...and how the "Christian" interpretation of history became "history."
Here's an excellent article from the National Endowment For The Humanities magazine, "Humanities."
Excerpts below.
https://www.neh.gov/article/all-history-revisionist-historyAll History Is Revisionist History
Ever since Thucydides dismissed Herodotus, historians have differed about the past
James M. Banner, Jr.
The collective noun for a group of historians is an “argumentation,” and for good reason. At the very dawn of historical inquiry in the West, historians were already wrestling over the past, attacking each other, debating the purposes and uses of historical knowledge, choosing different subjects to pursue, and arguing about how to pursue them. That is, in the infancy of their intellectual pursuit, historians were engaged in what we know as “revisionist history”—writing coexisting, diverse, and sometimes sharply clashing accounts of various subjects, accounts that challenged and sought to alter what had been written about them before. Accordingly, historians take it as indisputable that interpretive contests are inherent in all of their efforts to advance historical understanding. What’s more, historians are of the abiding conviction that robust, free arguments about the realities, significance, and meaning of the past should be cherished as an integral element of an open society like the one ours strives to be. Let me explain.
A fundamental feature of historical thought is the distinction between “the past” and “history.” What we call “the past” is just that: It’s what happened at some point before now. Once it occurs, “the past” is gone forever—beyond repeating, beyond reliving, beyond replicating. It’s recoverable only by the evidence, almost never complete, that it leaves behind; and that evidence must be interpreted by individual humans—historians principally, but archaeologists, anthropologists, and others, all of whom differ in all sorts of ways.
Distinct from “the past” are the narratives and analyses that historians offer about earlier times. That’s what we call “history.” History is what people make of the forever-gone past out of surviving documents and artifacts, human recall, and such items as photographs, films, and sound recordings. Indeed, history is created by the application of human thought and imagination to what’s left behind. And because each historian is an individual human being—differing by sex and gender; origin, nationality, ethnicity, and community; nurture, education, and culture; wealth and occupation; politics and ideology; mind, disposition, sensibility, and interest, each living at a distinct time in a distinct place—as a community of professionals, they come to hold different views, have different purposes, create different interpretations, and put forth their own distinctive understandings of “the past.”
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Yet it took no time for Herodotus to come under attack. His younger contemporary Thucydides curtly dismissed Herodotus’s pathbreaking work as “a prize essay to be heard for the moment, . . . attractive at truth’s expense.” What, to Thucydides, constituted the deficiency of his elder’s work? An Athenian general, Thucydides believed that, instead of being appealing in its art and capacious in its explanatory reach, history should maintain a tight focus on warfare, statecraft, leadership, and politics, its chief method being reliance on written texts and the direct observations of participants, its aims to instruct and, only secondarily, to please, its readers. In addition, he thought, it should be entirely secular; gods were of no use for explanatory purposes. His differences with Herodotus were philosophical in the sense that they put into contention what historians should study, why they should study it, and the uses to which they should put what they learn. We venerate Thucydides’s great History of the Peloponnesian War because of its gravity and the brilliance of the speeches he had his historical figures, like Pericles, deliver. His work continues to instruct everyone who reads it.
What’s relevant here is that Thucydides’s subjects, methods, and aims held the field of historical study effectively unopposed for the next 2,300 years. Thucydidean history, in the works of Polybius, Xenophon, Sallust, Livy, Tacitus, Plutarch, and Josephus, was the kind of history that the founders of the United States absorbed in their youth. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams discussed Thucydides in their lifelong correspondence but never once mentioned Herodotus. Until recently, most Americans were the children of Thucydides in that they studied Thucydidean subjects in school and college. Only recently have those subjects been joined by others with which Herodotus was more comfortable—those of social and cultural history, through which the history of women, laboring people, African Americans, Latinos, gays and lesbians, and others have been given greatly enlarged attention. Needless to say, the emergence of all people as historical subjects has been a source of public and political friction. It also lies at the roots of the negative use of the otherwise neutral term “revisionist history.”
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These arguments and that tension, however, are not the only constituent elements of history’s DNA. So is its variability—the changes, increasingly frequent and sometimes seismic, in the way history is conceived and expressed. In the West, the most transformative historiographic shift—conceptual, philosophic, religious, and cultural—was the one brought on by the conversion of the Roman emperor Constantine to Christianity in 312 CE. Not surprisingly, Constantine’s conversion engendered an immediate, revolutionary adjustment in historical thought to explain and justify the Christian faith’s emergence as the favored belief system of Constantine’s empire. It was an adjustment that was destined to put classical, pagan historiography on the defensive in the West ever after.
The principal author of Christianity’s historical claims was Eusebius, Bishop of Caesarea, whose world-historical achievement was, in his Ecclesiastical History, to create an account, written and published after 313 CE, of the history of Christianity and the Christian Church. No greater transformative revisionist conception of the Western past has ever appeared. Working from documents and fighting with polemical ardor on behalf of what soon became theological orthodoxy, Eusebius provided the West with the historical claims and the Western Church with the historical underpinnings from which subsequently grew most Westerners’ understanding of their world. Not even the Marxist worldview and the more recent introduction of women into the historical record have proved as powerful, permeating, deep, and enduring as the reign of Christian concepts, chronology, and subjects on the way we consider the past.
Here, again, it’s worth noting that, like Thucydides’s success in pulling historiography in a direction that would endure as historical orthodoxy for 2,300 years, so Eusebius’s Christian history has served as a traditionalist anchor of Western historiography ever since its emergence. Its incorporation of Jewish monotheism into Christian faith in place of pagan polytheism; its substitution, for older more fatalistic circular historical schemes, of the hope of future deliverance; and its claim that history had a datable origin, whether in Genesis or the Incarnation, were innovations of Eusebian thought. Since then, they’ve served as the secure mooring of the Western historical consciousness. For a second time, revisionist history became traditional; what once was a challenge to pagan orthodoxy turned into an orthodoxy of its own.
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