Crossing the Rubicon: One Time Only!

I said in my latest post that I wouldn't flip through thousands of pages of N.T. Wright's works just to tell you where he said that history is a series of unrepeatable events.

But I did.  I couldn't resist.

And what he has to say is just really, really good... as always.

He wrights (jk),

Less cautious historians, forgetting that history is the study, not of repeatable events as in physics and chemistry, but of unrepeatable events like Caesar's crossing of the Rubicon, declare that we can indeed go further, and that we can reach a clear negative judgment: we can be quite sure that nothing whatever happened to Jesus' body at Easter, except that it continued to decompose.  Dead people don't rise, therefore Jesus didn't either."

That's from The Resurrection of the Son of God (685).  But I also cracked open The New Testament and the People of God, because I couldn't remember which of the two books this quote was in, and I found some even more amazing things he was saying about history.

According to one popular 'modern' view, it is only in the last two hundred years that we have discovered what 'history' really is, while writers in the ancient world were ignorant about these matters, freely making things up, weaving fantasy and legend together and calling it history.  There is a high irony about this view, since it is itself a modern myth, legitimating the cultural imperialism of the Enlightenment without having any basis in the real history of the ancient world....  Herodotus arranged events in such a way as to set forth his theory about how history operates -- namely, that it is all a matter of the outworking of human jealousy and greed....  Like all the major historians in the ancient world, Herodotus knew the difference between History proper and mere horography, the attempt to record 'what happened' from one day to the next.  At the same time, he knew as well as we do that there are such things as actual events, and that it is the business of the historian to write about them, discrediting ones which he thinks incredible. (NTPG 84)

And then this:

One learns to suspect people who claim to be the only unbiased voice on their subject; normally this simply means that their agenda is so large that, like a mountain which blots out the sky, they forget that it is there at all.... To imagine, therefore, as some post-Enlightenment thinkers have, that we in the modern world have discovered 'pure history', so that all we do is record 'how it actually happened', with no interpretative element or observer's point of view entering into the matter... such a view is an arrogant absurdity.  (NTPG  85-86)

So, there.  Some words of wisdom from my good friend Tom.  Oh, I guess I can call him that because one time I had lunch with him and his wife Maggie.  He basically was totally impressed that I'd been reading Christian Origins.  Totally.  We ate at an Italian restaurant.  I had a roasted eggplant burger with polenta on the side.  It was yummy and the good bishop picked up the check.  What a stand-up kind of guy.