Quotes about Historian

No Christian and, indeed, no historian could accept the epigram which defines religion as 'what a man does with his solitude.'

The duty of the historian is not to make the facts, but to discover them, and then to construct his theory wide enough to give them all comfortable room.

In so many multifarious ways, John Henry Newman has been a blessing to the Church. How appropriate, therefore, that the Church has now conferred a great blessing upon Newman by raising him to the altar. The beatified Newman is in the Presence of the Beatific Vision. He has achieved the only goal for which life is worth living. As such, praise should make way for prayers. Blessed John Henry Newman, historian, theologian, philosopher, and poet, pray for us.

It is not the business of the historian to construct a history from preconceived notions and to adjust it to his own liking, but to reproduce it from the best evidence and to let it speak for itself.

Whether we are reading the Bible for the first time or standing in a field in Israel next to a historian and an archaeologist and a scholar, the Bible meets us where we are. That is what truth does

Every historian, whether he is a Christian or not, ought to take account of this strange fact—that a certain Jesus, a man who lived in the first century in Palestine, was actually convinced, as He looked out upon the men who thronged about Him, that He would one day sit on the judgment-seat of God and be their judge and the judge and ruler of all the world.

Even in some older literature, such as in the writings of Byzantine historian Philostorgius in the fifth century, Ararat was suggested as the ark's landing site. After the 13th century a.d., more sources affirm this mountain as the landing site.

There is no reason in principle why the question, what precisely happened at Easter, cannot be raised by any historian of any persuasion. Even if some Christians might wish to rule it off limits, they have (presumably) no a priori right to tell other historians, whether Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, New Agers, gnostics, agnostics, or anyone else, what they may and may not study.

From the perspective of a classical historian, German scholar Hans Stier has concurred that agreement over basic data and divergence of details suggest credibility, because fabricated accounts tend to be fully consistent and harmonized. "Every historian," he wrote, "is especially skeptical at that moment when an extraordinary happening is only reported in accounts which are completely free of contradictions.

Aside from the faith factor, when it comes to reports of miracles, the historian must seek a natural explanation before considering a supernatural one.

I like the way C. F. D. Moule, the Cambridge New Testament scholar, put it: 'If the coming into existence of the Nazarenes, a phenomenon undeniably attested by the New Testament, rips a great hole in history, a hole the size and shape of Resurrection, what does the secular historian propose to stop it up with?' "3

A good historian must combine the talents of the storyteller and the scientist. He must know what is likely to have happened as well as what some witnesses or writers said actually did happen.