I have restored the context; not sure that the response is actually on the same subject, now I look.
Peter Kirby wrote:Roger Pearse wrote:katherinetrammell wrote:
what actual, physical, first century proof is there of Jesus? This could include papyri, wall scribblings, pot shards, clay tablets, stelae, tapestry, stone monuments...all dated to at least 35-40 AD. Sorry, but copies and claims or copies or one's "feelings" cannot be used as proof....in science, or a court of law.
Ancient history is not done like this, I am afraid.
Consider the history of events in Roman Britain after the death of Theodosius I in 396 AD. Our best source is Zosimus, living in Constantinople in the early 6th century, well over a century later, writing in Greek, and in a world in which the western empire had ceased to exist in any sense 50 years earlier, never mind remote little Britain. We have very little else to go on.
Or we could talk about whether the establishment of the date of Christmas, presumably in the early 4th c., is connected to the cult of Sol Invictus. If we do, as a web search will reveal, sooner or later someone discusses the testimony of the scholiast on Dionysius bar Salibi; a 13th century Syriac writer who probably never visited any part of what had been the Roman world 9 centuries earlier.
Or we might discuss the lives of the sages and philosophers of ancient Greece; the will of Aristotle, from the 4th c. BC, is preserved only in Diogenes Laertius, writing in the 4th c. AD.
Now we may certainly decide, if we like, that we aren't satisfied with the evidence in any of these three cases. We would rather not know, than rely on our only sources of information. We may, if we choose, use this kind of argument to show that "history is mostly bunk". This is obscurantism, pretending not to know what we do know, making ourselves ignorant of what is in fact known. It's a choice; to be educated, or ignorant. I hope we would all choose the former.
In ancient history we work from what is transmitted to us. It is little enough. Only polemicists find excuses to ignore any of it.
But surely, Roger, the specter of the false positive should concern us. Or do you maintain that accounts written at a remove of eight centuries have never led a historian wrong?
Even ancient historians need to establish a hierarchy regarding the value of the evidence they have, if only because our sources do not always agree with each other or with archaeology. In the process of so determining what is weaker and stronger evidence, even for the purposes of a non-"polemical" (maximalist) agenda that you describe, we will incidentally make some headway in determining what is better and stronger evidence, as contrasted with the whispering winds to which we listen only for lack of an alternative.
A query: by the "false positive", I understood you to mean statements in the data which are not actually true? (I will continue on the basis that this is what you had in mind, but of course I may misunderstand here).
I agree entirely that ancient authors may indeed be mistaken; they may be unwilling to say some facts for political or other reasons; they may lie to us. In short, they are human beings. But I suggest that it is a great mistake for us to start by choosing which bits of data we will listen to, on the basis that some of them may be lying to us. We must let the data speak, and, hesitantly, evaluate what it says. Inconsistencies in it, if we have enough, will tell us something; maybe even that some of the sources are in fact misleading.
What we get from antiquity is a relatively small body of data, invariably very much less than we might desire, and not infrequently a single source, often late. Consequently we must use it all. If we do decide that a source is unreliable, we retain it, but mark it as our opinion (not a fact) that it is unreliable.
Most bad scholarship is done because people are far too quick to discard data that contradicts their preconceived theory. Better far to have no theory, and see what the data says.
It's not very much surprise that the supreme position of evidence in ancient history is not any different to that in any other department of history, with priority among texts given to first-hand accounts written close to the events recorded in sources that can be reliably assigned authorship, provenance, and date... and with priority above that given to authenticated physical evidence that is not as susceptible to the falsifications to which literary evidence fall prey.
This sounds to me rather like a picture of how *modern* history is done. Such an approach presupposes loads of sources, far more than we can use, which we must sift and select from; where we may reasonably expect eyewitnesses to exist, to be well informed, and for secondary sources to be derivative of extant material (which we should certainly use instead).
Ancient history is not done like this, not because we should not like to, but because we don't have that kind of profusion of data. Often we don't know how we might sort them, because we don't even know how close to the action the sources are. In ancient history we use *everything*, and wish we had more. This is why I referred to the scholiast on Dionysius bar Salibi - no solar scholar would dream of ignoring that testimony, despite being 9 centuries later in a vastly different world. You use what you can get. You don't discard a source because of the calendar! To do so is a modern history thing, where you have to find *some* way - any way - to cut down the pile of sources to manageable proportions.
We might compare Tacitus on Tiberius with Velleius Paterculus. The latter is contemporary, the former hated Tiberius like poison and wrote 70 years later. But Tacitus is our main source.
Of course it is possible to take the view, on this basis, that "ancient history is mostly bunk". But this is obscurantism.
The only ones who aren't happy with the situation of relative certainty and uncertainty in ancient history are not, in fact, the ancient historians, but a breed of the Christian apologist for whom the results they want out of ancient history are necessary planks in their apologetic scheme, which must be seen as buttressed to the maximum extent, even if this means lowering the bar enough to make the implication that only a besotted, tendentious fool would call into question hearsay at the remove of eight centuries.
It is, of course, never difficult to find reasons why people we disagree with adopt methods we disapprove of.
We really have two choices as regards ancient history; we can write it based on the data; or we can write a fairy-story and decorate it with whichever bits of data we find convenient, and refer to the remainder as unreliable. The latter cannot be anything but subjective, and the narrative that results will invariably tell us only the time and place in which the modern author wrote. There is too much of it.
If the data is contradictory, then, to write a narrative, we will seek in the data explanations of that contradiction. In some cases we may find a reason why some writers say this, or that. But ... what we are always, always trying to do, is to avoid imposing a modern perspective on it all.
Data first, deduction later.
All the best,
Roger Pearse
