The definitions of history in Random
House College Dictionary read as follows: history is (1) “The branch of
knowledge dealing with past events”; (2) “a continuous systematic narrative of
past events as relating to a particular people, country, period, person, etc.,
usually written in chronological order”; (3) “the aggregate of past events”; and
(4) “the record of past events, especially in connection with the human race.” Basically these break down into three ways of
viewing history: it is a branch of scientific inquiry; it is everything that
happened in the past; it is a narrative reconstructing what happened in the
past. Webster’s Third International
Dictionary (unabridged) agrees with these three ways of defining history but in
its listing of options gives precedence to the idea that history is a narrative
of events or a systematic written account comprising a chronological record. The idea that history is principally a
narrative of past events can threaten the independent reality of the lived past.
At a recent conference (Society of
Biblical Literature) one panel speaker claimed: “History is only available in
narrative”—I objected claiming that history was a reality in its own right
completely apart from all historical narratives. Narratives change as new information and
insights become available, but the lived reality that was history is what it
was, whether we can recover it or not.
History is all the millions and
billions of things that have ever happened in the past—significant and insignificant,
public and private, natural and arranged, remembered and forgotten, personal
and impersonal, seemly and unseemly, etc.
Narratives about that aggregate of the lived past are attempts to
reconstruct it—not in its aggregate totality but in what the historian
considers its more significant aspects.
Bits and pieces of the aggregate that
was our historical past actually survive apart from the historical narrative in
the residue, artifacts, residua, and relics of the past. These odds and ends are the raw data of
history, remainders of a lived past before it was codified into the Master Narrative
of a given reconstructed history. For
example, remainders of the lived past of the Battle of Gettysburg survive in
such things as official lists of the dead and wounded, anecdotal reports of the
battle from observers or participants, military dispatches, photos, maps,
prisoner lists, scattered equipment from the battlefield, etc. Historians rely on these bits and pieces of
the lived past as well as on their imaginations to fill in gaps in the data.
History itself is something far
different than historical narrative.
History consists in billions of events themselves as played out at the
time—momentarily present but they then immediately become part of the lived
past. The reality that was the living moment
as it was actually lived can never be recaptured, but its scattered bones
(artifacts and memories) can be gathered, catalogued, and analyzed. The historian aims to revive a given living
moment by making connections between bits of data and imagining how things might
have played themselves out given the data at the historian’s disposal. Thus the historian codifies the lived past into
historical narrative. But a given historical
narrative is no more “history” than a corpse is a human being.
A narrative cannot be historical if
it is not informed by the residua of the lived past. And hence a historical narrative cannot be
“history” as such, but it is only an attempt at reconstructing the lived past
through its residua. A narrative about
the lived past is historically reliable as a reconstruction only to the extent
that it conforms to the residua of the lived past, and only to the extent that the
historian’s imagination corresponds to a critical sense of what is actually real.
This way of looking at history and
historical narrative has significant implications for the historical character
of the Gospel of Mark, our earliest gospel in the view of a majority of modern
scholars. No residua of the lived past
informs Mark’s narrative except unconfirmed oral reports, which scholars assume
that Mark had at hand when composing the narrative. Mark’s imaginative composition of the story,
however, does not conform to a modern critical sense of what is real, or even to
that represented by the finest history writing of the ancient past, such as is
represented, for example, by Thucydides in his History of the Peloponnesian War
(5th century BCE). Mark’s historical
narrative turns out to be pious historical fiction written for the purpose of
informing the reader about the origins of the gospel (Mark 1:1) preached by the
Markan community in the latter half of the first century.
Many contemporary scholars,
however, routinely treat Mark as though the narrative and the lived past are as
Mark imagined it—in other words what Mark says happened, actually happened that
way. Thinking of history as lived past
and historical narrative as an attempt to reconstruct that lived past puts Mark
in its place as a questionable reconstruction of the events of the lived past
of Galilee and Judea in the first third of the first century.
Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University
