The Wide Strike Zone: Reflections on History, Tradition, and the Question of Evidence
I remember sitting in that classroom at Harvard’s Extension Program, part of the Harvard Institute for Learning in Retirement, surrounded by elderly men and women whose lives had been shaped by decades of serious work—doctors, lawyers, scholars, individuals schooled in places like Cambridge, Harvard, and Radcliffe. The course was on the Book of Job, and the level of discussion reflected their hightly educated and developed professional lives: serious, careful, informed, and eager to learn.
In one of the classes, I raised a question about the historical reliability of the story surrounding the translation of the Septuagint (the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures – see more below). To me, the idea was intriguing, while also questionable. But the reaction in the room was immediate and unmistakable. It carried a quality of both surprise and defensiveness—something closer to resistance, as if I had crossed a boundary. What I had intended as a question of historical method was received, almost instinctively, as something inappropriate—if not outright blasphemous.
At the time, I lacked what others seemed to possess in abundance: knowledge—knowledge of history that was clearly taken as fact. They could point to texts like the Letter of Aristeas, which I only later learned about, as well as passages from the Talmud and Flavius Josephus, about which I knew very little. I had only a question about the plausibility of such a feat. In that setting, I felt like a fool—or, more accurately, someone ignorant of history.
It has taken some time to understand that what I was encountering was not simply a difference in intelligence or in knowledge of history, but a difference in what counted as historical fact.
The story of the Septuagint is well known: seventy-two elders, separated into individual chambers, each producing an identical translation of the Hebrew Torah into Greek. In its later form, especially in rabbinic literature, the account is considered miraculous—evidence of divine intervention guaranteeing textual unity and historical truth. However, upon closer examination, such a claim, as compelling as it may sound, cannot be substantiated. What can be said is that a translation did occur, most likely in Alexandria in the third century BCE. Yet the narrative told by ancient writers bears all the marks of a constructed account designed to legitimize that translation.
One “authority” on the subject is Flavius Josephus, a Jewish historian and former military leader in the 1st century CE who later wrote under Roman patronage. He is best known for works like The Jewish War and Antiquities of the Jews, in which he retells Jewish history in a form accessible to the Greco-Roman world. Faced with the relative silence of early Greek authors regarding the Jews, Josephus presents interpretations intended to demonstrate Jewish presence and antiquity. Later readers, encountering Josephus, often take these interpretations as confirmations, rather than as what they are: interpretive expansions of uncertain material.The historian Emilio Gabba, in his study of Greek knowledge of the Jews, lays this process bare. What appears, at first glance, to be a chain of historical references turns out to be something more complex: silence giving way to ambiguity, ambiguity to interpretation, and interpretation to accepted narrative.
After years of research and deep reading in ancient history, what I began to understand is that not everything presented as historical fact is firmly established. Much of it consists of repeated stories—shaped through selection, amplification, and repetition of questionable material. Sources and narratives of uncertain origin are strengthened through repetition, while unfavorable evidence is often overlooked. Over time, what began as tentative identification becomes established and referenced truths.
What was once speculative is now spoken of as fact. The ambiguities fall away. The story becomes the framework within which further scholarship operates. What was once questionable is now accepted without question.
These classmates of mine were clearly not naïve. They were not entirely unaware of the debates surrounding these materials. But there existed an unspoken assumption: questioning the foundational premises of the tradition itself was another matter. It was not simply a matter of inquiry; it was a matter of stability.
It is here that I began to arrive at my own understanding. When a narrative becomes central—when it shapes identity and meaning—it is no longer examined solely on evidentiary grounds. It begins to take on a metaphorical and allegorical weight, and in doing so, it is held in place by something more than proof. It becomes part of a larger framework that people live within, rather than simply a claim to be tested.
The evidentiary “strike zone,” to borrow a metaphor, begins to widen. Borderline claims are allowed. Weak connections are accepted. Gaps are filled, not always with evidence, but with interpretation. This does not happen because each individual claim is convincing on its own, but because the larger structure depends on them. To question one piece too closely risks unsettling the whole.
And so, what might otherwise be treated cautiously—what would, in another context, be called speculative or uncertain—is instead given the benefit of the doubt. Not out of carelessness, but out of a kind of quiet necessity. The narrative must hold. And because it must hold, the standards by which it is judged begin, almost imperceptibly, to shift.
This is not unique to religious history. It is a human pattern. Civilizations root themselves in stories of origin, continuity, and legitimacy. Greek, Roman, and medieval traditions—and even modern romantic or revolutionary narratives that we hold to be factual—show the same tendencies. What is distinctive in the case of biblical history is the extent to which these narratives have been carried forward—intellectually, culturally, and spiritually—into the modern world.
On the one hand, these narratives are meaningful, formative, and deeply embedded. On the other hand, their historical grounding is often uncertain, their evidentiary basis limited, and their continued retelling shaped by processes that are, at best, interpretive and, at times, selective.
I am not about to dismiss the stories that carry tradition. What I am asking for is clarity of presentation—a little less myth, and a lot more honest reflection.
But this clarity does not arise on its own. It requires something more demanding of those who work in history and related disciplines.
Historians must not only gather sources—they must interrogate them. They must question not only who is telling the story, but why, and how it has been transmitted. Confronting a thousand-year-old retelling of history is difficult, if not impossible, to refute. And when one attempts to question established historical “truths,” one finds oneself up against forces far greater than any individual. In doing so, one is effectively asking history itself to examine its own assumptions—especially when those assumptions are inherited from long-standing narrative frameworks.Without this, history risks becoming a repetition of earlier interpretations rather than a re-examination of the past.
Where claims are speculative, where evidence is indirect, or where narratives serve clear legitimizing functions, this should be explicitly acknowledged. There should be, in effect, a kind of intellectual “disclaimer”—not to diminish the value of the material, but to properly situate it.
Such disclaimers would not weaken history; they would strengthen it. They would distinguish between what is known, what is inferred, and what is believed. They would prevent the gradual transformation by which myth, through repetition and authority, comes to be received as unquestioned truth.
What I experienced in that classroom was not a failure of scholarship, but a moment of contact between two approaches: one that participates in a long-standing narrative framework, and one that steps back, in ignorance, to examine how that framework is constructed.
There is no easy resolution between these positions. It is not easy because too much rests on the stories we tell ourselves—history as it has been told, existential beliefs, long-established customs, and entire religious frameworks all depend, to varying degrees, on their perceived and collectively agreed-upon truth. To question them is to risk unsettling structures that have provided meaning, continuity, and identity over generations.
In allowing our old stories to remain, we need to speak of them with the understanding and courage that reflect honest inquiry. This is best done by successive generations taking up these stories, for many of the storytellers are simply retelling inherited myths without a critical eye. Younger generations need to dig deeper into these ancient (and modern) narratives and ferret out what we actually know, what is inferred, and what we believe—and to recognize that these are not always the same thing.
— Ed Reither
