If history is a form of knowledge, then it can be true or false, right?  Christopher Columbus discovered America in 1985.  The first President of the United States was Patrick Mahomes.  Moses led the Israelites to freedom from Egypt across the Atlantic Ocean. 

Those are all obviously false facts of history.  So, is that all there is to judging an historical account?  Check the facts, and if the dates and events are accurate, the history is true?

Remember that the word history comes from the same root from which we get our English word “story.”  Can a story have true facts, and still be a false history? 

Jesus of Nazareth was born to an unwed mother in the time of Caesar Augustus.  He grew up to be a teacher with about 12 students.  Around the age of 33, not long after a special dinner with his students, he was tried and convicted of serious crimes.  He died, most likely due to the failure of his lungs.

Is that a true or false history of the life of Jesus?  The facts are all true—but is the story the truth? 

Most of the fights over history today are less about the specific facts, and more about which ones to include in the story.  They are more about the significance of the facts that we know.  To some historians, that means that history is all just a matter of perspective, that there is no such thing as true history; that it all just depends on who is telling the story.  But that’s just a trick—an attempt to put ourselves in charge of the truth, rather than putting the truth in charge of us.

We all know that my history of Jesus is not the true story of his life—it is incomplete and misleading.  Just because the telling of history requires virtue—doing justice to the people and events of the past, exercising prudence to convey an accurate, complete, and fair picture—doesn’t mean I get to decide what’s true.  It just means that true history is much more than a list of facts—it means what we already knew: Real history is a true story.

Have a wonderful day.