Friends,

It seems to me that many people on a list such as 
this don't know what people do to understand and 
assess the evidence of events and accounts that 
they have not themselves experienced.

For reasons not worth explaining, I occasionally 
read material on distant moments in history, 
attempting to sort out questions of how memory 
and transmission work, and trying to distinguish 
between genuine historical accounts of what 
people believed or said to each other. (This 
includes the possibility that what they told each 
other may not have taken place.)

Historians such as Victor will understand the 
difficulty and the importance of this task. If 
all accounts are fictional, one must ask whether 
we have any reason to believe any account -- 
including an account of something we believe that 
we observed happening today at lunch. It is true 
that all accounts are imperfect and selective, 
but I'd argue that some kind of epistemological 
and political baggage accompanies the notion that 
we cannot know and say anything reliable about 
the past.

Is history simply a tale told by the victors? 
Isn't there some way to know whether there was or 
was not a Holocaust?

In October, 2006, the science journal Nature 
published a study estimating the civilian death 
toll in Iraq that resulted from the US-led 
invasion at 655,000. George Bush called the study 
flawed, claiming that the research methods were 
"discredited." Bush stood by his proposed 
estimate of 30,000 civilian deaths to that date. 
Are both accounts fictional? Is there some 
reasonable way to sort them out?

The issue of epistemological baggage has come up 
here several times. I'll try to answer for my 
baggage when I respond to Klaus. At this point, 
I'll suggest that everyone in this debate is 
carrying some kind of epistemological baggage.

For those who want to learn a little more about 
how historians sort through information that 
comes from our own planet at times long, long ago 
and places far, far away might enjoy reading 
Birger Gerhardsson's work. He works with accounts 
that go back to stories and traditions written 
down long after the events described took place, 
and shows how historians sort through these kinds 
of issues.

There is a more recent series of accounts that 
will be known to some of you. For many years, 
scholars insisted that the Iliad and the Odyssey 
count not have been composed and memorized in 
oral form by one man. In the twentieth century, a 
scholar named Milman Parry travelled around, 
finding bards who memorized and recited huge epic 
oral poems. Another scholar named Albert Lord 
carried the line of inquiry forward. Today, 
scholars agree that lengthy, detailed accounts 
can survive in an oral tradition relatively 
intact. Those who know the scaldic tradition of 
the sagas will know similar traditions. I'm not 
saying any of these accounts repeat true events 
-- I do not believe that Odin hung for nine 
nights on a tree or traveled about with two 
ravens named Hugin and Munin. But I certainly 
believe that people carried these tales forward 
for centuries in unwritten form, along with 
accounts of battles, royal deeds, and genealogy.

Things grow dim with distance in time space. But 
one kind of epistemological baggage would be the 
notion that we cannot sort out reasonably well 
that some things have happened, even though we 
did not see them or experience them personally. 
That's what historians do -- imperfectly, as 
Victor notes, but not unreasonably.

Ken

--

Gerhardsson, Birger. 1964a. Memory and 
Manuscript. Oral Tradition and Written 
Transmission in Rabbinic Judaism and Early 
Christianity. 2nd Edition. Lund: C. W. K. Gleerup.

Gerhardsson, Birger. 1964b. Tradition and 
Transmission in Early Christianity. Lund: C. W. 
K. Gleerup.

Gerhardsson, Birger. 1977. Evangeliernas 
förhistoria. Lund: Verbum-Håkan Ohlssons Förlag.

Gerhardsson, Birger. 1979. The Origins of the 
Gospel Tradition. Philadelphia: Fortress Press.

Gerhardsson, Birger. 2001. The Reliability of the 
Gospel Tradition. Peabody, Massachusetts: 
Hendrickson Publishing.

--

-- 

Ken Friedman
Professor

Dean, Swinburne Design
Swinburne University of Technology
Melbourne, Australia