neilgodfrey wrote: ↑Thu Oct 05, 2017 11:55 pm
This post is an addendum to my earlier Rules of Historical Reasoning. It addresses a particular instance where a historian uses a very late document as a repository of a very early "primary source" from a much earlier period.
Rule #1 (from Mark Day's The Philosophy of History, 2008, pp. 20-21) addressed the necessity of prioritising primary sources.
Primary sources here are understood to be the documents and other material artefacts that belong to the period being researched.
So coins minted by a king are primary sources for the reign of that king; a written account of that king that looks back on his reign subsequent to his death is a secondary source1. A monument or decree written by order of the king that survives today is a primary source. A later historical work asserting claims about what the king wrote or decreed is a secondary source1.
But what happens when the historian has no primary sources? That is, when no documents from the person/period being studied survive although the historian does have much later purported copies of primary sources2?
- (These are common definitions of the terms that have been in use since the nineteenth century. There is some fluidity among historians about how they use the terms but I have set out how they are used by Mark Day in his rules of historical reasoning.)
For example. Josephus, writing in Roman times, quotes what he claims is correspondence between the second century BCE Seleucid persecutor of the Jews, Antiochus IV (Epiphanes), and Samaritans. Is it legitimate for a historian to use Josephus's "record" of this correspondence as primary source material3a for the actual events of the second century BCE?
The answer, I believe, is found in Elias Bickerman's analysis of Josephus's narrative, 'A Document Concerning the Persecution by Antiochus IV Epiphanes' in Studies in Jewish and Christian History, 2007, pp. 376-407.
Bickerman goes into very detailed argument to establish a reasonable argument that the historian is indeed justified in using Josephus's record as a genuine copy3b of original correspondence dating from the time of Antiochus IV.
His arguments is based on several lines of evidence:
- archaeological evidence supporting originality of the correspondence in Josephus's work and providing details highly unlikely to have been known in the time of Josephus;
- misunderstandings by Josephus in his use of the letters that demonstrate an ignorance of practices alluded to in the letters that passed from usage in the Roman era;
- anachronistic references by Josephus that demonstrate a failure to understand the original context of the correspondence;
- other examples of genuine and forged correspondence3c used as controls in Bickerman's argument;
Bickerman concludes his argument for authenticity of the correspondence by addressing the possibility that
- the extraordinary difficulties a forger would have had in getting specific details correct -- formulae appropriate to a narrow geographical and chronological range; accurate dating despite many potential chronological traps such as years beginning differently from one city to another, -- as they are in the correspondence cited by Josephus.
In other words, Bickerman is very aware of the absolute necessity to establish a source4 as a "primary source"4 in order to use it as a basis for a historical reconstruction of the period being investigated.a forger was skilful enough to fabricate, one or two hundred years later, an impeccable document dated to 166 BCE. His diligence would not have done him any good; indeed, it would actually have detracted from the plausibility of his work because, if his readers were to be tricked into accepting it, they needed a document drawn up in the terms with which they were familiar, -ie. in the style of their own historical period. This explains the remarkable fact that forgers in antiquity normally employed the official formulae of their own period when they produced their texts.
I confess I was at first very suspicious of Bickerman's historical methods. The first work of his I read was God of the Maccabees in which he baldly stated, at one point, that we have various sources from the Seleucids pertaining to the Maccabean revolt. It was only after reading his justifications for this claim (as in the article discussed in this post) that I backed down and gave his argument some credence.
What Bickerman has given historians is a very solid argument. He has not given them primary sources. But he has given historians reasons to have some degree of confidence that they do have access to primary sources5. That means any argument based on these primary sources must necessarily remain hypothetical, always with awareness that the "sources" upon which the argument is based are conclusions of argument, hypotheses6, and not the "hard facts" as we have with coins or stone monuments or preserved clay tablets, etc.
Bickerman's primary "sources" will, like any and all primary sources, remain open to question and challenge. After all, that's what Mark Day (like many other historians) calls for: a constant testing and evaluation of the historian's source material.)
Bickerman's use of the documents as cited in Josephus are not a shoddy licence to make easy excuses for "making do with what we have or else we cannot do the history we want to do" type of unprofessional, unscholarly approach.
1 It would depend on what sources the writers of those 'accounts or 'works' used. For their accounts or works to be good secondary sources, their sources should, likewise, be good primary contemporaneous sources and their accounts of them good. Such an account or work may only be an unverified narrative.
2 copies? or other's accounts of previous documents [or purported previous documents]?
Neil, I appreciate you are posting here to clarify a lot of this. My commentary on your commentary is not to diss or criticise you per se or personally, but to facilitate this; particularly as you have an interest in this area and because you have an influence by your reputation and through vridar.
3 I haven't read Bickerman's account but a few thinks strike me about the terminology here -
- Is Josephus' account really a copy? or is just an account of 'correspondence between Antiochus IV (Epiphanes; the 2nd century BCE Seleucid persecutor of Jews) and Samaritans' ??
- it would seem Josephus's account would best be termedas a secondary source.
- a purported copy?
- is the implication that Bickerman discusses whether
- Josephus had forged the correspondence [between Antiochus IV (Epiphanes) and Samaritans]? or
- Jospehus might have been using a forgery?
5 -ie. "access to secondary sources that likely had access to suitable primary sources."
6 or may be, and often are, accounts of accounts