MetaCatholic

Chris Heard has a useful post Is the Bible history or theology? which is part of a discussion on the Biblical Studies list. Generally I would want to affirm what he says there. Taken globally about the whole Bible, the question poses a false antithesis

A point I would like to develop a little further, however, is that a great many of these discussions, including the one referred to, tend to assume that we all know what we mean by history, and that we all mean the same thing. Self-proclaimed post-modern views of history, however, are in many respects virtually indistinguishable from theology. One of the foremost proponents of this approach to history is Keith Jenkins, who says of his work:

I thought and still think—that debates about ‘history’ are debates about meaning (i.e. ontological debates) and, of course, meaning (of the ‘facts’; of this or that interpretation, etc.) escape facticity and interpretation. (b) That all historical discourse is positioned—is ideological/political, and that, rather than avoid this obvious conclusion, one should make explicit one’s own position… that is to say, there was a call for ‘reflexivity’ going ‘all the way down’.

Other historians strongly disagree in debating the question “What is History?” The precise relationship between an ordered information-bearing narrative or discourse on the one hand, and specific pieces of discrete data, whether literary data, artifacts, or (reconstructed) facts, on the other is a hot topic amongst all historiographers, not just those concerned with the Bible and theology. At one extreme is the view that one is essentially offering a coherent discourse that simply gives information about what happened. At the other extreme is the view that one is offering an account or critique of the present by telling a story about the past.

The first of those views is remarkably like what many people mean when they claim that the Bible’s narrative is essentially history. The second is very like what people mean when they claim the Bible is purely theology. Most historians, of course, take a position somewhere between the extremes, whether they are writing about purely secular history, or seeking to write about biblical or theological history. This is, in short, less a debate about the Bible, than a debate about historiography carried on in relation to the Bible.