Endnote 11 – What Did Jesus Really Say?

It is important to note that one cannot settle historical questions by “belief.” The fact that I believe something to be true has no bearing on whether it is. Whether I believe that Lincoln wrote the Gettysburg address on the back of an envelope has nothing to do with whether he did. Thus belief cannot be used in historical judgments, not even as a way of tipping the scales when the evidence is evenly balanced. See what Van Harvey calls “the morality of historical judgment” in his The Historian and the Believer (New York: Macmillan, 1966).