research in and write history in order to strengthen religious convictions or prove the historical claims of the Bible. If I forced my research into the service of religious convictions, how could I honestly claim then to have listened to the evidence? My duty as an historian is owed to people not dogma. As such, there is in my mind no greater danger to history than the refusal to listen to all the sources and to write critically and faithfully the stories of the past.
Murray, Oswyn. "Herodotus and Oral History." Pages 16-44 in The Historian's Craft in the Age of Herodotus. Edited by Nino Luraghi. Oxford: Oxford, 2001.
In "Herodotus and Oral History," Oswyn Murray investigates and elucidates Herodotus' use of oral tradition in The Histories. Murray confronts this issue in two stages. First, he examines Greek, and specifically Herodotean, oral tradition through a comparative lens and second, he applies the insights of this comparative approach to the apparent oral sources that lay behind Herodotus' Median and Persian cycles.
In the first part of his article, Murray draws on the works of Jan Vansina and Ruth Finnegan on oral tradition in Africa to formulate some essential parameters for understanding oral tradition. Murray responds first to the objection of Moses Finley that oral tradition is short-lived, noting that Vansina's empirical research demonstrates that oral traditions may reach 150-200 years in the past. Interestingly, this accords well with the limits of Herodotus' knowledge as the traditions that he recounts about the various Greek city-states are generally limited to a period after 650 BCE. For earlier information, Herodotus enters a decidedly more mythical realm, albeit that the transition from myth to tradition (or history) is quite permeable.
The next area that Murray explores is Vansina's distinction between fixed and free traditions. While fixed traditions depend on verbal formulae and are generally restricted to aetiological, genealogical, or proverbial and oracular traditions, free traditions are biographical or epic and much more adaptable. The aesthetic concerns for the latter are generally more pronounced and the emphasis in the accuracy of the presentation may focus more on "the mode and purpose" of the tradition rather than its historicity. Consequently, the relationship of such traditions to history may vary depending on the importance of the historical details to the purpose of the traditions. Murray observes that these free traditions are the predominant type of oral traditions found in Herodotus' Histories.
Murray then concludes this section by examining "the importance of the group" that preserves the traditions and the significance of their social and geographical location. He observes that Herodotus favours professional group memory, such as the merchant class traditions with respect to Naucratis and aristocratic traditions for Athens and Persia. Professional group memory, while more static and persistent than folk tradition, is "more limited and more liable to bias, for it reflects the interests of the group rather than those of the society as a whole" (27). These biases Murray calls 'deformation' and are particularly pronounced in the aristocratic and merchant class traditions on which Herodotus relies. These groups are less likely to have broader social concerns, as, for example, may exist in royal traditions (insofar as royalty are an embodiment or representatives of society).
This first part of the article is rich in detail and my summary inevitably falls short of encapsulating Murray's nuanced and important discussion. Yet, Murray does not end here and instead moves forward to look at Herodotus' apparent oral sources for his Persian and Median logoi. Murray starts this discussion by summarizing two salient points from his previous section: (1) that the question of historical reliability in oral traditions is secondary and must proceed from a clear understanding of the type of tradition, and (2) that the primary question must, therefore, center on the "channels of information" and types of tradition available to the enquirer.
So, the second part of the article attempts to identify the type and social and geographical locations for Herodotus' oral traditions of the Persians and Medians. At the outset, Murray excludes a priestly source for these traditions, observing Herodotus’ shallow depiction of religious concerns. Instead, Murray posits two likely channels. First, he agrees with David Lewis, who argues "that one source for Herodotus' information on Persia was the Greek element in the Persian imperial bureaucracy" (37). He also hypothesizes that this information, primarily covering the fall of the Medes and the rise of Cyrus, exhibits a "Median slant" and so may ultimately originate in Median aristocratic circles. Second, Murray revives the old argument of J. Wells that another block of information, specifically the siege of Babylon and the story of the intrigues leading to Darius' accession, originate with Zopyrus, a great-grandson of one of the conspirators in Darius' plot, "who deserted to Athens in the lifetime of Herodotus" (39). According to Murray, these oral sources, combined with some written materials such as lists, were the basis of Herodotus' accounts of the Medes and Persians. In my view, Murray's borrowed hypotheses are intriguing but he does not provide sufficient proofs from the texts themselves to substantiate these ideas; this section requires further development and support.
Murray concludes his article with some reflections on the implications of his reconstruction, especially as it pertains to a possible legacy or trace of Persian historiography preserved in the Greek historiography of Herodotus, Ctesias, and Xenophon. Murray suggests the Greek and Jewish Novelle, which bears considerable resemblance to Herodotus' Persian and Median logoi, may have a shared foundation in such a Persian court tradition. In this regard, Murray builds on and interacts with the seminal ideas of Momigliano on the development of Greek and Jewish historiography in the Persian period. For the Greek tradition, Murray posits the fusion of the Persian and Lydian kingdoms as the likely conduit for this influence.
In sum, Murray's article is an adept and careful analysis of the issue of oral tradition. He interacts with a range of cross-disciplinary literature and handles the insights from each in a judicious and insightful way. Scholars and students will undoubtedly profit from the article.
In my recent blog entries, I expressed my frustration with three methodological problems that in my mind have wholly negative, if not dangerous, implications for the art of historiography in biblical studies: (1) the tendency to reject the use of the biblical texts for historical reconstruction, (2) the tendency to deny the possibility of reconstructing the ancient history of Israel, and (3) the tendency to claim that most biblical texts were written ex nihilo, or nearly so, in late periods. Yet, at the same time that I reject such positions and consider them highly suspect, there are numerous positive developments that have arisen as a result of the challenge that minimalists launched to biblical studies. To create a sense of proportion, I will refer to three:
First, minimalists have encouraged us to take seriously the ideological function of biblical historiography. While traditional source and form criticism also pays close attention to ideology, such analysis is directed more toward identifying and segmenting ideologies as indicative of the prehistory of the text. The minimalists, on the other hand, have emphasized ideology as part of the text's communicative and rhetorical significance. This breathes new life into biblical studies by placing significant, positive stress on the texts we have. It also has encouraged a more critical and, in my opinion, successful and accurate reading of the texts, whether to expound that ideology or, by other more maximally minded scholars, to reconstruct history.
Second, some minimalists have contributed, along with Chronicles-Ezra-Nehemiah scholars, to opening up the Persian period, and Hellenistic period, for biblical studies. Only recently has this period really received the attention it is due as an important one in the compositional development of biblical traditions. While I previously commented negatively on the tendency to locate the creation of biblical literature within a small community of elites in the sixth to second century, I actually agree that this reconstruction has considerable productive power to situate and explain the production of biblical literature, that is the reading, rereading, writing, and rewriting of the texts. Indeed, much of my present research and work is devoted to the production of biblical literature in the Persian period and the role this plays in the restoration of Jerusalem. My point of departure from the minimalists is that biblical literature is being rewritten in this period not created ex nihilo (notwithstanding clearly post-exilic texts, of course).
Third, I wrote previously that to me it seems "the entire epistomological framework of minimalism and its jargon exists in opposition to a naive maximalism of religious fundamentalists and/or long discredited historical-critical reconstructions that really have little to no currency in academia today." To be fair, it is minimalism that has exposed this naive maximalism and discredited some historical-critical reconstructions that are well and appropriately consigned to the dustbin. It is difficult to understate the importance of the minimalist counter-weight on the pendulum. I believe that the center of biblical studies is on much surer and certain ground as a result of the many naive presuppositions and historical reconstructions that the minimalists have dismantled.
On a more personal note, I have profited greatly from reading many works by the so-called minimalists--and more still from my personal interactions with these important scholars. In that regard, I hope it is abundantly clear that my dispute is with specific methodological approaches of so-called minimalism and the real danger that I think those pose and not any one scholar. I can not step back from those earlier criticisms because I think they were fairly (if colorfully) made. Nevertheless, I hope this blog entry has given some sense of balance to my representations as well as my take of minimalism.
Christianity and Confession
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