Omniscient narrators, common in epic poetry,3 were not common in history or biography. Historians, in fact, often felt constrained to indicate some of their sources,4 especially if they depended on written sources and wrote for upper class readers who might have access to these various works. Accuracy of sources, unimportant in some genres, was known to be a concern of historians. 5 One could establish one’s point better by naming various earlier sources supporting it.6 A historical writer who does not include everything that has been written might need to explain that he had in fact read almost everything but did not judge it all suitable for inclusion.7
That ancient historians, biographers and anthologists8 depended on earlier sources is not in question; both biblical9 and Greco-Roman10 writers frequently cite them. (Other means of detecting them, such as different textures within a narrative, are usually less dependable.)11 They often cite varying accounts, even when preferring one above another.12 Thus, for example, the biographer Arrian prefers above other sources his two earliest ones, which often agree, and he chooses between them when they diverge;13 when sources diverge too much he frankly complains that the exact truth is unrecoverable.14
Likewise the biographer Philostratus notes a point where his sources diverge, and his research provided no definitive resolution;15 such a complaint hardly implies that ancient biographers regularly practiced free invention!16 At one point the biographer Plutarch names five sources for a “majority” position and nine for a minority one,17 plus an extant letter attributed to the person about whom he writes.18 Occasionally historians also found ways to harmonize traditions,19 or apparently smoothed out contradictions in their sources in their own rewriting.20
At the same time, lack of citation does not mean that sources are not used. As our opening quote from Pliny suggests, writers did not all acknowledge all of their sources. Historians usually mentioned sources, but generally did so only when they conflicted or the author disagreed or was unsure about their reliability21 or about which sources were best.22 Such conflicts arose more often when treating events of the more remote past than when treating the present. The Gospel writers do not identify specific sources (although they clearly had some available; Lk 1:1-2), probably at least partly because they discuss events of a recent generation on which sources have not yet diverged greatly.23 They may also follow some Jewish conventions on this point; in some such works we can identify the sources only because they are extant.24 The more popular audience anticipated may be a more important factor; popular works of various genres were less likely to cite sources, even when they clearly depend on them. Earlier exaggerated contrasts between elite and popular literature aside,25 the Gospels do not reflect an elite audience.
Including material missing in earlier extant sources does not always betray fabrication. A writer providing information missing in some earlier historians sometimes was drawing from sources unavailable to the other historians, whether the sources were written, oral, or both.26 Moreover, even writers who preserved their sources sometimes edited them, even in the case of sacred cultural texts27 and philosophic works.28 Some argue that such changes were more common at the written than the oral level,29 perhaps because the former reflected literary urban culture and the latter more traditional society.
For one example of using sources we may return to Polybius, whom we have noted before. Polybius complains that Timaeus failed to make appropriate use of earlier historians’ works, though living in Athens provided him access to them;30 this complaint reinforces the picture that many sources were available and that good historians were expected to consult them when possible. For Polybius, real history requires a study of documents, though this must take a third place after visiting the locations in question and reviewing their historical context.31
We should not underestimate the research sources available to ancient writers, especially since (as in Lk 1:1) they often explicitly mention the existence of such works. Clearly an abundance of contemporary sources existed then that are no longer extant;32 for example, Pliny the Elder, explaining that he could not survey everything,33 notes that he surveyed about two thousand volumes (though focusing especially on a hundred), and supplemented them with other data.34 Few of his sources remain extant, but we can appreciate Pliny’s preservation of much of the content.
