Historical Facts

I wonder whether those in the field of religious studies, or biblical studies more specifically sometimes feel what I feel, i.e., a sense that many people don't care about "history" the way we do. Now, I don't say this as a way to criticize others, in fact, I wonder if the problem lies within academia itself. What I mean by this is that we argue and re-argue the most minute details of some esoteric subject that it very well may be that we are just talking among ourselves while neglecting to think about just what kind of value these discussions have for the broader public (I also want to talk about "public" scholarship in a later blog post). To qualify my statement further: on one hand, I am not saying religious studies or other humanities fields need to be strictly utilitarian in their approach/aim. Specialists in any field, including something like cancer research, will inevitably get into the minutiae that only other specialists can understand or critique. On the other hand, having worked with many undergraduate students for the last three semesters engaging in natural scientific research, it is also clear that sometimes humanistic inquiry just doesn't make any sense to anyone outside of that specific discipline, at least in the way they are often packaged. This is on a very different scale than the cancer research I just mentioned: even my student in computer science and big data can understand (somewhat) and appreciate how my other student in cancer biology is engaging her research, even if he may not really understand the mechanism behind working with knockout mice and performing Western blots.

But, that does not mean of course that historical research is useless and that historical details can be blatantly ignored. The current socio-political climate reveals clearly why history matters and why facts matter. On a less serious note, I remember one time I happened to be watching Jeopardy and the answer was something about the "epistle apostle" in the New Testament from "the first century BC." Truth be told, I felt my snobbery coming out, though none of the contestants even batted an eye at this mistake.

Just this morning, I came across an article and here is a screenshot from a page of that article:

This comes from a CNN Travel article here titled, "Beautiful photos reveal Matera, the Italian city carved into solid rock" (Aug. 1, 2018). Part of it describes very old grotto churches in Matera that have frescoes of biblical scenes. The problem is the author wrote that these works "dat[e] back hundreds of centuries." This would locate these artworks into the Paleolithic period, thousands of years before Jesus was even born!


Do historical facts matter to you? Why does it matter? And if it does matter, how do we show/teach our students and colleagues (of all types of disciplines) why it matters?