Follow-up on the reliability on historical documents

Your criteria for the reliability of historical documents would eliminate a sizable chunk of what we know about human history from before about A.D. 1200.

“the person who wrote the document must have witnessed these events themself” – Very little of what we know about history comes from accounts written down by the eyewitnesses themselves. This only starts to be common around A.D. 1200, when writers started authoring more biographies and memoirs from their own experiences, and also when organizations started producing regular records of their activity. A great deal of our knowledge from before 1200 comes, not from eyewitnesses, but from historians who compiled other people’s testimony, whether written or oral. Of course we need reason to believe there was an eyewitness *somewhere* down the line, but it’s not often that they actually wrote down their own account.

If you only accept history which was actually written by a person who witnessed the events himself, then along with large chunks of the Old Testament and the Gospels, you’d better throw away:

- the Trojan War (Iliad of Homer our earliest account, written hundreds of years later)

- the Buddha (earliest documents written hundreds of years later)

- the Greco-Persian wars and the Peloponnesian War (Herodotus and Thucydides both collected other people’s testimony when compiling their histories)

- the first 500 years of Rome’s history (earliest accounts written about 200 BC)

- practically all of the history of England before about A.D. 700 (Bede wrote his History about 732)

- in general, large chunks of European history in the ancient and medieval periods

- probably practically all of the rest of the world’s history before the sixteenth century

Certainly this would mean that there is no history of aboriginal peoples: no history of Canada before the arrival of Europeans!

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I think you’ve spoken judiciously and well about how to evaluate the credibility of historical accounts. I have nothing to add except I would tend to put more stock in poetic or epic material and oral traditions than you seem to be willing to do. Partly it’s because I’ve learned that many cultures pre-Gutenberg have developed the training of memory to a very high degree (for instance, getting a law degree in a medieval university required feats of memory which hardly anybody today could accomplish), to the point that the accurate transmission of history in a mnemonic form seems plausible. But it’s also just my subjective sense of things, and I don’t expect I could persuade anybody about it by argument.

I was going to make a distinction between different genres in the Bible—e.g. Genesis is a poetic foundation myth, while the Gospels present the testimony of eyewitnesses—but I see that you already pointed that out! It’s essential to recognize that distinction. It’s why I think Christians are obliged to read the Gospels as literal history but not Genesis. That is where Ken Ham goes wrong. We can settle one thing: I agree with you that Ken Ham is wrong about the age of the Earth and the universe, and probably other things as well, and he’s wrong because he thinks Genesis is an authoritative literalistic description of how things happened. No argument from me there.