I. No Generation Begins Religion Anew
II. The Accumulation of Religious Memory
III. Religious Traditions Do Not Develop in Straight Lines
IV. When Religious Narratives Become a Way of Life
V. When Interpretations Become Religious Authority
VI. Israel and Judah Within Inherited Religious Worlds
VII. From Israelite Religion to Developing Judaism
VIII. Christianity Within the Continuing History of Religion
IX. How Religious Worlds Become Self-Evident
X. Religious Continuity, Innovation, and the Exercise of Power
XII. The History of Belief and the Question of Divine Reality
Conclusion - The Unfinished Human History of Religion
Bibliography
Why These Authors and Sources Were Chosen
Appendix C - The Processes of Religious Inheritance and Transformation
Appendix D - Historical Layers in Israelite, Jewish, and Christian Religious Development
Appendix E - From Inherited Interpretation to Lived Religious Certainty
The Independence of Historical Inquiry and the Limits of Religious Explanation
Historical inquiry cannot, by reconstructing the human development of religious belief alone, settle the ultimate question of divine reality. Nevertheless, its findings can substantively support, challenge, or undermine particular historical and theological claims.
Importantly, the independence of history from theology does not make religious history irrelevant to theological judgment. Rather, historical inquiry provides an essential means of examining, testing, and reconsidering theological claims by investigating the human circumstances in which they arose, developed, and acquired authority.
Its findings then may support, challenge, or require the revision of inherited religious understandings without independently determining whether the divine reality to which those understandings refer actually exists.
This distinction establishes the methodological foundation for our final investigation.
Throughout the preceding sections, we have examined:
how religious narratives were preserved,
how communal practices acquired authority,
how sacred writings, doctrinal formulations, and religious institutions becamehow inherited traditions were reinterpreted following political catastrophe, and
established features of communal life.
These developments can be investigated through archaeology, anthropology, sociology, literary criticism, textual scholarship, and historical reconstruction.
They now bring us to a consequential question:
Can the historical development of religion be explained without appealing to God?
Answering that question requires distinguishing the historical processes through which religious traditions developed from the philosophical and theological claims subsequently made concerning their divine significance.
Historical Explanation Begins with Historical Evidence
Historical inquiry seeks to reconstruct earlier events, circumstances, relationships, and developments through evidence that can be critically examined. Archaeological remains, inscriptions, manuscripts, literary traditions, documentary records, and material objects provide different forms of access to the past.
Such evidence is necessarily incomplete. Historians cannot recover past events in their entirety, and their reconstructions frequently remain subject to revision. Nevertheless, responsible historical explanation depends upon arguments that can be examined, criticized, and compared with the surviving evidence.
The development of ancient Israelite religion provides one example.
Archaeology reveals substantial cultural relationships between early Israelite communities and the wider Canaanite environment. Biblical literature preserves disagreements concerning legitimate worship, divine identity, and religious authority. Inscriptions and material remains disclose religious practices that do not always correspond to the expectations expressed by particular biblical writers.
These materials enable historians to investigate the development of Israelite and Judahite religious identities through cultural inheritance, political circumstances, communal practices, and the changing interpretations of YHWH.
The investigation does not require historians to establish that YHWH actually communicated with Israel before examining how Israelite communities came to understand themselves as belonging to YHWH.
Likewise, Christianity's emergence can be investigated through the Jewish religious world of the first century, the historical circumstances of Roman Judea, early Christian writings, communal organization, and the transmission of beliefs concerning Jesus.
Historians can examine what Jesus' followers proclaimed, how they interpreted his death, and how their communities developed without first determining whether the theological claims expressed in those proclamations are true.
This approach does not dismiss religious convictions as historically unimportant. It recognizes those convictions as significant features of the communities whose histories are being reconstructed.
Methodological Naturalism and Metaphysical Naturalism
An important distinction concerns the difference between methodological and metaphysical naturalism.
Methodological naturalism seeks explanations through identifiable processes and evidence without requiring supernatural agency as an explanatory premise. Within the historical study of religion, this generally involves investigating religious experiences, beliefs, practices, writings, and institutions through their cultural, social, political, psychological, and historical circumstances.
Metaphysical naturalism makes a different claim: that reality itself contains no supernatural or divine beings.
The first concerns how we investigate reality through scientific and historical research, using evidence and identifiable natural processes. The second concerns what ultimately exists - the philosophical question of reality's fundamental nature, including the possibility of divine existence.
This distinction explains why our larger inquiry began with relational reality before moving toward relational theology, ethics, and participation. Our companion studies, Reality & Cosmology and Reality & Metaphysics, have been investigating reality independently of theological commitments. While our present series, The Prehistory of the Bible, complements these philosophical studies by tracing the historical development of religious belief. Together, these distinct but related inquiries provide a foundation for our subsequent exploration of Christian faith and relational theology.
Consequently, a naturalistic historian will employ naturalistic methods of investigation while affirming religious faith, agnosticism, atheism, or another philosophical position, in the search for religion's historical development and expression
The method does not require either agreement or disagreement concerning the ultimate nature of reality. Rather, it intends to consistently construct religious inheritance using present day investigative knowledge.
However, historical inquiry is never entirely free of - or neutral to - philosophical assumptions. Judgments concerning evidence, explanation, probability, and the credibility of competing accounts will necessarily involve broader questions about human knowledge, especially in the study of faith and faithful worship.
For this reason, methodological naturalism should not be presented as an infallible or completely philosophically neutral procedure. It is better understood here as a disciplined commitment to explanations that can be critically examined without requiring agreement concerning divine reality.
This distinction prevents two separate conclusions from being confused.
To explain religious history without invoking God is not equivalent to demonstrating that God was absent from that history.
But the reverse is equally important.
The possibility that God may have been present does not justify introducing divine agency into a historical reconstruction without appropriate supporting evidence.
Historical inquiry must remain accountable to its own evidential responsibilities.
Religious Experience and Human Testimony
Religious experiences have played important roles in the development of religious traditions.
Individuals and communities have reported experiences interpreted as encounters with gods, spirits, ancestors, sacred powers, or realities beyond ordinary perception. This we have shown. Such experiences may become foundational elements of religious memory, communal identity, ritual practice, and claims of revelation.
Historians can investigate the surviving testimony concerning these experiences, the circumstances in which they were reported, and their consequences for religious communities. Psychologists and neuroscientists can examine aspects of perception, emotion, memory, and the biological conditions associated with human experience. Anthropologists can investigate how inherited cultural expectations influence the interpretation of extraordinary events. These investigations reveal different dimensions of religious experience without necessarily addressing the same questions.
Thus, a historian may conclude that a community sincerely interpreted an experience as divine communication. But, that conclusion does not establish that divine communication occurred. Likewise, identifying psychological, neurological, or cultural conditions associated with an experience does not automatically demonstrate that its perceived divine referent was unreal.
The historical task is to distinguish the experience or testimony from the religious interpretation subsequently assigned to it. This distinction becomes especially important when religious experiences are understood as authoritative revelations.
Historical scholarship can investigate how particular claims arose, how they were transmitted, and how they influenced communal behavior. But it cannot treat the sincerity, intensity, or social consequences of religious conviction as independent verification of divine agency.
Yet at the same time, religious beliefs can be genuine historical causes. People typically act upon what they understand to be real. Ancient rulers associated political legitimacy with divine favor. Israelite writers interpreted national catastrophe through inherited understandings of covenant and judgment. Early Christians organized communities around their conviction that Jesus had been raised from the dead. In each case, the historical significance of belief can be investigated without requiring historians to confirm the theological interpretation motivating it.
As a point of methodology then, the historical consequences of religious belief and the independent reality of its proposed divine referent are distinguishable questions.
Scripture and Religious Institutions as Historical Developments
The formation of Scripture provides another important example.
The Hebrew Bible developed through processes of composition, editing, preservation, transmission, and interpretation extending across different historical periods. The Greek scriptural traditions collectively associated with the Septuagint developed through multiple translation projects and manuscript histories rather than one universally directed undertaking. The Christian New Testament likewise emerged through the composition, circulation, preservation, and eventual recognition of writings associated with early Christian communities.
These processes can be investigated through textual criticism, manuscript comparison, literary analysis, archaeology, and historical testimony. Such an investigation does not require an appeal to supernatural dictation to explain how writings were composed, copied, translated, collected, and recognized as authoritative. Their development involved identifiable human activities.
Similar considerations apply to religious institutions.
Temple organizations, priestly offices, synagogues, Christian assemblies, episcopal leadership, church councils, and other structures developed within changing historical environments. Their histories can be reconstructed through institutional records, literary testimony, archaeological evidence, and the study of political and communal relationships. The claim that a particular institution possesses divine authorization remains distinguishable from the historical account of how that institution emerged and exercised authority.
This distinction does not establish that Scripture cannot be inspired or that institutions cannot possess religious significance. It means that their historical development must be investigated without requiring those theological conclusions in advance.
A believer may understand Scripture as inspired while acknowledging its historical formation.
A nonbeliever may examine the same evidence without attributing divine significance to the writings.
In either case, the historical evidence must remain open to critical examination.
To sum up then, an important distinction must follow:
Sacred authority cannot substitute for historical evidence concerning the development of religious traditions. Conversely, historical explanation cannot, by itself, establish the absence of divine reality, interaction, or experience.
Historical inquiry must remain accountable to its evidence and methods, while theological inquiry must remain open to critical examination of its claims, interpretations, and assumptions.
Consequently, neither discipline should dictate the conclusions of the other, nor should either be exempt from the evidence, reasoning, and criticism that may challenge its understandings. Rather, both must remain open to informing, questioning, and refining one another in their continuing search for truth.
What Historical Explanation Establishes
We can now return directly to our central question -
Can religious history be explained without God?
To a substantial extent, the development of religious traditions can be reconstructed and explained through identifiable human and historical processes. Such explanations remain incomplete and open to revision, but they do not require divine agency as an additional historical premise. The extent of their success must be judged by the available evidence rather than by either theological or anti-theological expectations.
Cultural inheritance helps explain how religious understandings pass between generations.
Communal memory helps explain how selected interpretations of the past become enduring traditions.
Ritual and institutional organization help explain how religious meanings become embedded in collective life.
Literary composition, translation, and textual transmission help explain the development of sacred writings.
Political circumstances, social relationships, and institutional authority help explain the recognition, contestation, and transformation of religious practices.
Yet their incompleteness does not independently justify introducing divine agency to account for whatever remains unexplained. Historical uncertainty is not evidence of supernatural intervention. Nor does the endurance or eventual influence of a religious tradition establish that its development was divinely intended.
The histories of Israel, Judaism, and Christianity involved contingent circumstances, competing interpretations, political disruptions, and developments whose outcomes cannot be treated as historically inevitable.
Judaism should not be reconstructed as an incomplete stage whose purpose was to produce Christianity, nor should Christianity's subsequent history be interpreted as evidence of an inevitable progression toward its later doctrinal or institutional forms.
A religious community may interpret its history providentially. Such an interpretation belongs to theological inquiry and must be distinguished from the historical reconstruction itself.
This methodological distinction has consequences.
Historical findings may challenge theological claims concerning biblical authorship, religious chronology, the origins of religious institutions, or the antiquity of doctrinal formulations. When this occurs, religious communities face an important responsibility. They may acknowledge the strength of the evidence and revise their inherited understandings accordingly, or they may hold traditional interpretations provisionally while continuing to examine the available evidence. Neither response should place inherited theology beyond criticism or dismiss historical scholarship simply because its conclusions are unsettling.
My own experience offers an example. Relevancy22 emerged from the difficult reconsideration of an evangelical Christianity whose inherited beliefs had, in important respects, become increasingly difficult to reconcile with contemporary scholarship. Founded seventeen years ago on October 22, this website grew out of that struggle - not to abandon Christian faith, but to question inherited certainties and explore how faith might be responsibly reinterpreted in light of expanding historical, scientific, and philosophical understanding.
That experience illustrates the principle governing our investigation:
Theological claims must remain accountable to historical knowledge, even when doing so requires reconsidering beliefs once regarded as settled.
and,
The historical development of religion can be investigated without introducing God as an explanatory premise. But neither the success nor the limitations of those explanations, by themselves, settle the ultimate question of divine reality.
That recognition completes our methodological inquiry.
It brings us to a second and more explicitly philosophical question. If religious beliefs possess identifiable human origins, what does their history tell us about whether the realities they describe actually exist?
XII. The History of Belief and the Question of Divine Reality
What Religious History Can Reveal - and What Remains Beyond Its Conclusions
Section XI established that historical scholarship can investigate the development of religion without requiring divine agency as an explanatory premise. Yet the historical ancestry of religious belief raises a further question.
If human understandings of gods, revelation, sacred authority, and religious obligation developed through cultural transmission, communal experience, and historical interpretation, what reasons remain for believing that these understandings correspond to reality?
Some interpret religion's historical development as evidence of humanity's continuing relationship with divine reality. Others regard the same developments as evidence that religious beliefs arise through human imagination, social experience, and cultural inheritance without requiring a divine referent. Neither conclusion follows automatically from the historical existence of religious belief.
The question therefore requires distinguishing three related inquiries:
Origin: How did a particular belief arise and acquire authority?
Truth: Does the reality described by that belief actually exist?
Justification: What evidence or reasoning warrants accepting the belief as true?
These distinctions are essential if we are to avoid both premature rejection and unwarranted affirmation of religious claims. Especially those claims which create unloving and inhuman acts upon those outside a religious circle's beliefs.
The History of a Belief Is Not the History of Its Referent
Human understandings of reality have changed extensively across generations.
Ancient explanations of disease, weather, planetary motion, and biological life differed considerably from those developed through modern scientific investigation. The historical development of those explanations does not mean that the realities being investigated began to exist when human beings acquired particular understandings of them.
Yet human communities have also developed elaborate accounts of things whose existence has not been established or whose supposed characteristics conflict with available evidence. Consequently, the historical development of an interpretation does not establish whether its proposed referent exists.
An interpretation may develop historically while describing something real.
It may also develop historically without possessing the independent referent assumed by its participants.
The development of ancient Israelite understandings of YHWH illustrates this distinction.
Historians can investigate relationships among YHWH, El, older Canaanite traditions, changing understandings of divine sovereignty, and the eventual prominence of increasingly exclusive monotheistic claims. These findings illuminate the historical ancestry of Israelite and Jewish understandings of God. But they do not independently establish whether YHWH corresponds to an actually existing divine reality.
Similarly, historians can reconstruct the development of Christian understandings concerning Jesus, resurrection, incarnation, and divine identity. Such reconstruction explains how particular convictions emerged, were defended, and acquired authority. Yet it does not automatically establish either their truth or falsehood.
This distinction also guards against what philosophers call the genetic fallacy - or, the fallacy of origins - of confusing a belief's origins with its truth. Or, assuming that a belief must be true or false simply because of the circumstances in which it arose or was inherited thereby. This means that discovering how a belief developed may reveal whether it rests upon reliable testimony, independent evidence, inherited authority, or mistaken assumptions.
The historical ancestry of belief may therefore influence our assessment of its credibility, even where that ancestry does not logically determine its truth.
Explaining then why people believe something, is not equivalent to establishing whether it is true. But understanding how they came to believe it can help us evaluate the reasons offered in its defense.
Religious Diversity and Competing Claims
Humanity's religious history also reveals an extraordinary diversity of understandings concerning divine reality. Different communities have recognized different gods, sacred powers, ultimate realities, and explanations of humanity's relationship to the world. Even traditions sharing substantial historical ancestry have developed divergent and sometimes incompatible theological claims.
Ancient Israelite religion emerged within a wider religious environment containing multiple divine figures and practices. Jewish traditions subsequently developed distinctive and increasingly exclusive forms of monotheistic understanding. Christianity then emerged within Judaism while developing additional claims concerning Jesus, divine identity, incarnation, and salvation. Similarly, other religious traditions followed different historical trajectories and developed understandings that cannot simply be reduced to Jewish or Christian categories.
This diversity raises a philosophical difficulty. If religious communities offer incompatible descriptions of divine reality, how should their competing claims be evaluated?
Their diversity does not demonstrate that every religious interpretation is false.
But neither can the antiquity, popularity, familiarity, or cultural authority of a particular belief establish its truth.
The conviction then that one tradition possesses divine authorization must be distinguished from the evidence or arguments supporting that community's conviction.
This becomes especially important when believers encounter religious understandings other than those they inherited. What appears self-evident within one community may be regarded as historically contingent or philosophically unpersuasive within another.
Recognizing this circumstance need not require abandoning religious commitment. But it does require intellectual humility and a willingness to evaluate religious claims through appropriate evidence, reasoning, and critical comparison. Religious plurality therefore raises more than questions concerning cultural diversity. It raises questions about the justification of particular religious convictions.
Religious Experience, Revelation, and Human Interpretation
Religious experience offers another important setting in which origin, truth, and justification must be distinguished.
Individuals may report an overwhelming sense of divine presence, spiritual encounter, guidance, forgiveness, transformation, or communication from God. Such experiences can possess considerable personal significance and may contribute to the development of enduring religious traditions. Yet the reality of an experience does not independently establish the truth of every interpretation attached to it.
A person may sincerely interpret an experience as divine communication, while another person interprets a comparable experience through different religious or nonreligious categories. Psychological, neurological, and cultural processes may help explain how experiences occur and how people understand them. Yet their identification does not automatically establish that every proposed divine referent is either real or unreal.
Nor does the sincerity or intensity of an experience independently demonstrate that divine agency was involved. The question becomes whether sufficient reasons exist to interpret a particular experience as involving something beyond the identifiable human processes through which it was received.
Similar difficulties arise concerning revelation.
Religious communities may understand particular declarations, events, or writings as communications from God. But claims of revelation are encountered through embodied human beings whose experiences are remembered, narrated, interpreted, translated, and transmitted within historical circumstances.
Two different assertions must therefore be examined. One is whether a community understood an experience or tradition as divine communication. The other is whether divine communication actually occurred. The first may be investigated historically. The second requires philosophical and theological consideration of what divine communication could mean and what might justify recognizing it.
Historical mediation does not automatically exclude the possibility of revelation. Yet neither does the possibility of revelation establish that a particular religious tradition has genuinely received divine communication.
This distinction becomes especially significant for sacred writings (Scripture).
The historically identifiable processes through which biblical writings developed do not, by themselves, settle whether those writings possess divine significance. However, neither can claims of inspiration remove those writings from historical examination or exempt their assertions from critical assessment.
We therefore must ask whether religious experience or claims of revelation can be evaluated by distinguishing between what seemingly occurred, how it came to be interpreted, and what forms of reasoning might support those interpretations or not.
Is God an Explanation or an Interpretation of Reality?
A further distinction concerns the role God is understood to play within the natural world.
One theological approach attributes particular events to direct divine intervention supernaturally. A community's survival, the emergence of sacred writings, extraordinary occurrences, or even the timing of personal experiences may be understood as evidence of God's s-u-p-e-r-n-a-t-u-r-a-l activity. Such interpretations often arise when experience or events seem exceptional, meaningful, or difficult to explain through ordinary circumstances.
Firstly, as an argument against supernatural interpretation, an event does not become evidence of divine intervention merely because its natural causes remain unknown. Which is to say that neither historical uncertainty nor personal conviction is sufficient, by itself, to establish divine agency.
Secondly, as an argument for God's participation within the natural world, a broader theological understanding may take a different approach. Rather than invoking God primarily to explain events that science or history cannot explain, it asks whether God may be present and active within the natural processes of the world itself. In this understanding, divine activity need not interrupt nature but may be expressed through its ongoing development.
This opens an important possibility: the language of God, faith, revelation, and worship need not depend exclusively upon supernatural explanations of events. A theology may instead understand divine presence as accompanying or participating within the natural world's continuing existence and becoming.
Such a natural theology may be described as a relational theology (or, a processual theology), in contrast with orthodox, traditional, or evangelical theology dependent upon supernaturalistic intervention of God into a relational - or relationally processual - world.
But such an interpretation raises its own philosophical responsibilities.
What does divine presence actually mean?
How would divine reality differ from the natural world itself?
When, where, and on what grounds are we justified in interpreting natural events or experiences theologically?
And if natural processes already explain much of cosmic development, biological evolution, human consciousness, and religious history, what does the affirmation of God contribute beyond giving those processes a religious name?
These questions cannot be answered simply by attaching theological language to natural processes already described by science and history. A theological interpretation may offer an understanding of ultimate reality, meaning, human responsibility, or divine relationship. But it must explain what these claims mean, why they are warranted, and how they differ from interpretations that do not invoke God.
The fact that science and history cannot disprove God does not prove or disprove God's existence. Nor does the possibility of divine presence as asserted by the faithful demonstrate that divine presence actually exists. For nonbelievers, divine reality may remain unpersuasive, unestablished, or altogether nonexistent. A theological interpretation must therefore offer more than compatibility with natural explanations; it must provide reasons for its own distinctive claims that God and the world perceive and interpret one another. Reasons that include the possibility that God and the world exist in a continuing relationship of mutual presence and responsiveness.
This responsibility becomes especially important when every circumstance - whether creativity or catastrophe, freedom or suffering, success or failure - is interpreted as evidence of divine activity. A theology may understand God as present throughout these experiences, but it must clarify what such presence means, how that divine presence enfolds within that experience, and why that interpretation should be considered credible.
Otherwise, theology risks becoming little more than a religious vocabulary applied to natural (relational) reality without explaining what its claims genuinely contribute. This will be our later task when developing how a relational theology integrates with a relational reality. At present, we are presenting the conundrums between faith and world, God and presence, revelation and interaction with creation.
Consequently, our investigation throughout Essays 5A, 5B, and 5C has been the examination of the historical emergence and development of religious belief and experience. It has not sought to establish or dismiss divine reality, nor to resolve the philosophical and theological questions raised by that history. Rather, it has shown why those questions - including the meaning of divine presence, revelation, and activity within a naturally developing world - must remain open to critical examination.
Religious Belief After Historical Understanding
What, then, becomes possible when individuals and religious communities recognize the historical ancestry of their convictions?
Some inherited explanations may require reconsideration. Claims concerning biblical authorship, religious chronology, the historical uniformity of early religious communities, the permanence of particular institutions, or the direct divine establishment of certain traditions may encounter substantial historical difficulties. Where evidence challenges such claims, responsible inquiry requires that they remain open to revision.
This does not mean that every religious commitment must be abandoned... but it does mean that inherited authority cannot substitute for independent justification. Religious believers may distinguish their continuing commitments from particular interpretations through which those commitments were previously expressed.
A Christian may continue affirming belief in God while reconsidering inherited explanations of divine action.
Another may continue regarding Scripture as religiously authoritative while acknowledging its historically developing literary and cultural ancestry.
Still another may conclude that particular theological convictions can no longer be sustained.
Historical inquiry does not predetermine which response an individual must adopt. Nor should it guarantee that every inherited commitment can be preserved through reinterpretation. Rather, it makes possible a more informed evaluation of religious claims.
The distinction between reverence and unquestioning acceptance becomes especially important.
A religious tradition may be valued, practiced, studied, and critically examined without assuming that every historical or theological claim made on its behalf is correct.
Likewise, questioning an inherited understanding of God need not be equated with denying divine reality.
What communities have declared sacred remains open to historical investigation because those declarations, practices, and institutions belong to human history. Their possible theological significance must then be considered through arguments appropriate to the claims being made. The history of religious belief therefore leads us beyond the question of how people acquired their convictions. It requires us to ask whether those convictions are justified.
The human development of religious belief neither establishes nor automatically disproves divine reality. But if divine reality is affirmed, reasons must be offered beyond the historical existence, persistence, or authority of religious belief itself.
This recognition completes our examination of the relationship between the historical origins of religious belief and the justification of its claims. Historical inquiry may inform, challenge, and transform theological understanding, but it cannot substitute for the philosophical and theological evaluation of divine reality.
The responsibility that follows is neither to preserve every inherited religious explanation nor to dismiss religious belief because it possesses a human history. It is to examine what we have inherited, distinguish interpretation from reality, and remain accountable to the evidence and arguments through which our convictions may be assessed.
The implications of this responsibility for Christian faith will become the subject of our next essay.
Human beings inherit religious worlds they did not create. They receive languages, memories, narratives, practices, and understandings of reality shaped by generations whose experiences and circumstances differed from their own. What begins as an interpretation may become tradition; what becomes tradition may acquire authority; and what acquires authority may eventually be experienced as an unquestionable description of reality.
Throughout Essay Five, we have examined these processes in both their general human character and their particular historical expressions. The histories of Israel, Judah, Judaism, and Christianity reveal religious traditions developing through cultural inheritance, political upheaval, sacred literary interpretation, communal participation, and changing institutions. Their continuity did not require the unchanged preservation of every belief or practice. It depended upon the continuing relationships communities maintained with their inherited religious worlds.
These histories also demonstrate that claims of sacred authority do not remove religious traditions from historical investigation. Scripture has literary ancestry. Doctrines have histories of formulation and disagreement. Religious institutions develop within identifiable social and political circumstances.
Historical inquiry cannot, by reconstructing the human development of religious belief alone, settle the ultimate question of divine reality. Nevertheless, its findings can substantively support, challenge, or undermine particular historical and theological claims. The independence of history from theology does not make history irrelevant to theological judgment.
This distinction is consequential. Explaining how human beings came to believe in God neither establishes nor automatically disproves God's existence. Yet historical findings may require believers to reconsider particular understandings of Scripture, revelation, divine action, or religious authority. Likewise, the possibility of divine reality does not itself justify any particular theological interpretation. Such claims require further philosophical and theological examination.
The significance of our investigation is therefore not that religion has been explained away, nor that faith has been historically vindicated. It is that religious traditions can now be approached with a clearer understanding of their human ancestry and with greater responsibility for evaluating what they claim.
The human history of religion remains unfinished because every generation inherits traditions it must continue to interpret, examine, and live.
For Christians, this recognition introduces a further question. If Scripture, theology, and religious institutions possess historical ancestries more complex than many inherited explanations acknowledge, must Christian faith remain dependent upon those explanations? Or can believers reconsider their traditions without presuming that the loss of historical certainty necessarily entails the loss of God?
Our next essay, Can Faith Survive What We Have Learned?, will examine that question directly.
For now, we have established a necessary distinction: the human history of religious belief can be investigated independently of theology, while the possible truth of its claims concerning divine reality remains a subject for further critical inquiry.
Selected scholarly works in cultural inheritance, religious memory, ritual, ancient Israelite religion, Second Temple Judaism, early Christianity, biblical textual transmission, religious authority, and the historical development of religious belief.
Anderson, Robert T., and Terry Giles. The Samaritan Pentateuch: An Introduction to Its Origin, History, and Significance for Biblical Studies. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2012.
Assmann, Jan. Religion and Cultural Memory: Ten Studies. Translated by Rodney Livingstone. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006.
Ayres, Lewis. Nicaea and Its Legacy: An Approach to Fourth-Century Trinitarian Theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Bell, Catherine. Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.
Bell, Catherine. Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Bellah, Robert N. Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011.
Berger, Peter L., and Thomas Luckmann. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966.
Brown, Peter. The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity, A.D. 200–1000. 10th anniversary rev. ed. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013.
Carr, David M. The Formation of the Hebrew Bible: A New Reconstruction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Cohen, Shaye J. D. The Beginnings of Jewishness: Boundaries, Varieties, Uncertainties. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
Cohen, Shaye J. D. From the Maccabees to the Mishnah. 3rd ed. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2014.
Collins, John J. Between Athens and Jerusalem: Jewish Identity in the Hellenistic Diaspora. 2nd ed. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2000.
Dever, William G. Did God Have a Wife? Archaeology and Folk Religion in Ancient Israel. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2005.
Drake, H. A. Constantine and the Bishops: The Politics of Intolerance. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000.
Frazer, James George. The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. Abridged ed. London: Macmillan, 1922.
Fredriksen, Paula. When Christians Were Jews: The First Generation. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018.
Gallagher, Edmon L., and John D. Meade. The Biblical Canon Lists from Early Christianity: Texts and Analysis. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.
Grabbe, Lester L. A History of the Jews and Judaism in the Second Temple Period. Vol. 1, Yehud: A History of the Persian Province of Judah. London: T&T Clark International, 2004.
Halbwachs, Maurice. On Collective Memory. Edited, translated, and with an introduction by Lewis A. Coser. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
Jobes, Karen H., and Moisés Silva. Invitation to the Septuagint. 2nd ed. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2015.
Killebrew, Ann E. Biblical Peoples and Ethnicity: An Archaeological Study of Egyptians, Canaanites, Philistines, and Early Israel, 1300–1100 B.C.E. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2005.
Law, Timothy Michael. When God Spoke Greek: The Septuagint and the Making of the Christian Bible. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.
Levine, Lee I. The Ancient Synagogue: The First Thousand Years. 2nd ed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005.
Lieu, Judith M. Neither Jew nor Greek? Constructing Early Christianity. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2002.
Porten, Bezalel. Archives from Elephantine: The Life of an Ancient Jewish Military Colony. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968.
Proudfoot, Wayne. Religious Experience. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.
Schilbrack, Kevin. Philosophy and the Study of Religions: A Manifesto. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014.
Smith, Mark S. The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel. 2nd ed. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2002.
Tov, Emanuel. Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible. 3rd ed., revised and expanded. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2012.
Tylor, Edward B. Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom. 2 vols. London: John Murray, 1871.
van der Toorn, Karel. Scribal Culture and the Making of the Hebrew Bible. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007.
Weber, Max. Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology. Edited by Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich. 2 vols. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978.
Jan Assmann examines how communities preserve and reconstruct their past through cultural memory, religious practices, and authoritative writings. His scholarship supports our distinction between historical remembrance and the later meanings assigned to inherited traditions, particularly in Sections II and V.
Lewis Ayres investigates fourth-century Christian theological controversies and the developing interpretations of Nicaea. His scholarship demonstrates that later Trinitarian formulations emerged through extensive theological argument and ecclesiastical disagreement rather than through one council's immediate establishment of universally accepted doctrine. His work supports Sections IX and X, particularly their examination of doctrinal formation and authority.
Catherine Bell provides foundational scholarship on ritual as a form of social and religious activity. Her work demonstrates that religious practices do not necessarily originate from previously formulated doctrines but may themselves contribute to the formation and transformation of religious understandings. Her two volumes are especially important for Section IV's examination of lived religion.
Robert N. Bellah investigates religion within the larger evolutionary history of human symbolic, social, and cultural capacities. His scholarship connects our earlier discussions of human evolution and religious imagination with Essay Five's investigation of historical religious development. His approach is useful for understanding religious complexity without assuming that all societies followed an identical developmental path.
Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann examine how socially produced understandings become established, institutionalized, and experienced as ordinary reality. Their work helps explain why individuals inherit religious worlds that may appear natural, permanent, or unquestionable even though those worlds possess identifiable histories. Their scholarship supports Sections I and V and is especially relevant to Section IX's investigation of how historically developed religious understandings become established certainties.
Peter Brown examines Christianity's development within the political, cultural, and institutional transformations of late antiquity. His work provides historical context for Christianity's changing relationship with the Roman Empire, the emergence of influential ecclesiastical institutions, and the continuing diversity of Christian communities. It is especially relevant to Sections VIII and X.
David M. Carr investigates the composition, transmission, and editorial formation of the Hebrew Bible. His scholarship helps explain how inherited literary traditions were preserved, revised, and incorporated into larger scriptural collections. His research supports Section VI's treatment of Israelite and Judahite religious memory and Section IX's distinction between the historical development of biblical literature and its later recognition as Scripture.
Shaye J. D. Cohen explores the development of Jewish identity, including distinctions involving ancestry, geography, religious practice, communal boundaries, and conversion. The Beginnings of Jewishness is especially important for Section VII's caution concerning the terms Judean, Jewish, and Judaism. His From the Maccabees to the Mishnah provides a broader historical account of Jewish religious developments from the Hasmonean period through the emergence of rabbinic traditions. Together, these works support Section VII and Appendix B.
John J. Collins examines Jewish identity and religious literature within the Hellenistic world, particularly the relationships between inherited Jewish traditions and Greek language, culture, and intellectual life. His scholarship demonstrates how Jewish communities could participate in wider cultural environments while preserving distinctive religious identities. It supports Section VII's discussion of Hellenistic Judaism and the historical circumstances surrounding the Septuagint.
William G. Dever investigates everyday religious practice in ancient Israel through archaeological evidence, particularly household objects, local sanctuaries, and forms of worship not consistently represented by official biblical teachings. His work supports Section IV's distinction between prescribed religion and religion as actually practiced, as well as Section VI's examination of religious life beyond kings and temples.
H. A. Drake investigates Constantine's relationships with Christian bishops and the political circumstances through which religious disagreements acquired imperial significance. His scholarship helps distinguish religious conviction, ecclesiastical authority, political sponsorship, and coercion. It is particularly relevant to Section X's examination of Constantine and the changing relationship between Christian institutions and Roman government.
James George Frazer represents an influential early approach to comparative religion that attempted to organize religious history into broad developmental stages. Although many of his evolutionary assumptions have been challenged by subsequent scholarship, his work remains important for understanding the intellectual history of theories concerning religion's origins and development. Frazer is included as an object of critical historical examination, not as an endorsement of his developmental framework.
Paula Fredriksen reconstructs the earliest Jesus movement within its first-century Jewish environment. Her work challenges the tendency to treat Christianity as an already independent religion during Jesus' lifetime or the earliest years of his followers. It supports Section VIII's examination of Jewish Jesus movements, the significance of Gentile inclusion, and the gradual development of distinguishable Jewish and Christian identities.
Edmon L. Gallagher and John D. Meade investigate early Christian biblical canon lists and the historical circumstances through which particular writings were recognized as authoritative. Their scholarship provides important evidence for the diversity and gradual development of Christian scriptural collections. Their work supports Sections VIII and IX, particularly the distinction between the authority of individual writings and the later recognition of a defined biblical canon.
Lester L. Grabbe provides a detailed historical investigation of Judean society under Persian administration, including political institutions, temple life, social organization, and religious literature. His research supports the transition from the histories of Israel and Judah into developing Judaism. It is especially relevant to Section VII's treatment of Yehud and Appendix B's account of Persian-period Jewish history.
Maurice Halbwachs established an influential sociological approach to collective memory, emphasizing that remembrance occurs within social relationships and communal frameworks. His scholarship supports Section II's explanation of how religious communities select, preserve, reconstruct, and reinterpret inherited memories.
Karen H. Jobes and Moisés Silva provide a substantial introduction to the history, translation, manuscripts, and significance of the Septuagint. Their scholarship helps distinguish the initial Greek translation of the Pentateuch from the subsequent translation and transmission of other Jewish religious writings. Their work is especially important for Appendix A and its explanation of why the Septuagint cannot be assigned one date of completion or finalization.
Ann E. Killebrew examines the archaeological and cultural evidence surrounding the emergence of early Israel among the populations of the southern Levant. Her scholarship clarifies the relationships among Canaanite continuity, developing ethnic identities, and the archaeological evidence of the Late Bronze Age and early Iron Age. Her work supports Section VI's account of Israelite origins without assuming either complete cultural isolation or an uncomplicated reconstruction from biblical narratives.
Timothy Michael Law investigates the Septuagint's development and its significance for early Christian interpretation of Jewish Scripture. His work demonstrates how the scriptural inheritance of early Christianity was deeply shaped by Greek Jewish textual traditions. It supports Section VIII's account of early Christian Scripture and Appendix A's historical reconstruction of the Septuagint.
Lee I. Levine examines the origins and development of synagogues from the Hellenistic period through late antiquity. His scholarship helps distinguish the varied communal functions of early synagogues from their later religious and institutional forms. It supports Section VII's examination of Jewish religious life beyond the Jerusalem temple and Section IX's treatment of developing religious institutions.
Judith M. Lieu investigates how early Christian communities constructed and negotiated their religious identities in relation to Judaism, surrounding society, inherited literature, and communal boundaries. Her scholarship challenges overly simple accounts of one decisive separation between Judaism and Christianity. It is particularly relevant to Section VIII's discussion of the gradual differentiation of Jewish and Christian identities.
Bezalel Porten examines the Aramaic documentary archives of the Jewish military colony at Elephantine in Persian-period Egypt. These writings provide important evidence of Judean religious communities beyond Jerusalem, including their temple, religious practices, and relationships with surrounding institutions. His work supports Section VII's argument that developing Jewish religious identity was geographically dispersed and not completely uniform.
Wayne Proudfoot examines the relationship between religious experience, human interpretation, and the explanations offered for experiences understood as religious. His scholarship emphasizes that identifying an experience as religious already involves concepts, beliefs, and interpretive judgments. His work supports Sections XI and XII's distinction between the occurrence of an experience, the meanings attributed to it, and the question of whether those meanings correspond to divine reality.
Kevin Schilbrack investigates the relationship between philosophy and the academic study of religion, arguing for an approach that integrates historical and social-scientific explanation with philosophical interpretation and critical evaluation. His scholarship helps distinguish the historical origins of religious belief from questions concerning its truth and justification. His work supports Sections XI and XII's methodological independence while demonstrating why historical investigation remains relevant to philosophical and theological judgment.
Mark S. Smith provides essential historical scholarship on the development of ancient Israelite religion, particularly its relationships with Canaanite religious traditions and the evolving identification of El and YHWH. His research supports Section III's discussion of religious convergence and differentiation and Section VI's investigation of changing understandings of YHWH.
Emanuel Tov provides foundational textual-critical scholarship concerning the Hebrew Bible, the Dead Sea Scrolls, ancient translations, and the relationships among biblical manuscript traditions. His research demonstrates the importance of distinguishing textual variation, translation, and manuscript transmission from unsupported claims of deliberate corruption. His scholarship supports Sections VII and IX, together with Appendix A's discussion of the Septuagint and the Hebrew Masoretic tradition.
Edward B. Tylor contributed significantly to early anthropological understandings of culture and religion, particularly through his investigations of animism and cultural evolution. His work is included to document the history of linear developmental theories critically examined in Section III. His nineteenth-century assumptions should not be treated as established conclusions of contemporary scholarship.
Karel van der Toorn examines the scribal institutions and literary practices through which ancient religious traditions were composed, preserved, revised, and transmitted. His research complements our earlier investigation of the Hebrew Bible's formation and supports Sections II, V, VI, and IX concerning religious memory, textual preservation, and authoritative interpretation.
Max Weber offers a foundational sociological account of legitimate authority, including traditional, charismatic, and legal-rational forms of recognition. His distinctions help explain how religious teachers, institutions, sacred offices, and exceptional figures acquire and sustain authority. His scholarship is especially relevant to Sections V and X, including the historical relationships among religious leadership, institutional recognition, and political power.
The Contribution of These Sources
Together, these works establish an interdisciplinary scholarly foundation for examining how inherited religious understandings become enduring systems of belief and practice. Anthropology, sociology, cultural memory studies, ritual studies, archaeology, textual criticism, biblical scholarship, and the historical study of Judaism and Christianity contribute different perspectives to this investigation.
Their contributions are complementary without necessarily representing one unified scholarly interpretation. Earlier developmental theories are examined critically alongside more recent scholarship emphasizing historical contingency, cultural diversity, religious plurality, communal interpretation, and the reciprocal relationships between religious beliefs and practices.
The historical studies of Israel, Judaism, and Christianity also demonstrate that continuity need not imply uniformity. Religious communities may preserve recognizable relationships with inherited traditions while developing different interpretations, institutions, practices, and understandings of authority.
The purpose of these sources is neither to establish that religious traditions are merely human inventions nor to confirm their claims concerning divine reality. Rather, they provide an interdisciplinary foundation for reconstructing how religious beliefs were inherited, preserved, transformed, practiced, and regarded as authoritative. They also help distinguish historical explanations of belief from philosophical questions concerning its truth and justification. Together, these investigations preserve the independence of historical scholarship while recognizing its continuing relevance to theological interpretation.
How Religious Traditions Are Received, Remembered, Practiced, and Reinterpreted
Religious traditions do not arise anew with every generation. They are inherited through the languages, relationships, narratives, practices, and institutions of communities already possessing established understandings of the world.
Yet religious inheritance is not simply the preservation of unchanged beliefs. Each generation encounters traditions within circumstances different from those in which the traditions first developed. Meanings may be remembered selectively, practices adapted, teachings contested, and authorities reconsidered.
The following table summarizes the principal processes examined throughout Essays 5A–5C.
A. Principal Processes of Religious Development
| Process | Function within religious life | Possible historical consequences |
|---|---|---|
| Cultural inheritance | Transmits existing meanings, practices, and expectations across generations | Provides familiar frameworks through which later experiences are understood |
| Communal memory | Preserves and reconstructs selected understandings of the past | Establishes shared identities and authoritative narratives |
| Religious experience | Introduces experiences interpreted through religious or sacred categories | May generate new practices, testimony, movements, or claims of revelation |
| Narrative formation | Organizes remembered events and experiences into communicable stories | Develops shared accounts of origins, identity, divine activity, and communal purpose |
| Ritual and practice | Embeds religious meanings in repeated personal and communal activities | Establishes durable habits, relationships, and expectations |
| Interpretation and reinterpretation | Relates inherited understandings to changing circumstances | Preserves continuity while permitting new meanings and applications |
| Textual formation and transmission | Composes, edits, copies, translates, and preserves religious literature | Creates enduring bodies of written tradition that may later acquire scriptural authority |
| Institutionalization | Establishes communal offices, organizations, and structures | Sustains religious practices and regulates participation across generations |
| Authorization | Recognizes certain teachings, practices, writings, or persons as legitimate or binding | Distinguishes accepted traditions from disputed or excluded alternatives |
| Contestation and differentiation | Challenges inherited interpretations and established authority | Produces reform, disagreement, religious plurality, and sometimes new communities |
| Adaptation and transformation | Reorganizes religious life under changing historical conditions | Enables religious traditions to persist while undergoing substantial change |
B. These Processes Are Interrelated, Not Sequential Stages
The table should not be understood as a universal sequence through which every religion must pass.
Ritual may precede the formulation of explicit doctrine. Communal memory may preserve practices whose original meanings have changed or become uncertain. Religious experiences may be interpreted through inherited narratives, while those same experiences subsequently transform the narratives used to explain them.
Institutional authority may preserve inherited traditions, but it may also encourage reinterpretation or provoke opposition. Written traditions may reinforce established practices while simultaneously providing resources for their criticism.
The relationships among these processes are therefore reciprocal.
A religious tradition may preserve continuity in one dimension while undergoing substantial transformation in another.
For example, a community may retain inherited sacred writings while developing new interpretations of their meaning. Another may preserve recurring forms of worship even as its explanations of those practices change. Still another may establish new institutions while presenting itself as recovering an older religious inheritance.
Religious continuity does not require complete religious uniformity.
C. From Inherited Interpretation to Lived Religious Certainty
One recurring development deserves particular attention because it helps explain how historically situated interpretations become experienced as unquestionable religious truths.
A possible pattern is:
Inherited interpretation → Communal repetition → Institutional recognition → Familiarity → Experienced certainty → Reconsideration or reaffirmation
This pattern illustrates one pathway rather than an inevitable progression.
An interpretation may initially be disputed. Through teaching, worship, communal practice, and institutional recognition, it may gradually become familiar to later generations.
Eventually, its historical emergence may disappear from ordinary awareness. What earlier communities debated may come to be experienced as an obvious and permanent feature of religious reality.
Historical investigation can recover aspects of that forgotten development.
Such recovery does not automatically determine whether the interpretation is true or false. It does, however, challenge the assumption that familiarity or inherited authority is sufficient to establish truth.
Reconsideration may lead to reaffirmation, revision, rejection, or the development of alternative interpretations.
D. The Central Historical Recognition
Religious traditions are neither merely static inheritances nor completely new creations of each successive generation.
They develop through relationships between inherited understandings and changing human circumstances.
The processes summarized here help explain how religious worlds become durable without being unchanging, and how communities preserve recognizable identities while adapting to circumstances their predecessors could not have anticipated.
Religion becomes a living inheritance because it is continually received, practiced, interpreted, and transformed.
A Reference Chronology of Religious Inheritance, Differentiation, and Continuity
The histories of Israelite religion, Judaism, and Christianity unfolded across changing political, cultural, linguistic, and institutional environments.
Their religious developments cannot be reduced to one continuous sequence in which each later tradition simply replaced the earlier one. Nor can the surviving biblical narratives be treated as complete accounts of every historical circumstance involved in their formation.
The following chronology identifies significant historical settings and selected developments discussed in Essay 5B.
Dates are approximate unless associated with relatively well-established historical events. Religious changes frequently occurred over generations or centuries rather than at a single identifiable moment. Regional differences and overlapping traditions must also be considered.
A. Principal Historical Layers
| Historical setting | Approximate dates | Religious and cultural developments |
|---|---|---|
| Late Bronze Age Canaan | c. 1550–1200 BCE | Canaanite city-states, regional religious practices, divine figures including El and Baal, and inherited West Semitic religious traditions |
| Emergence of early Israel | c. 1200–1000 BCE | Developing highland communities and identifiable Israelite identities within the wider southern Levantine environment |
| Israelite and Judahite monarchies | c. 1000–586 BCE | Royal and temple institutions, local and household worship, changing understandings of YHWH, and competing religious practices |
| Assyrian domination and disruption | 8th–7th centuries BCE | Fall of Samaria, conventionally dated to 722/721 BCE; deportations, political reorganization, and reinterpretations of communal identity |
| Babylonian conquest and displacement | 597–586 BCE and afterward | Deportations, destruction of Jerusalem and its temple in 587/586 BCE, preservation and reinterpretation of inherited traditions |
| Persian-period Yehud and diaspora | 539–332 BCE | Return movements, development of the Jerusalem temple community, textual activity, and dispersed Judean religious communities |
| Hellenistic Jewish worlds | 332–63 BCE | Greek-language Jewish cultures, scriptural translation, diverse Jewish interpretations, and interaction with Hellenistic political institutions |
| Hasmonean developments | 2nd–1st centuries BCE | Maccabean revolt, Hasmonean rule, changing relationships among political leadership, priesthood, and religious identity |
| Roman-period Judaism | From 63 BCE | Diverse Jewish communities and movements under changing Roman political arrangements |
| Jesus and the earliest Jesus movements | 1st century CE | Jesus' activity within Jewish society, resurrection proclamation, Jewish Jesus communities, Gentile inclusion, and emerging Christian literature |
| After the destruction of the Jerusalem temple | From 70 CE | Jewish communal adaptation, developing rabbinic traditions, continuing diaspora life, and changes in Jewish and Christian relationships |
| Early Christian differentiation and institutionalization | 2nd–3rd centuries CE | Developing Christian identities, scriptural collections, worship, leadership, doctrinal debate, and regional diversity |
| Late antique Judaism and Christianity | 4th–5th centuries CE | Rabbinic literary and institutional developments, Christian imperial patronage, councils, doctrinal controversies, and changing boundaries of authority |
B. Religious Development Did Not Occur Along One Historical Line
This chronology must not be understood as a ladder beginning with ancient Canaan and ending with Christianity.
Several developments continued alongside one another.
Ancient Israelite and Judahite religion arose within wider Levantine environments and included practices and interpretations that were not uniform across all communities.
After the destruction of the monarchies, Judean religious traditions continued both within the land and among dispersed communities.
Judaism developed through multiple geographical and intellectual settings rather than exclusively through the Jerusalem temple.
The Samaritan religious tradition likewise preserved its own relationship to Israelite religious ancestry, including distinct understandings of sacred geography and authoritative Scripture.
Christianity subsequently emerged within the diverse Jewish environment of the first century. The development of increasingly distinguishable Christian identities did not terminate Judaism's independent history.
Jewish and Christian communities continued to develop through their own interpretations, institutions, and changing relationships with the surrounding world.
The emergence of one tradition therefore does not establish that the historical purpose of another was to produce it.
Related religious traditions may share ancestry while possessing distinct and continuing histories.
C. The Historical Layers of Scriptural Authority
The development of sacred writings illustrates another important dimension of historical inheritance.
| Religious textual tradition | Historical development | Important distinction |
|---|---|---|
| Israelite and Judahite literary traditions | Narratives, laws, prophetic traditions, poetry, and other writings were composed, collected, and revised across different periods | The setting described in a text may differ from the period of its composition or editing |
| Hebrew biblical textual traditions | Written collections developed through copying, transmission, revision, and changing communal use | Earlier textual plurality should not be confused with the later predominance of the Masoretic tradition |
| Samaritan Pentateuch | A distinctive Pentateuchal textual tradition preserved and transmitted within Samaritan communities | Its relationship to other textual forms reflects a history of shared ancestry and differentiation |
| Septuagint and other Greek Jewish Scriptures | Greek translations and textual traditions developed over several centuries | The Septuagint was not produced as one translation project at one moment |
| Early Christian writings | Letters, Gospels, narratives, and other literature circulated among developing Christian communities | Individual writings could be treated as authoritative before a fixed New Testament collection was universally recognized |
| Christian biblical canons | Scriptural collections and recognized boundaries developed through extended communal and institutional histories | Canon formation involved historical processes rather than one universally accepted decision at the beginning of Christianity |
| Rabbinic literary traditions | Traditions of legal interpretation, teaching, debate, and communal practice were transmitted and developed in works including the Mishnah and later Talmudic collections | Rabbinic literature represents continuing Jewish interpretation, not a merely residual form of biblical religion |
These textual histories demonstrate why sacred literature should not be treated as though every writing, translation, and canonical collection originated simultaneously.
They also explain why manuscript variation, literary development, and institutional recognition must be investigated as distinct historical questions.
D. Three Dates That Must Not Be Confused
One of the most important principles of historical interpretation concerns the distinction among three possible dates associated with a religious narrative or writing.
1. The date of the event or setting described. A narrative may portray circumstances belonging to a much earlier period.
2. The date of composition, editing, or transmission. The written form available to historians may have developed considerably later than the event it describes.
3. The date of authoritative recognition. A writing may have circulated for generations before becoming recognized as part of an established scriptural collection or receiving particular institutional authority.
These dates cannot automatically be treated as identical.
For example, a biblical narrative may describe an early Israelite setting, contain literary material composed or edited across subsequent periods, and acquire its later canonical standing through still further developments.
Historical scholarship seeks to distinguish these processes wherever evidence permits.
That distinction does not require denying the possible historical significance of the traditions preserved in a text.
It requires acknowledging that the history described by a writing and the history of the writing itself are not necessarily the same.
E. Reading the Historical Layers Together
The historical development of religion involves multiple forms of continuity.
Communities preserve inherited narratives while adapting their interpretation.
Religious practices continue even as the circumstances in which they are performed change.
Sacred writings acquire authority through histories that may be considerably more complex than later communal memories suggest.
Institutions may preserve recognizable religious identities while changing their functions, structures, and relationships with political power.
For this reason, historians must resist both the assumption of an entirely unchanging tradition and the opposite assumption that every historical transformation creates something wholly disconnected from its ancestry.
The histories of Israelite religion, Judaism, and Christianity are best understood as related, overlapping, and continuing developments whose meanings and institutional forms were repeatedly reconstructed within changing historical worlds.
How Historians Investigate Religious Traditions and Evaluate Claims about the Past
Throughout Essays 5A–5C, we have examined religious traditions through archaeological discoveries, surviving manuscripts, ancient inscriptions, literary analysis, comparative historical evidence, and the study of religious communities.
These investigations raise a reasonable question:
How do historians know what they claim to know about the development of religion?
Historical scholarship does not possess unrestricted access to the past. It works with surviving evidence that is frequently incomplete, unevenly preserved, and open to more than one interpretation.
Nevertheless, the limitations of historical evidence do not make responsible historical knowledge impossible.
Historians evaluate sources through questions concerning their origin, dating, authenticity, context, relationship to other evidence, and possible alternative interpretations.
Their conclusions may possess different degrees of confidence.
Some historical developments are supported by multiple independent forms of evidence. Others remain plausible reconstructions. Still others cannot presently be established.
The following reference explains several major categories of evidence and their limitations.
A. Principal Forms of Historical Evidence
| Evidence | What it may help establish | Principal limitations |
|---|---|---|
| Archaeological remains | Settlement patterns, material culture, religious installations, economic life, and communal practices | Objects do not usually provide complete explanations of the beliefs or intentions associated with them |
| Inscriptions and monumental records | Names, titles, rulers, religious dedications, political claims, and some historical events | Inscriptions may be fragmentary, propagandistic, selective, or difficult to date |
| Ancient manuscripts | Textual forms, variation, copying practices, translation, and transmission | Surviving copies may postdate their original compositions by centuries |
| Literary and source criticism | Possible relationships among texts, literary layers, genre, and processes of composition | Reconstructions may depend on disputed assumptions and incomplete evidence |
| Textual criticism | Differences among manuscript witnesses and probable histories of textual transmission | It cannot always recover a single original wording or establish the circumstances of initial composition |
| Documentary archives | Administrative arrangements, correspondence, transactions, and aspects of everyday life | Surviving documents represent limited communities and historical circumstances |
| Comparative historical evidence | Cultural relationships, shared literary patterns, religious similarities, and possible influence | Similarities alone do not establish direct borrowing or common historical origin |
| Later religious testimony | How communities remembered and interpreted earlier people, events, and traditions | Later accounts may preserve earlier materials while reshaping them through subsequent beliefs and concerns |
| Social-scientific comparison | Patterns of cultural transmission, memory, ritual, leadership, and institutional development | General models cannot substitute for evidence concerning a particular historical event |
These forms of evidence are most useful when examined together.
An inscription may establish that a religious name or title was in use at a particular time. Archaeological remains may provide evidence of a related practice. A later literary text may then demonstrate how subsequent communities interpreted that religious tradition.
Yet each source answers a different question.
An inscription does not establish everything a community believed. Archaeological remains do not necessarily reveal the theological meaning of a ritual. A later narrative cannot automatically be treated as an eyewitness account of the period it describes.
Historical interpretation depends upon recognizing both the contributions and limitations of each form of evidence.
B. How Historians Evaluate Competing Reconstructions
When considering an explanation of the past, historians commonly ask several interrelated questions.
What evidence survives? An interpretation should begin with identifiable sources rather than assuming the correctness of a traditional account.
When and where did the evidence originate? A text, object, or inscription must be considered within its own historical circumstances.
How close is the evidence to the events being reconstructed? Contemporary evidence may offer particular advantages, but proximity alone does not guarantee accuracy.
What purposes may have shaped the source? Royal inscriptions, religious narratives, polemical writings, and institutional records may preserve important information while reflecting the interests of their authors or communities.
Does independent evidence support the interpretation? Agreement among different kinds of evidence may strengthen a reconstruction, provided the sources are not merely repeating the same earlier account.
Are alternative explanations possible? A responsible reconstruction must consider interpretations that also fit the surviving evidence.
How much confidence is justified? Conclusions should reflect the strength and limitations of the evidence rather than the certainty desired by an interpreter.
These questions do not produce automatic answers. Historians may disagree because evidence is incomplete, because sources permit several interpretations, or because different scholars assign different weight to particular findings.
Such disagreement is not necessarily evidence that historical inquiry has failed.
It may reflect the difficulty of reconstructing a past that survives only partially in the present.
C. Three Examples from Israelite, Jewish, and Christian History
The usefulness of these methods becomes clearer when applied to specific examples.
Ancient Israelite religion. Biblical literature preserves understandings of legitimate worship and criticism of religious practices regarded by particular writers as unacceptable. Archaeological remains and inscriptions provide additional evidence of religious life beyond the prescriptions of those texts. Comparing these sources helps historians distinguish official ideals from practices that existed within particular communities. The evidence may establish religious plurality without revealing every belief held by the people involved.
The formation of biblical Scripture. Surviving Hebrew, Greek, and other manuscript traditions reveal textual differences, translation choices, and histories of transmission. Such evidence helps establish that biblical literature passed through identifiable human processes. It does not always permit historians to recover precisely when a text first took shape or how every stage of its composition occurred. Nor does textual development, by itself, establish or refute a theological claim concerning inspiration.
The emergence of Christianity. Early Christian writings provide evidence of beliefs, disputes, practices, and developing communal identities. They must be interpreted in relation to first-century Judaism, Roman political circumstances, literary genre, and the dates and purposes of surviving texts. Historians may reconstruct many features of early Christian development without treating every theological claim preserved in those writings as independently verified historical fact.
In each example, responsible inquiry distinguishes between what the evidence establishes, what it suggests, and what remains uncertain.
D. Absence of Evidence and Evidence of Absence
Historical investigation must also distinguish between the absence of surviving evidence and evidence that an event or practice did not occur.
Many ancient activities left little or no durable material record. Documents may have been lost, structures destroyed, and memories transformed through successive generations.
The failure to discover evidence of a particular event therefore does not automatically establish that it never happened.
Nevertheless, absence may become historically significant when substantial evidence would reasonably be expected if a particular claim were correct.
For example, the absence of expected archaeological remains, the lack of corroboration among otherwise informative contemporary sources, or contradictions among surviving accounts may weaken a proposed reconstruction.
The strength of such an argument depends upon what evidence should reasonably have survived.
Historical uncertainty must not be converted into certainty merely because one explanation is religiously familiar.
Likewise, an absence of evidence should not automatically be treated as decisive disproof.
The task is to assess what the available evidence reasonably warrants.
E. Historical Probability and Degrees of Confidence
Historical conclusions do not all possess equal certainty.
A reconstruction may be strongly supported by converging evidence, plausible but disputed, possible without substantial corroboration, or inconsistent with well-established findings.
These distinctions matter because historical writing sometimes presents interpretation as though it were an uncontested fact.
Responsible scholarship should make room for degrees of confidence.
The destruction of the Jerusalem temple by Roman forces in 70 CE, for example, is supported by substantial historical evidence.
By contrast, the exact circumstances underlying the composition of particular biblical passages may remain disputed.
Similarly, historians can investigate the emergence and growth of early Christian resurrection belief while disagreeing about what historical conclusions can legitimately be drawn concerning the experiences and events that generated it.
Historical evidence does not become meaningless because it falls short of absolute certainty.
It becomes more useful when its conclusions are expressed with appropriate confidence and qualification.
F. What Historical Evidence Can - and Cannot - Establish about Divine Reality
The final distinction returns us to the methodological questions of Sections XI and XII.
Historians can investigate claims of divine revelation, reports of extraordinary events, the origin of sacred writings, and the historical consequences of religious belief.
They may evaluate testimony, dating, context, corroboration, and competing explanations.
Such investigations can support or challenge particular religious and historical assertions.
They do not, simply by identifying the human processes involved in religious development, settle the ultimate question of divine reality.
Nor does the possibility that God exists establish that a particular historical report should be accepted as divine revelation.
Historical evidence and theological interpretation therefore have related but distinguishable responsibilities.
Historical investigation asks what can reasonably be reconstructed from the available evidence. Philosophical and theological inquiry must then examine what further conclusions, if any, are justified concerning the nature of reality.
This distinction does not make historical findings irrelevant to religious belief.
On the contrary, where theological claims depend upon historical assertions, those assertions must remain accountable to historical evidence.
The independence of history from theology is therefore not a separation that prevents intellectual exchange.
It is a methodological responsibility that permits such exchange without predetermining its conclusions.
G. The Responsibility of Historical Understanding
The historical investigation of religion is neither an exercise in defending inherited belief nor an attempt to dismiss religious traditions because of their human ancestry.
It is an effort to understand how communities developed, transmitted, and transformed their understandings of reality.
That effort requires evidence, interpretation, criticism, and a willingness to revise conclusions when warranted.
It also requires acknowledging that our present reconstructions remain incomplete.
We inherit fragments of earlier worlds rather than their complete histories.
From those fragments, historical scholarship seeks to establish responsible accounts of what occurred, how religious meanings developed, and why communities came to understand their traditions as authoritative.
The result is not certainty about every question.
It is a disciplined approach to the past that distinguishes what is known, what is reasonably inferred, and what remains unresolved.
Historical understanding becomes more trustworthy not when uncertainty disappears, but when the strength and limits of its evidence are acknowledged.
