Ancient History as Non-history?
Ancient History as Non-history?
We should not treat rhetorical or moral interests as inimical to historical information. Ancient historians developed many of the critical methodologies further refined and used by historians today.199 We err when we treat ancient historians as if they were modern historians, but we also err when we treat them as lacking interest in historical information.
On one side, many scholars are anachronistic in holding ancient historians to modern standards. Some have done so in order to defend a particular theological understanding of how gospel authors should have written; others use these standards to discredit them.200 Both approach the Gospels in an anachronistic manner in this regard.
By contrast, some scholars, in rightly emphasizing the differences between ancient and modern historiography (differences we have been noting), have overstated these differences.201 While ancient biography and history need not have been accurate in all details, the genres generated expectations of some ideal standards. Granted that ancient historians write from locations of class, political and ethnic bias;202 that they supplied (and historians cannot help but supply) interpretive grids in how they constructed their narratives;203 that historians, especially elite historians, made abundant use of rhetoric, including epideictic rhetoric;204 that historical intention does not guarantee the accuracy of one’s sources: shall we for such reasons simply dismiss all historical value in Tacitus, Suetonius, or even Josephus, as if they wrote something historically on the level of novels about historical characters? Such a sweeping claim, if pressed fully, could easily eradicate most of what we claim to know about first-century history.205 Ancient historiography was not modern historiography, but neither was it identical with novels.
Gerd Lüdemann appears to imply that such watering down the factual historical demands of ancient history represents modern apologists’ attempt to rescue biblical writings by lowering historical standards.206 Claims that ancient historians wrote history so differently from today that one cannot hold Luke (and other Gospel writers) to a high standard “are irrelevant, deceptive, or as false as the occasionally advanced claim that the ancients were not concerned about false attribution of writings”; ancients did in fact care about “what really happened.”207 “To say that the great Roman historians did not write what actually happened does not mean — as Haenchen seems to imply — that they could write almost anything.”208 Lüdemann may also overstate the case, but the fact that we find scholars on both sides of the debate probably reflects the diversity of our data regarding information and rhetoric: ancient historians endeavored to recount their information in rhetorically sensitive ways.
Thus when Josephus portrays Agrippa’s death according to tragic conventions and uses the owl as an omen,209 Josephus takes his full liberties as a rhetorical historian (much more interested in Hellenistic rhetorical and tragic conventions than any of our Gospel writers are); but he does not invent Agrippa’s death on that occasion. Clare Rothschild offers a fairly balanced, centrist assessment: historians, who like orators claimed that they placed truth over style, varied in their preferences, but mostly dealt both in information and its persuasive presentation.210
While it is true that virtually all ancient historians exhibited both a degree of literary freedom and edifying agendas unacceptable to many modern (albeit perhaps less so to postmodern) historians, denying that most of the events they report derive from their sources is easily refuted by comparing them with their extant sources where both cover the same ground (e.g., Luke using Mark). Historians could exercise flexibility on details to provide coherent rhetorical presentation, but such flexibility did not normally entail wholesale creation of events (and not necessarily even of all details, when authentic details were available).