Historians cannot take Bible as true history

In a column published Tuesday ("The Bible: Myth or History") Jack Grimes offers a shortsighted defense of the Bible as an objective history. He makes his case by disputing the notion, articulated to him by his friend that "history is written by those in power."

He argues -- rightfully so -- that Christians living and writing in the years following the death of Jesus had little "power" or "authority." Indeed, as he phrases it, "Back then, being a Christian didn't give one power to oppress other people, it got one killed." Grimes believes that the statement "history is written by those in power" is overly simplistic; equally simplistic, however, is his contention that those who lack power necessarily lack an agenda.

By implying that only those with "power" or some type of governmental authority have an agenda, Grimes misses the point. Certainly, there are histories written by those lacking the type of power Grimes describes, but every history, and I mean every history, is biased. In this sense, it is more accurate to say that history is written by those with an agenda.

Grimes argues that because early Christians lacked power, their only motive in writing the Bible was to "to change individual lives for the better." While I do not doubt that the Bible's authors strove to improve the lives of others, this does not automatically mean they had no "ulterior" motives. If anything, being out of power puts more pressure on individuals to articulate the reasons why they should be in power. Religion and politics can very rarely be separated, and the search for power is almost always a motive. The political history of the Catholic Church -- from the Crusades to the Holocaust -- makes this abundantly clear.

If I have learned one thing in my four years studying history here at Tufts, it is that all authors -- even those who wrote the Bible -- have a cause to advance. This is the essence of the foundation seminar requirement for history majors. In the foundation seminar, students approach a single topic from a variety of perspectives, and we are taught to critique and interrogate every source we encounter. We also avoid the word "objective" because in the writing of history, attaining such a lofty goal is impossible.

The toughest decision facing any historian is not what to include in his or her work, but what to exclude. Those who wrote the Bible faced exactly the same choice. Its authors made conscious decisions about what stories to tell and what stories to omit -- often "borrowing" from each other in a manner that today would be labeled plagiarism.

They also clearly made decisions about how to "spin" their stories, occasionally to the point of contradiction. Those who subsequently translated the Bible faced similar editorial choices. (We can all agree that England's King James had a political agenda as well as the "power" to advance it, right?) The necessity of making these decisions is why most histories have prefaces, allowing the author to explain and justify why such choices were made. The problem is that the Bible has no preface.

When discussing hermeneutics (a methodology for analyzing religious texts), University Chaplin David O'Leary frequently reminds his students that any given religious text was written at a particular place, at a particular time, by a particular person, with a particular agenda. That is, in order to understand a religious text from an historical perspective, one must contextualize it. Who wrote the text? At whom was the text targeted? What was the political environment within which the text was authored? These are all questions any historian must grapple with when analyzing a source.

Asking these questions is especially important with the Bible because, as Father O'Leary will tell you, there are incredibly few non-religious sources that describe Jesus. And it is obvious that those who wrote the Bible had a vested interest in the success of Christianity. Simply put, in history, blind conformity is not a responsible option.

As a Christian myself, I am not trying to discredit Christianity. As a foundational text that outlines a theology, the Bible is nearly unparalleled; as a history, the Bible must be interrogated. Those who approach the Bible solely from a religious perspective can take its stories on faith. Why? Because that is what faith is about-unconditional trust. Historians have no such luxury. To simply "trust" that the Bible is an objective history is naive at best, intellectually dishonest at worst.

Adam Mueller is a senior majoring in history.