Faith in History
By Suan Sonna
After graduating from Harvard Divinity School with an M.T.S. in New Testament, many people have asked whether my beliefs have changed. On the one hand, I have not changed much: I am still a Christian who believes in the inspiration of Sacred Scripture. On the other hand, I have gained a deeper appreciation for the strengths and limits of historical criticism.
By “historical criticism” I mean the general outlook of scholars toward the Bible, which presupposes methodological naturalism, meaning one studies and reconstructs history without admitting miracles and providence, emphasizing a return of Biblical texts to their cultural matrices rather than our own. Many contemporary Jewish and Christian interpretations of the Bible, for example, are viewed as anachronistic and as imposing unity upon contradictory texts that have been forced together through canonization. Theological interpretations are gently patted on the head and promptly escorted off the premises.
At the same time, the rejection of theological readings is a rejection of a genuine, historical aspect of these texts: they were made to be interpreted and understood within a theological conversation, or they were at least published into a world where the original authors, insofar as we can reconstruct them, knew (or should have known) that they lack a monopoly over their text’s meaning. Even if a distinguished professor says “I am not doing theology” but proceeds to interpret a passage within an author’s overall corpus, replete with musings on the nature of God and other mysteries, then some theological muscles are inevitably being exercised. The inevitability of some theology is not a knock against historical research but essential to receiving these texts as the earliest communities would have.
James Kugel notes that there are four assumptions all ancient interpreters of Biblical texts shared: (1) scripture is in some sense divinely inspired and authored; (2) it is always relevant across time and space and so never restricted to just its original context; (3) it is fundamentally cryptic and therefore says more on a deeper reading than initially thought; and (4) scripture is wholly inerrant and without contradiction. These theological beliefs have fruitful insights for historians to consider. Take the Documentary hypothesis, for example, which sees the Pentateuch as a combination of four independent documents: J (Jahwist), D (Deuteronomist), E (Elohist), and P (Priestly). Rather than completely or even substantially being the work of one hand, traditionally Moses, the Torah is seen as an attempt to combine contradictory sources bearing discordant conceptions of God and “different religions” together.
But why is the combination of these sources often treated as lesser in value than the individual documents? For example, Abraham pleads with God in Genesis 18:22-33 not to destroy the innocent together with the wicked in Sodom. In Genesis 22, however, Abraham is willing to sacrifice his innocent son Isaac without protest. One explanation for this seemingly radical shift (some would say “contradiction”) in Abraham’s character is that Genesis 18:22-33 is part of the J source, whereas the binding of Isaac is part of the E source until perhaps Genesis 22:11. In one sense, this is a perfectly fine answer: we have different Abrahams, because we have different versions of the character in different sources.
At the same time, there is the sensible explanation that whereas Genesis 18 strictly concerns justice, sacrifice is at the center of Genesis 22, which takes us into a different realm. Whereas Genesis 18 showcases God’s obligations to humanity (punishing only the guilty and not the innocent), Genesis 22 pertains to humanity’s obligations to God as exemplified in Abraham (withholding nothing of His from Him). This interpretation makes perfect sense with the data before us and does so without sacrificing the coherence of Abraham’s character even if the redactor stitched independent traditions together. Thus, the decision to see multiple, fragmented Abrahams is an interpretive choice, one controversial option among others, when there is in fact a way to read everything together in accordance with the final redactor’s intent. One can either seek out contradictions or see a coherent whole by believing that the text is always relevant by teaching us about justice and sacrifice without contradiction.
Whose intent then should we prefer? Whose intent is superior? Should we interpret J and E separately at the expense of the final redactor? These questions strike me as odd, because they insist upon an unnecessary conflict. On the one hand, J and E can be interpreted separately, differences and all. On the other hand, the redactor’s tapestry is also a literary unit in its own right. Remarkably then, even if we are reading the same words on the page, we are not thereby reading the same document. A historical critic might be investigating a work titled “Genesis” but is in another sense not reading “Genesis” by taking it apart and refusing to reassemble it. Our prior commitments will shape what counts as the true literary unit to be studied, what is the real as opposed to artificial reading of this text. What one might see as an organic unity, another sees as patchwork.
To be clear, I am neither objecting to the Documentary hypothesis nor source criticism in general. I also am not saying that synchronic or final form criticism is superior to atomistic flavors of criticism. Rather, there needs to be a greater sense of modesty among historical critics with respect to their attitude towards theologians.
First, history is a game of probabilities, sometimes arising to the level of near certainty but often approaching an educated guess the further back we travel. One historian observed “that doing history is somewhat like playing cards. We wish the cards in our hand were better. We wish we had more cards. But we’ve got to play with the hand we’ve been dealt.” Historians are tasked with reconstructing the past based on the hand they have been dealt, and the more cautious among them are aware of how any degree of confidence about especially the ancient past, is a hard-won victory. Even still, Origen of Alexandria soberly observed “that an attempt to substantiate almost any story as historical fact, even if it is true, and to produce complete certainty about it, is one of the most difficult tasks and in some cases is impossible.”
Second, history is still a soft enough science to be manipulated in a number of ways. For example, it is uncontroversial that various allegedly “objective” and “scientific” reconstructions of Jesus throughout history have coincidentally produced a Jesus who is made in the historian’s image: a rationalist Jesus who transcends Judaism as advocated by liberal Protestant scholars in 19th century Germany, a Reform Jew who rebelled against the proto-rabbinic Pharisees, an anti-establishment hippie who preached a gospel of social justice, and so on. The most prolific historical Jesus scholar to date, John P. Meier, candidly admitted, “The historical Jesus is not the real Jesus. The real Jesus is not the historical Jesus.” Rather, the historical Jesus “is a modern abstraction and construct.”
Thus, it is one thing to construct a historical Jesus and another thing to say that this historical Jesus is the real Jesus; it is one thing to (re)construct history and another thing to necessarily say what happened. Whereas a person of faith would insist that divine revelation provides the contours missing in the historian’s portrait, historians must banish such considerations by presupposing methodological naturalism. Far from being bad, historical criticism, like any other framework, must bracket certain questions and simplify reality in order to obtain knowledge elsewhere. But it is unwarranted to treat the method as an omniscient defeater of religion, to have enough faith in history to say there is no room for faith in history.
Contributed by Suan Sonna. Suan Sonna is the Director of Apologetics for the Diocese of Bridgeport under Bishop Frank J. Caggiano. Suan has a B.A. in Philosophy from Kansas State University, an M.T.S. in New Testament studies from Harvard Divinity School, and is currently pursuing an M.A.R. in Second Temple Judaism at Yale Divinity School.
This piece was adapted from a longer talk given at the Abigail Adams Institute on 04/11/2025.
