This post is a response to this post at Pat Lang’s place referencing Thucycides’s History of the Pelopponesian War. Much of the information here was drawn from this reference on the work. If you’re not interested in classical literature, I suggest you ignore this post.
When I read the piece referenced above, I was immediately moved to react. If you’re not familiar with Thucycides’s History of the Pelopponesian War, it’s believed to have been one of the most respected historical works of the ancient world, a major source for information about the Pelopponesian War between Athens and Sparta (Athens lost), and very widely cited. The problems as I see it are that it is actually a work of literature rather than history and we don’t reallu know when it was written or by whom.
What we know of the work derives from just eight medieval manuscripts. Eight. The earliest complete manuscript of the work dates from 900AD—a full 1300 years after the war purportedly took place. The earliest fragments of the work date from around 300AD—that’s 700 years after the war purportedly took place—and they’re pretty small. Some of the manuscripts are later, as recent as the 14th century and there’s some differences among the manuscripts. You need to believe a lot of things to believe it’s actually a reliable source.
- You need to believe that the work was faithfully transcribed over and over for 1300 years. Based on our knowledge of ancient literatures and scribes that is extremely unlikely.
- You need to believe that the work was written by an actual eyewitness. We simply don’t know.
- Some of the things reported in the work are now known to be incorrect (based on inscriptions). Not just unproven. Proven wrong. You need to find some way of explaining that away.
If you accept the work as a work of literature (or philosophy) as I do, all of those problems go away. We really just don’t know a lot about things that happened more than about six hundred years ago.
If you apply the same standards to the New Testament as are applied to the War, you must believe in the historicity of all sorts of events that many people reject, i.e. the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. Again, the War is known from just eight manuscripts. There are more than 15,000 manuscripts of New Testament books dating from 900AD or earlier.
To me the more interesting questions are why the Christian scribes who continued to copy the work for centuries did so and how they adapted it to their needs. Insistence on the historicity of the work obscures those questions.
