There is not a single contemporary historical mention of Jesus, not by Romans or by Jews, not by believers or by unbelievers, during his entire lifetime. This does not disprove his existence, but it certainly casts great doubt on the historicity of a man who was supposedly widely known to have made a great impact on the world. Someone should have noticed.
However, the difficulties and pleasures of the writing itself are similar for a novel with a historical setting and a novel with a contemporary setting, as far as I'm concerned.
So we've done science songs. We've done historical songs. A lot of people would like us to do more historical songs. Our history record would probably be like the people's history of the United States, set to music.
Accepting the view that man was prior in the creation, some Scriptural writers say that as the woman was of the man, therefore, her position should be one of subjection. Grant it, then as the historical fact is reversed in our day, and the man is now of the woman, shall his place be one of subjection?
It is only by historical analysis that we can discover what makes up man, since it is only in the course of history that he is formed.
Since historical reconstruction is a rational process, only justified and indeed possible if it involves the human reason, what we call history is the mess we call life reduced to some order. pattern and possibly purpose.
I think the important thing is to realize that the establishment of a democracy is sometimes a messy thing and it takes time. Yeah, we've been at it 240 years.
When people like Glenn Beck throw around the word Nazi without taking that kind of care, they are engaging in demagoguery. I am doing it with a concrete footnoted historical context.
We are not buried in history, but surrounded by it. You can't avoid our behavior being shaped by it, to a considerable degree. We have this fantasy that we are free of history. This allows us not to see the circumstances, the historical circumstances of other people.
Historical investigation and literary criticism have taken the magic out of the Bible and have made it a composite human book, written by many hands in different ages.
I suspect people would be in for a real shock if they knew the depths of [Obama's] historical ignorance.
Happiness is more effectually dispensed to mankind under a republican form of government than any other.
To say that historical conditions made personal life possible, and with it the self-consciousness that allowed psychoanalysis to emerge, is to tell half the story: one also has to consider that the erotic impulse, ever pressing for satisfaction, had something to do with making the history that encouraged its expression.
Without the meditative background that is criticism, works become isolated gestures, historical accidents, soon forgotten.
When I was growing up I loved reading historical fiction, but too often it was about males; or, if it was about females, they were girls who were going to grow up to be famous like Betsy Ross, Clara Barton, or Harriet Tubman. No one ever wrote about plain, normal, everyday girls.
Communism is Utopia, that is nowhere. It is the avatar of all our religious eschatologies: the coming of the Messiah, the second coming of Christ, nirvana. It is not a historical prospect, but a current mythology. Socialism, by contrast, is a realizable historical system which may one day be instituted in the world.
A word is nothing unless it has values and an atmosphere, unless you grasp its historical significance.
The core cuisine of Southern food is established in the plantation South, within the world of slavery. To understand the plantation table, we must understand the relationship of enslaved people to Africa, to historical trauma, and their central role in food production. Their voice is the most poignant, expressive voice in Southern cuisine.
So these liberals say historical research can't possibly discover the Jesus of faith, because the Jesus of faith is not rooted in history. He's merely a symbol. But listen: Jesus is not a symbol of anything unless he's rooted in history. The Nicene Creed doesn't say, "We wish these things were true. " It says, "Jesus Christ was crucified under Pontius Pilate, and the third day he rose again from the dead,' and it goes on from there.
My visitors say they noticed perfumes from different companies in my fridge, and ask what I need these for. I explain that they are mainly there as historical benchmarks of quality, below which I must not and would not want to fall.