Originally published October 29, 2013
I once posted this question on Facebook:
“If history contains truth, error, missing information, and religious or political manipulation, whom are we supposed to believe?”
It is a difficult question.
How much confidence should we place in documentaries, encyclopedias, historians, religious texts, newspapers, government records, or institutions?
How do we distinguish truth from interpretation?
And how can we know what really happened when we were not there to witness the past ourselves?
History Is More Than a Collection of Facts
History may look simple when presented in a textbook.
A date.
A person.
A war.
A revolution.
A document.
But historical knowledge is built from evidence that has survived from the past.
Letters, government records, photographs, artifacts, newspapers, diaries, eyewitness accounts, archaeological discoveries, religious texts, and many other sources help historians reconstruct what happened.
The difficulty is that evidence is rarely complete.
Some records disappear.
Some were never written.
Some witnesses remember events differently.
Some documents were produced for political, religious, or personal purposes.
And historians themselves must decide which evidence deserves greater weight.
This does not mean that history is merely opinion.
It means that serious historical study requires evidence, comparison, context, and critical judgment.
Can Historians Be Biased?
Of course.
Historians are human beings.
They live within particular societies, possess particular assumptions, and sometimes disagree sharply about the meaning of the same event.
But recognizing bias should not lead us to conclude that all historical accounts are equally unreliable.
A good historian does not simply ask:
Who wrote this?
The better questions include:
Why was it written?
When was it written?
Was the writer an eyewitness?
What evidence supports the claim?
Do independent sources confirm it?
What information might the source omit?
Does new evidence challenge an older interpretation?
This is why historical scholarship develops over time.
New documents become available.
Archaeological discoveries appear.
Old interpretations are challenged.
And historians debate which explanation best accounts for the evidence.
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| Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel |
Do We Learn From History?
I originally paraphrased the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel as saying that the only thing we learn from history is that nobody learns from history.
His actual point was more nuanced.
Hegel wrote that peoples and governments often fail to learn from history because each historical period has circumstances of its own.
That does not make history useless.
It warns us against assuming that the past gives us perfectly reusable formulas for the present.
History can show us patterns.
It can reveal consequences.
It can expose failures.
It can help us understand why institutions, nations, religions, and cultures developed as they did.
But studying history does not automatically make a person wise.
We still have to interpret what we learn.
What About the Bible?
For me, the question becomes even more important when history intersects with faith.
As a Christian, I believe the Bible deserves serious study rather than either blind acceptance or casual dismissal.
But biblical history also involves questions about manuscripts, languages, translation, textual transmission, archaeology, and interpretation.
My original article mentioned the Textus Receptus, Masoretic Text, and Codex Sinaiticus together as though they were directly competing versions of the same thing.
That needs clarification.
The Masoretic Text concerns the textual tradition of the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament.
The Textus Receptus refers to a printed Greek New Testament tradition that later influenced translations such as the King James Version.
Codex Sinaiticus, meanwhile, is an ancient biblical manuscript containing substantial portions of both the Old and New Testaments.
These sources belong to different parts of the complicated history of biblical transmission.
For Christians who believe Scripture is inspired, studying that transmission should not be something to fear.
Faith should be capable of serious historical inquiry.
The King James Bible and Historical Evidence
I remain deeply familiar with and appreciative of the King James Bible.
But saying that one English translation has “stood throughout time” is not, by itself, a historical argument for every textual decision behind it.
A responsible study of Scripture involves examining the original languages, manuscript traditions, translation history, historical context, and the reasons scholars reach different conclusions.
That does not necessarily weaken faith.
For me, it can deepen it.
The same principle applies to secular history.
We should not believe something merely because it appeared in a prestigious documentary, encyclopedia, book, sermon, or website.
Authority matters.
But evidence matters too.
What About the Vatican Archives?
My younger self also wondered about supposedly “hidden” records inside the Vatican.
That language needs correcting.
The Vatican Apostolic Archive contains an enormous collection of historical documents spanning centuries, but it is not simply a secret warehouse completely closed to humanity.
The archive has been open to qualified scholars since the late nineteenth century. Today, qualified researchers may apply for access, and documents are generally available through the end of the pontificate of Pope Pius XII in 1958.
Access is restricted and regulated, as many major archives are.
That does not mean every document is publicly available online or that every historical question has been answered.
But “restricted archive” and “hidden conspiracy” are not the same thing.
That distinction matters when we talk about history.
How Should We Decide What to Believe?
Perhaps the better question is not:
Whom should I believe?
Instead, ask:
What evidence supports this claim?
That approach changes everything.
When reading history, we should:
compare multiple independent sources;
distinguish primary evidence from later interpretation;
check whether quotations are accurate;
consider the author's purpose and context;
look for corroborating evidence;
separate established facts from disputed interpretations;
and remain willing to revise our conclusions when stronger evidence appears.
That requires humility.
Sometimes we discover that something we confidently believed was incomplete.
Sometimes an argument we rejected turns out to have stronger evidence than we expected.
And sometimes the most responsible answer is simply:
We do not know enough yet.
Faith and Historical Inquiry
As a Christian, I still believe truth ultimately matters because truth is not something we are free to invent.
But belief in objective truth should make Christians more careful, not less careful, about evidence.
If something is true, serious investigation should not threaten it.
We should therefore avoid two extremes:
believing everything merely because it supports our worldview;
and rejecting everything merely because it comes from people who disagree with us.
Whether we are studying Christianity, politics, science, national history, or ancient civilizations, intellectual honesty requires us to follow the evidence as carefully as we can.
History Will Always Leave Questions
There will probably never be a time when every historical question is settled.
New evidence will appear.
Interpretations will change.
People will continue arguing about what the past means.
That is not necessarily a weakness of history.
It is part of the responsibility of studying a past that we cannot revisit directly.
We inherit fragments.
We examine them.
We compare them.
We argue about them.
And from those fragments, we try to understand what really happened.
For me, faith still has a place in that search.
But faith should never become an excuse for careless history.
And skepticism should never become an excuse for believing that nothing can be known.
Question the source. Examine the evidence. Compare the claims. And remain humble enough to keep learning.
— J.P. Abecilla, October 2013
