H.L. Mencken, the supposed atheist, arguably anti-Christian, certainly controversial, but often brilliant early 20th century American journalist, once argued that a historian is just an unsuccessful novelist. Mencken was a critical – even disparaging – social commentator, as well as a skilled satirist regarding the culture and the institutions around him, so it’s hard to know exactly what he meant by his assessment of historians. On some level, he probably meant that they weren’t imaginative enough to write entertaining marketable content, but were just smart enough to invent stories and fill the gaps between apparently established events of the past. This is ironic, given that the greatest historians of all, are, like him, journalists who record history as it is happening. It is not just official government documents from which we stitch together our mosaic of history, but newspaper clippings, old diaries, personal letters, and written academic explorations by eyewitnesses who captured the details of the events of our past. Mencken, to some degree, was a historian as he wrote about his world in real time. The failed novelists can make nothing of history without the “historians” who recorded it.
The bible has some very good historians. Luke, who wrote the gospel named after him, also wrote the Book of Acts. In the first chapter of that book, he reports how Jesus rose from the dead, and showed himself to the apostles for 40 days while telling them about the Kingdom of God (Acts 1:1-3). Luke gave specific details that could have been easily verified by any contemporaneous reader of his work. He was recording history! Later, Paul, in his letter to the Corinthian church, corroborated Luke by recording how Jesus appeared to over 500 people at one time, as well as to other apostles. He then boldly told his readers that most of those people were still alive (1 Corinthians 15:3-8)! Paul, the writer of history, gave his contemporaneous readers the ability to verify the history he had captured. As far as we can tell, no one who existed at the same time as Paul, Luke, or those more than 500 people, contested their reports – not even the murderers of Jesus!
Luke does this again in Acts chapter three when he recorded how Peter and John healed a lame beggar outside of the temple’s Beautiful Gate (Acts 3:1-10). Luke noted in his work how the man had been known by everyone to be lame since birth, and that all of those who witnessed the healing were astonished, since they knew he had been lame for as long as they had known him. Luke’s capturing of that detail lets us know that the man was not just some actor they’d hired from some other town to help them fake a miracle. He was a historical person known by the people in his community.
It is true that The Gospels, Acts, and the letters of the new testament are works full of spiritual and theological wisdom. But far more importantly, they are historical documents. They are not novels written by unimaginative and unsuccessful story tellers coaxing us to adopt a strange theology with no basis. They are history written by people journaling it firsthand as it was happening.
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