Fake History

[Ματθαίος]

I know there is a lot of fake news out right now. I had a history teacher tell me once that most of the history they teach in the public school system is fake. Can anyone explain why we would have fake history and how to tell the difference between real history as we read it in the Bible and fake history that people use to promote for their own agenda.

Live by today and what you see with your heart as true. The rest is illusion

 

[elliott95]

History in the end is based in the records left behind by those who have come before. Sometimes the records left behind are deliberately falsified by those in history writing them. Always, the record is incomplete. Moreover, there is often records existing in such volumes that the historian needs to apply a filter to sift what is important to the aspect of the record that is the point of interest for him from that which is not.
To guard from the first type of error of falsification, the historian usually tries to balance the historical record left behind by one group with the record left behind by another. For example, for the record on Jesus, we have what the Gospel says. But we also have what Josephus says, and we have what certain Romans had to say. More than this, since the record itself has been handed down to us, and preserved through Christians, we often have additions to the record that are forged into the record to put a more positive Christian slant on it.
It is the job of the historian to draw a conclusion from that, to discern what in all likelihood has been forged, and to come up to a conclusion of who Jesus really was.
Professional historians train themselves to be dispassionate in the filters that they apply to the data, and the understandings that they derive from the texts left behind, but in truth, dispassionate analysis is something that is very difficult to achieve. Christians want to have their beliefs confirmed, but so do the atheists, for their very immortal souls depend upon them being right.
Truth itself is a passion for Christians also, and for most non-Christians too now, so in order to get the best idea of what the closest approximation of who the real historical Jesus is, we must critically read from all sources, and not just from the ones we would like to be true.

This is to say that without total freedom to present the facts as the individual historian sees them, without having different versions of history presented to us in textbooks as alternative possibilities, all history is fake. The historic question for example might be was the settlement of the American West a genocide? Without at least two alternatives being presented to the reader in the textbook, what is being presented is no longer history, but propaganda.

In our age, there is a plethora of different sources of information from a plethora of points of view. Historians present their points of view footnoted to the primary and secondary sources from which they have formulated their conclusions. I think in that kind of scenario, whether history is fake or not is very much dependant on the reader himself. It is really up to us to not just settle in to the story that is most supportive of our worldview, and to not just ignore any of the fact that are contrary to that worldview.

The bigger question is not whether or not history is fake, but whether or not we are going to be willing to settle for a fake history because it makes us feel better about believing the things that we do.

 

[Shempster]

History and religion always went hand in hand in ancient times.
About the only thing we know about history is that history works like a genealogy. Fred begat Sam who begat John who begat David who begat Elvis. Only in history it is a nation invading another land, killing the people and taking all their stuff.
Actually it was still going on just a few years back. Just 80 years ago, Italy decided they wanted Ethiopia so they marched right down there and took over. They all did it. England holds the record for invading the most countries of all.

The point is, when a land is invaded the books are burned, temples destroyed and the culture erased.
Imagine all the knowledge in the perhaps 1 million books housed at the great library of Alexandria.
Of course it was all burned. WE actually don't have but a sliver of the knowledge from that time.
Its not always true, but often true that new history books were written to create the scapegoat out of the conquered and give the aggressors a noble appearance. That goes for American history as well.

So fake news stories like rewritten history are stories designed to create a scapegoat and a savior.

 

[HermanNeutics13]

Certainly much of what you learn in school about history is at the very least skewed. Take Columbus. You may have learned that he was one of the only people who knew the Earth was round but no one believed him except Queen Isabella and he came to America looking for passage to India. That is almost entirely false. It had been well known that the world was round for centuries by that tie and we can see this when looking at scientific sources before Columbus. Columbus never even set foot on the Continent of America and really only came to the Caribbean. There were Europeans who preceded him to the Americas, such as Lief Ericson. How can we know what is real and what isn't? You can't always know entirely but the art of how to actually critically study history seems to have been lost. This is what why get people who deny a historical Jesus even though the vast majority of those who do know the historical method agree that there was a historic Jesus (although may would deny his deity). You have to look not only at primary sources, but secondary sources and see how they compare. What do they agree on. Where they disagree, is there motivation for the disagreement? Does the author have an agenda?

 

[Root of Jesse]

I know there is a lot of fake news out right now. I had a history teacher tell me once that most of the history they teach in the public school system is fake. Can anyone explain why we would have fake history and how to tell the difference between real history as we read it in the Bible and fake history that people use to promote for their own agenda.

I can give you some statements of 'history' which are fake...
1. The Catholic faith is just prepackaged pagan myths.
2. Catholics borrowed Christmas and Easter from pagans.
3. Catholic beliefs about the Blessed Virgin Mary are derived from pagan sources.
4. Shortly after Christ founded the Church, it underwent an apostasy, becoming the corrupt Catholic Church. The True Christian Faith went underground until the Reformation.
5. The Catholic Church caused the fall of the Roman Empire.
6. The Catholic Church suppressed certain books of the Bible (the Gnostic Gospels, eg.) to control Jesus' message.
7. Emperor Constantine made Catholicism the official religion of the Roman Empire, thus institutionalizing the Catholic perversion of the true Biblical faith.

That's a few...

 

[Root of Jesse]

A lot of bogus information can filter its way into how we narrate history to one another. A somewhat famous example can be seen in Washington Irving's A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, a work of fiction and an historical train wreck that has managed to color our "knowledge" of Columbus since. The myth that Columbus set out to prove that the earth was round instead of flat? Irving made that up. Nobody with a basic education at the time doubted that the earth was round, it had been mathematically proven that the earth is round since the days of Eratosthenes around three hundred years before Christ--depictions of the earth throughout the middle ages show it as a globe. Columbus, in fact, believed that the earth was much smaller than it actually was, and so was confident that he could reach India by sailing West (nobody doubted that one could theoretically reach India by sailing West, it's just that the trip was suicidal); after asking several European monarchs he finally was given three ships and a crew by Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain--his trip would have ended up in disaster if he didn't just happen to bump into the Americas on accident.

Mostly true. Columbus actually sailed past Iceland as an apprentice (he became a sailor at 14), where he learned about the warm currents coming from the south. Also, it only took 33 days for him to get to the Bahamas.

Also, the popular narrative of Columbus presents him as a valiant hero--but valiant hero he wasn't, he was cruel tyrant who brutally raped and murdered the indigenous peoples, the things he did, recorded and testified to by even people who loved him, are acts so heinous that they could be put into one of the Saw movies. Columbus, his brothers, and his men would test the sharpness of their knives by slicing the flesh off of the natives, in one incident two young native boys had parrots, the Spaniards took the parrots, and then beheaded the children--for fun.

Actually, not. Columbus had to return to Europe one ship short, and had to leave 42 men on Cuba. He instructed them to treat the native people well, especially the women. When he returned, he found that his men hadn't listened. On his second voyage, he encountered the Carib tribe, who were cannibals, practiced sodomy, and castrated captured boys from other tribes. Columbus recognized the captives as the peaceful tribe he had met on his first voyage and rescued them. Most accounts of Columbus' voyages mistake his motives by focusing on economic or political reasons, but the real reason was to find enough gold to finance a Crusade to retake Jerusalem from the Muslims. His first words upon landing on the island of Hispanola were "The monarchs of Castile have sent us not to subjugate you, but to teach you the true religion."

Why was Columbus chosen? Probably because early Americans didn't want to honor English explorers, such as Cabot.

-CryptoLutheran

 

[Hawkins]

I know there is a lot of fake news out right now. I had a history teacher tell me once that most of the history they teach in the public school system is fake. Can anyone explain why we would have fake history and how to tell the difference between real history as we read it in the Bible and fake history that people use to promote for their own agenda.

Basically humans have no ability to get to the past. That's why we have to rely on human accounts of testimonies to get to know what could possibly happen in the past. Under most circumstance, this is the only way how we can reach the past, disregarding the fact that human accounts of testimonies can be faked.

Moreover, written history is about the recording of 0.0000001% human activities. Human capability can only choose to record those events/figures famous enough (to an authority) for them to be recorded down and for them to be passed on. Out of these extremely small portion of recordings, only those secular testimonies are considered seriously written and kept. It is so because most human authorities won't accept serious supernatural recordings. They will only accept and pass on recordings can be comprehended by them.

 

[JCFantasy23]

Fake history is propaganda. It is history put together for a political aim.

Exactly. Not necessarily untrue, but our history books emphasize what they want us to focus on. I had no idea Christopher Columbus was such an atrocious man until I was an adult and did my own research. History books in school made it sound like he was an excited explorer who wants to discover lands - hardly the truth the way that picture is painted. The same can be said for much of the history we're taught - some of it is sugarcoated to make it less traumatic for little kids, some whitewashed to keep it focused on PC issues instead of covering all issues

 

[Root of Jesse]

Exactly. Not necessarily untrue, but our history books emphasize what they want us to focus on. I had no idea Christopher Columbus was such an atrocious man until I was an adult and did my own research. History books in school made it sound like he was an excited explorer who wants to discover lands - hardly the truth the way that picture is painted. The same can be said for much of the history we're taught - some of it is sugarcoated to make it less traumatic for little kids, some whitewashed to keep it focused on PC issues instead of covering all issues

Actually, not. Columbus had to return to Europe one ship short, and had to leave 42 men on Cuba. He instructed them to treat the native people well, especially the women. When he returned, he found that his men hadn't listened. On his second voyage, he encountered the Carib tribe, who were cannibals, practiced sodomy, and castrated captured boys from other tribes. Columbus recognized the captives as the peaceful tribe he had met on his first voyage and rescued them. Most accounts of Columbus' voyages mistake his motives by focusing on economic or political reasons, but the real reason was to find enough gold to finance a Crusade to retake Jerusalem from the Muslims. His first words upon landing on the island of Hispanola were "The monarchs of Castile have sent us not to subjugate you, but to teach you the true religion."

 

[Athanasius377]

Some people want to push a specific agenda and will twist even reliable sources to and shoehorn them into a narrative. I would say as a rule, use primary source material such as eyewitnesses or someone who received their information from an eyewitness. This isn't always possible but I tend to trust someone closer to the event than a work written much later. Just my two cents.

 

[Radagast]

long-cherished myths, like in Columbus' time everyone thought the world was flat.

There are a bunch of those myths.

Look at The Da Vinci Code. Almost every bit of "history" in that novel is fake.

 

[Radagast]

Take Columbus. You may have learned that he was one of the only people who knew the Earth was round

His critics had a better idea of the earth's circumference than he did. They said that the earth was too big to take a sailing ship from Europe to Asia without restocking on food and water along the way. They were right.

Blind luck for Columbus that, in between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, there was a bunch of land.

 

[Radagast]

I would say as a rule, use primary source material such as eyewitnesses or someone who received their information from an eyewitness.

Primary sources can sometimes be wrong or slanted, but still, I tend to agree with you.