Quotes about Historian

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.

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

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

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.

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.