Roger Pearse

I took it as meaning that we can't decide whether a quote is historical or not without examining how that passage came to be written. We need instead to look at the source documents or oral tradition from which it derives, to decide whether it is likely to be historical or not.

Since none of these supposed sources are extant, I naturally don't have much faith in that.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

spamandham

I take it to mean that to understand what a writing means in context we have to know quite a bit about the history of the time a priori. For example, I take it as an unprovable assumption that none of the miracles attributed to Jesus have an any historical basis at all, but instead, the writers attributed these things to Jesus because they fit the theological framework of the writings. If I had a better grasp of the history of the time, I could possibly tell you exactly why water-to-wine was attributed to Jesus. This is the type of analysis being referred to, from my understanding.

This is a bit of chicken and egg, since to understand history, we have to understand the writings and to understand the writings, we have to already know history. But I don't see it as an impossible task, just a very difficult one. To understand the history of the time, we have to analyze *all* the data. After having done that, then we can analyze an individual texts.