Coming out of the theatre, one of the many questions "The Passion of the Christ" raises is simply, "did it really happen?" Since the story is pulled straight from the documents Christians call the scriptures, the real question is whether the scriptures are historical. A friend of mine dismissed the question with a quick answer: "History," she said, "is just written by those in power."
Now my friend believes her statement to be a fact, an accurate description of the world we live in. And it just might be. It is, after all, a statement that can either be true or false. But to find out which it is the natural first questions to ask would be, "How do you know? Why do you believe this statement to be true? Have you ever met one of the people who have written our histories?"
My guess is that my friend has not met such people. But that's okay. She might still be correct. You don't need to experience something directly to believe that a statement about it is true. Most likely, she thinks history is just written by those in power because someone told her that, and she believed them. She took their word for it, not having any other definitive evidence to go by. In other words, she believed on their authority.
It's not uncommon for one's skin to crawl when they read the word "authority", especially if they haven't had the best of relationships with those we usually think of as being "in authority". But trusting in someone's authority is something we do every day. When our roommate tells us there's no milk, and so we go to the store. When the weatherman tells us it'll be a nice day, and so we leave the umbrella at home.
Of course, many stop trusting the weatherman the day they get rained on. And that's quite right. It's definitely true that we always need to examine the trustworthiness of those who would ask us to submit to their authoritative knowledge.
Which is precisely why I would ask my friend, just who was it that first told you history is just written by those in power? Why did you submit to them on that issue? This is where doubts start to rise in my own mind. Was he someone who has extensively studied histories, of all sorts? Persian court records and Greek plays? Egyptian trade reports and American biographies? I have to ask simply because it's just such a huge claim.
"History is just written by those in power." All history? Every account of events in the human race's past? This seems unlikely. I find it hard to believe that human beings, foolish and careless and arrogant as we are, could ever be that efficiently in control over that many affairs (textbooks, archaeological digs, museum displays, etc).
Of course, people in positions of influence have abused that power in accounts of history. The Egyptians, I'm told, didn't keep records of their defeats. But this still makes sense under a view that says history is written by all types of people.
I can believe that chieftains and pharaohs desired to pad their accomplishments, when they could get away with it. But I also believe in the possibility of real historians: men and women of integrity and desire to search out and stand by the truth, representing events in an accurate light. I can believe some histories are dependable and some aren't. What I cannot believe, and what makes no sense to me, is to say that no history is reliable, and all of it is suspect.
My friend may not have intended to make such a general and philosophical claim about all histories and our ability to know history. Maybe all she was saying, with a bit of hyperbole, was that these histories -- the narrative stories and the personal letters of the Bible in the particular -- were written by people in power, just flimsy legends made up by religious leaders.
The first question, though, is the same: How do you know? Who told you this? How did they get their information? Did you hear this from a biblical historian? Do any other historians disagree? All of these are essentially the same question, one to judge the trustworthiness of a source.
We can also compare the claim to what we know from other authorities, perhaps ones we have already come to trust, like science. Two particular sciences, archaeology and textual criticism, tell us this fact: the historical account we call 'the gospel of John' is at least 1,912 years old. A fragment of it is sitting in the John Ryland's Library of Manchester, England, right now. You could probably go and see it. It dates from 130 A.D. It was found in Egypt, so far from its place of origin that it was probably written about 40 years prior.
Now, since we have a date, the question is, "if the historical account of Jesus was written before 100 A.D., was it told by the people in power?" As we saw in "The Passion," the Romans and the Jewish high priests had the power. After Jesus left the earth, some traditional Jews would drag off the Jews who followed him and stone them to death. The Romans would throw the followers of Jesus into sporting arena to get ripped apart by lions. That was just during the day.
At night, during a particularly bad time, one could see Christians doused with lighter fluid and set on fire, strung up a pole to give light to the streets. The Romans ruled the world, and they couldn't care less about one more weird cult that had the nerve to say Caesar was not God.
There was no one in power to write this history of Jesus. Back then, being a Christian didn't give one power to oppress other people, it got one killed. The power to oppress did come, centuries later. But since we know the history that is at the foundation of Christianity was written centuries before, the hypocrisy of some need not get in our way.
There was no power then, save the power to change individual lives for the better. There was no ulterior motive. It was as it still is and will be: a group of people met someone extraordinary, and couldn't help but tell their friends about him.
Jack Grimes is a senior majoring in philosophy. He can be reached at grimes@tuftsdaily.com.
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