Pieter Craffert on historiography

Historiography refers, among other things, to "the body of techniques, theories, and principles of historical research and presentation; methods of historical scholarship" (dictionary.com, which suffices for our purposes). I am currently reading Pieter F. Craffert's article, "How Historiography Creates (Some) Body: Jesus, the Son of David—Royal Stock or Social Construct" (Scriptura 90 [2005]: 608–20). I'm not  persuaded by his main thesis—at least, not yet—but his description and diagnosis of standard historiographical practices among historians of Jesus is very good and well worth paying attention to.

For example, Craffert writes:

What historians learned from anthropologists is that "people lead meaningful lives, and that these meanings can only be discovered within the context of those lives, it cannot be imputed to them on the basis of some previously established ideas about the biological or psychological makeup of people" (Cohn 1980, 201). Therefore, anthropological historians recognise that they "must grasp the absolute presuppositions, the unspoken assumptions, of the society under review, in order to understand what has occurred" (Stanford 1986, 93). (Craffert 2005:611)

In other words, it will not do to run through historical documents (the Gospel of Mark, the Acts of the Apostles, Xenophon's Anabasis, or whatever) and attempt to isolate historically credible or plausible data that the historian can then use to reconstruct the past. Our documents are situated accounts of the past, written by people with particular perspectives—biases, expectations, values, ideas about what could happen, what should happen, and so on. And unless historians can approximate to some significant degree those particular perspectives, we simply will not be able to get in touch with "what actually happened" (the ultimate goal of most historiography) in any meaningful sense.

As a result, "[a]nthropological historians approach the documents as narrative constructs themselves of cultural realities and experiences" (Craffert 2005:611). This way of approaching texts matters, I think, not just because this more accurately perceives what our historical sources are (though this is true). Instead, it helps us to appreciate more acutely that our own historical reconstructions are similar phenomena: expressions of the past in terms that make sense within, communicate meaningfully to, and provide orientation for people in the present. Back in 2005 I made a similar point in a post on the SBL Forum (available here).

As I said above, I'm not persuaded by Craffert's main thesis regarding the claim of Davidic descent in the Gospels and (I would argue) during the life of the historical (= real) Jesus. However, he has offered us real insight in how we engage historical practice—historiography—as we try to know with some degree of precision and/or certainty what the past actually was. I strongly recommend you check out this essay.

thoughts on the limits of historical description

I begin with an obvious point: Humans exhibit significant limitations regarding the ability to describe and/or reconstruct the past. I have two such limitations primarily in mind, though perhaps there are others. First, processes of human perception already filter through the sensory data assaulting our senses and limit what we notice about the world around us. As we move through the ever-moving stream of the present, we don't even notice some things (how windy it is on an average day, how many people walked past my office door in any given hour, etc.). We remember even less (I almost certainly noticed things that happened on 11 September, 2000, but I can't recall any of them).

Second, our language is limited in its capacity to describe and communicate the things we do notice and remember about the real world, and what utility our language does have already directs interpretation of the events we're attempting to describe. For example, if I tell you about "what happened" to me at the bank, you expect a certain type of story (perhaps I slipped on the wet floor, or I found a $10 bill on the counter). If, however, I tell you about "the incident" in which I was involved at the bank, you expect another type of story (such as I couldn't get in because the police had barricaded an armed robber inside).

Such easily documented considerations have typically urged historians to exercise caution in what we think we know about the past. And rightfully so. But we have run the risk of being immobilized in our attempts to know anything meaningful and authentic about the past with any degree confidence. So I enjoyed Gerd Theissen's comments in this regard, from his 1996 essay, "Historical Scepticism and the Criteria of Jesus Research: or, My Attempt to Leap Across Lessing’s Yawning Gulf” (SJT 49: 147–76):

So human inability to give a genuine account of truth implies the equal inability totally to refashion everything according to certain interests and intentions. As we are axiomatically convinced of human imperfection before we have studied a single source, so—provided our source material is sufficiently complex—we are protected a priori from the suspicion that everything described in these sources is fictitious. (Theissen 1996:155)

Theissen's comments echo things written by folks such as Michael Schudson, Barry Schwartz, and Gary Alan Fine, all of whose works are finding their voice among biblical scholars. This is a helpful development in biblical historical criticism.

historical and/or mnemonic trajectories

Okay. The fourth chapter ("Memory and Typology") of Anthony Le Donne's The Historiographical Jesus: Memory, Typology, and the Son of David (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2009) presents the heart of Le Donne's argument regarding trajectories (and the utility thereof) for historical Jesus research (see the section, "Mnemonic Continuity and Trajectory" [70–77]). This, as I've said elsewhere, is so far the heart of my disagreement with Le Donne's historiographical program, including his appropriation of social memory theory. On the one hand, this is a significant disagreement, since without the argument for trajectories Le Donne's book loses a lot of its substance. On the other hand, the amount of theoretical and methodological material in the book with which I agree probably surpasses 90%, and so I'm prone to minimize the significance of this disagreement. Either way, let's make sure I understand the argument rightly.

First, Le Donne is not suggesting that mnemonic trajectories enable us to move behind the extant historical data to the historical realia that generated our data. As he has argued throughout the previous two chapters, there simply is no uninterpreted historical reality behind the data, no "real Jesus" for us to get to apart from the "Jesus Remembered" (note the intentional echo of James Dunn). Le Donne isn't suggesting that there wasn't an actual historical (= real) Jesus that the early Christians remembered in their accounts of his life and teachings. But he does insist that we cannot get behind our historical data to reconstruct the real person of whom the gospels are (or claim to be) traces.

What the postmodern mind has taught us is that we must always qualify what we mean by "real." What is real is that which has been perceived and interpreted and thus refracted. But once qualified it is no longer helpful to draw a distinction between the real Jesus and the remembered Jesus. For those disciples of the first generation, the real Jesus was the Jesus of their memory. (76)

I have to admit that I agree here. We can know the Jesus whom the early Christians remembered. Inasmuch as Paul's letters, the gospels, and other early Christian texts "get Jesus wrong," we cannot know the "real" Jesus who walked and talked throughout Galilee. Inasmuch as they "get Jesus right," we can. But in both cases, we are constrained by (n.b. not "restricted to") the evidence we have, all of which has already been "refracted."

Second, Le Donne builds his case for mnemonic trajectories on the strength of his argument for memory's continuity through time. Let me say, I agree completely with his case that memories are causally related to previous perceptions and conceptions of the past (= continuity), even if each generation has to expend its own energy to come to terms with the past it inherits from its forebears. "What is vital to this model is the concept of mnemonic continuity. . . . Once a perception has been localized within a particular mnemonic category, the refractions thereafter will constitute only incremental modifications to that category" (72; my emphasis). Le Donne's point isn't necessarily that dramatic changes in conceptions of the past don't happen, but only that they happen in relation to the conceptions of the past that were received as traditional. As an example (my own, not Le Donne's), if someone were to offer the (radically revisionist) view of Jimmy Carter's presidency as "successful," they would have to do so in direct conversation with thirty-years' of conceptions of Carter's administration as inept. Such an argument couldn't simply ignore received appraisals of the late-1970s American political milieu; it would have to tackle them head-on if it hoped to find any widespread reception. Again, "Our memories demand a high degree of continuity in order to tie all of our shifting frames of meaning together. The integrity of this chain determines its reliability. I can account for where and who I am now (and why) by analyzing the continuity of this chain" (73). This is exactly right.

Third, Le Donne moves directly from memory as continuous to memory as chartable: "Memory is in a constant process of refraction. Most of the time, this refracting process remains reliably stable and therefore historically chartable. . . . Because memory refraction is constant, it is chartable and therefore historically measurable" (75, 77). Perhaps. For those moments (or instances) of refraction for which we have data available for analysis, I think Le Donne's right. We can trace the diachronic development and movement of memory—how conceptions of the past morph and mutate and migrate across time. But if I've understood Le Donne's purposes rightly, his point is that we can extrapolate beyond our data (or more accurately, before our data) and posit originating (or simply earlier) memories that explain the instances of memory we have. For example,

In order adequately to account for the origin of a mnemonic trajectory, the historian must compare and contrast interpretive spheres (i.e., mnemonic cycles) that seem to be distorting a memory in opposite directions. Once these spheres are compared and contrasted, it is then necessary to postulate how these divergent traditions relate to one another. . . . it is now appropriate to speak in terms of memory trajectories that might be triangulated to postulate a common origin. (74)

In other words (again, if I understand rightly), given . . . D E F, we can postulate A B C. The problem, I think, is that Le Donne assumes not simply continuity between memories but also predictability. And as far as I can tell, there simply isn't any predictability between our gospels, even if we accept one of the traditionally accepted models of interdependence between them (e.g., the Two-Source Hypothesis, or the Farrer Theory).

Another problem, though perhaps not as significant as the leap Le Donne makes from continuity to predictability, concerns how to identify "interpretive spheres that seem to be distorting a memory in opposite directions" (74). Here the problems are legion. Is John the Baptist's question at Matt 11.3 pulling against his deferential response to Jesus at Matt 3.13–15? If so/not, what about the parallel in Luke 7.19–20, which doesn't pull against a previously narrated Johannine confession (unless you include John's pre-natal jubilation at Luke 1.41!)? Is Jesus' question about the messiah as Son of David in Mark 12.35–37 (parr.) in tension with the Davidic overtones of Mark's account of Jesus' entry into Jerusalem (Mark 11.9–10)? Is Mark a proponent of one of these christological perspectives over the other? Was Jesus? Do the gospel's portrayal of Jesus in Elijah-like terms stand in tension with the casting of John in Elijah's light? Or should we synthesize these portrayals instead?

The problem here is rooted in the relative paucity of our data; others have pursued the kind of analysis for more thoroughly documented figures (e.g., Abraham Lincoln; see Schwartz 2000; 2008) that Le Donne proposes for Jesus. It has proven an intractable problem to identify with any level of precision how various units of the Jesus tradition relate to one another, especially those traditions that may be "distorting a memory in opposite directions." It seems to me that our reconstructed trajectories will fail us anytime the early Christians' memories of Jesus behaved in ways we might not have expected. That's not to say their unexpected memorial practices weren't continuous with practices attested elsewhere. Le Donne's case for memory's continuity (which does not equal veracity, necessarily) is well made; I have my doubts, however, about its predictability.

thinking about history

I recently finished the second chapter of Anthony Le Donne's, The Historiographical Jesus: Memory, Typology, and the Son of David (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2009). Le Donne briefly traces the discussion of history and interpretation from Spinoza through Lessing, Ranke, Schleiermacher, Dilthy, Heidegger, and finally Bultmann. Essentially, he's laying the foundation for a historiographical program that takes serious three observations:

• If perceptions are to be remembered then they will inevitably be interpreted, subconsciously, consciously, or both.


• (ii) Perceptions that contribute to historical memory are thus always interpreted along each stage of the tradition that they inhabit.


• (iii) The historian is never able to interpret an uninterpreted past (17; see also 38–9).

Essentially, Le Donne wants to make the point that contemporary critical historiography, which has come to grips (albeit at this end of a long and painful process) with the historian's inexorably interested location. There is no knowledge of the past without a knower, and knowers cannot but see the past from their own particular vantage point. This heightens—rather than obviates—the importance of being critical historians; Ranke and Co. ran into problems precisely because they failed to notice their own presuppositions and values in their historical observations. But (and here's the rub), those same contemporary critical historians have been less able to see the same processes at work in the ancients' portrayals of the past. So Le Donne offers a wonderfully ironic observation about Bultmann's historical program:

For the modern historian, Bultmann urges "encounter" and "dialogue." Bultmann described the historian's task in terms of existential self-involvement. History was not an objective account of facts; it was a subjective endeavor. According to Bultmann, the historian stands in the current of history and is personally affected by it and (in turn) projects this subjectivity back onto his understanding of the significance of this history. . . . But in his assessment of the writers of the New Testament, Bultmann notices these very same "subjective" characteristics and concludes that they were not interested in history(!). Rather, such characteristics demonstrate only their interest in their faith experiences (as if experience and history should be dichotomized). (36)

Inasmuch as Le Donne has identified a fundamental rupture in Bultmann's practice of history, the latter has left behind an impressive (if still incorrect) legacy amongst historians of Jesus. Interestingly, the influence of James D. G. Dunn's recent work on Jesus lies barely under the surface of the last sentence quoted (see Dunn's Jesus Remembered [2003] and A New Perspective on Jesus [2005]). It was roughly about the time that I was working through Dunn's lengthy Jesus-book that I wrote "What is 'Historical' about the 'Historical Jesus'?," and I was making roughly the same point (though with considerably less historical awareness or philosophical sophistication). Notice my essay's second-to-last paragraph:

Studies in social memory suggest that our apprehension of the past is encouraged along and constrained by both past and present. Remembering the past always means turning to a period in time that is not the present and that is different from, and in some ways alien to, the period in time in which we are remembering. There is no perfect fit between past and present. And yet the past is never completely foreign or unrecognizable; otherwise we would lose all motivation for turning to it in the first place. Turning to the past is always connecting two different periods of time in order to make sense of both. This is what "history" is.

And if "this is what 'history' is," then at the end of the day what the evangelists were doing and what critical historians are doing has more in common than we often suspect. Sure our methods are undoubtedly "more sophisticated" than were the ancients' (though we should be wary of such unhelpful value judgments; better to say that our methods are "differently sophisticated"). And Jesus historians aren't (or shouldn't be) pursuing kerygmatic purposes via historical methods (as were the evangelists). But both Mark and Meier, Luke and Lüdemann, John and . . . well, Sanders wrote about a past that was constitutive of the present in which they wrote. Each of these authors may have inhabited a present that was differently constituted by that past than the others, but we should not succumb to the siren song of our own superior technologies for knowing the past, especially when we stand removed from that past by nearly two millennia. The evangelists, after all, did not have to face that particular obstacle.

social memory and the historical Jesus

My PhD, from The University of Sheffield. (the capitalized article and the full-stop [period] are part of the uni's name, as you can see on their website; I know, I know . . . it's stupid), brought together social memory theory, oral traditional research, and gospels/historical Jesus research. My thesis was published earlier this year as Structuring Early Christian Memory: Jesus in Tradition, Performance and Text (European Studies on Christian Origins, LNTS 407; London and New York: T&T Clark, 2010). The only other PhD project I know of that focuses so intensively on the sociological inquiry into memory is Anthony Le Donne's, which he completed at Durham University. Le Donne's thesis was published as The Historiographical Jesus: Memory, Typology, and the Son of David (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2009), which I began reading earlier this week. My review is scheduled to be published by the Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus later this year.

I've only read the first chapter ("Introduction") and the first section of the second ("Hermeneutics and History"). Already, however, I'm discovering quite a bit I like and a bit with which I can argue. Anyone faintly familiar with academia knows that these books—the ones you agree with and argue against—are the best books. Le Donne begins by chronicling the bifurcation among Jesus historians between interpretation ("typology") and history. Even in scholars sensitive to the problem (e.g., E. P. Sanders), Le Donne suggests the model of "two contexts" oversimplifies the processes by which people perceive historical events and narrate them. Historians, then, cannot simply divide historical data into two categories (typology/history, or, I wonder, inauthentic/authentic?).

No, there are not only two contexts; there is a long continuum of many historical contexts that stand between Jesus and the Gospels, each connected and continuous with the others [emphasis added]. By placing the typological discussion in a different category than the context of "Jesus' own career," Sanders has created two contexts and thereby bifurcates his historical portrait of Jesus. (5)

All this is very good. In Structuring Early Christian Memory as well as my article, "Authenticating Criteria," I question the bifurcation of historical data into authentic and inauthentic categories. Le Donne pursues the same topic (independently; I've met Le Donne a few times, but our work has not interacted with each other in any significant way [at least, not yet]). His second chapter, as far as I can tell up to now, traces the hermeneutical essence of any discourse on the past ("memory," or "history") and how modern historiographical praxis has come to understand the two issues, interpretation and history.

As I mentioned above, there are some things I don't buy, at least not yet. Le Donne's research pursues a new approach to historical Jesus scholarship, one that identifies and traces backwards mnemonic trajectories. For well over a hundred years historical Jesus research has relied on models and the rhetoric of trajectories, and this, I think, is part of the problem. So I see red flags when I read:

I contend that typological appeals to salvation history are to be expected along each stage of the Jesus tradition. All history, whether salvation history or otherwise, borrows language, categories, and types from previous eras. For this reason the model of a continuum is to be preferred, one that places early typological interpretations of Jesus and the interpretations of the early church along the same trajectory. (5; emphasis added)

I agree wholeheartedly with Le Donne here; I've even written in the margin, "the past as constitutive of the present," which is a major emphasis of my own work. But when it comes to the italicized phrase, I'm not sure I would follow Le Donne. Memorial events (or acts) are both constitutively linked with memorial events from the past (as Le Donne states here), and they are inextricably embedded in their present contexts (another point Le Donne acknowledges). But the unpredictable and non-sequential nature of "present moments" problematizes any appeal to trajectories as part of our historiographical models.

Of course, I'm only twenty-two pages into Le Donne's book, so I haven't yet read his arguments supporting his use of trajectories. And I'm genuinely open to being convinced. I'll write more as time permits.

more on placing NT texts

As I continue to read Ruth A. Clement and Daniel R. Schwartz's edited volume, Text, Thought, and Practice in Qumran and Early Christianity (Studies on the Texts of the Desert of Judah 84; Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2009), I find more information relevant to the point I made in my previous post, "placing NT texts." Hermann Licthenberger, in his essay, Last night I finished Serge Ruzer's essay, "Demonology in the Dead Sea Scrolls and the New Testament" (267–80), cites Lawrence Shiffman's programmatic announcement, at the beginning of Reclaiming the Dead Sea Scrolls: "This book aims to correct a fundamental misreading of the Dead Sea Scrolls. For some forty-five years, the scholars publishing and interpreting the scrolls have focused almost single-mindedly on the scrolls' significance for our understanding of early Christianity. This is the first book ever written to explain their significance in understanding the history of Judaism" (xiii; Lichtenberger 2009: 268). Schiffman is right, of course, to place the DSS in the history of Judaism. My point (and, I think, Ruzer's and Kister's) is that the NT itself is also a part of that history!

So I was happy to read Lichtenberger's appreciative appropriation of Schiffman's reclamation of the DSS:

But in my opinion we have to go one step further. Since early Christianity in the Land of Israel was, in its beginnings, nothing other than a Jewish group, we have not only to interrelate the New Testament and early Christianity to other Jewish groups of the time—and there were more than the three or four we know from Josephus—but we have also to ask whether and how the New Testament and early Christianity contribute to our understanding of early Judaism in general, and of the Qumran-Essene community in particular. This is not to be understood as another New Testament-centered approach to Jewish texts and Judaism, but as an integration of the New Testament and early Christianity into their Jewish contexts. Or in other words: we read the New Testament as a Jewish text and as a source for our understanding of Judaism. (269; my emphases)

I hope this signals the development—at whatever stage of maturity—in the future of NT scholarship.

placing NT texts

I'm coming to the end of Ruth A. Clement and Daniel R. Schwartz's edited volume, Text, Thought, and Practice in Qumran and Early Christianity (Studies on the Texts of the Desert of Judah 84; Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2009). Last night I finished Serge Ruzer's essay, "Exegetical Patterns Common to the Dead Sea Scrolls and the New Testament, and Their Implications" (231–51), which aims at the common exegetical assumptions underlying the diverse halakhic rulings on divorce in the Damascus Document and the New Testament. (Perhaps I should mention here that my review of Ruzer's Mapping the New Testament: Early Christian Writings as a Witness for Jewish Biblical Exegesis [Jewish and Christian Perspectives Series 13; Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2007] appeared in the Stone-Campbell Journal 12/1 [2009]: 141–2.) I find Ruzer's reading of ancient texts—especially NT texts—unconvincing and even problematic. Even so, his theoretical approach strikes me as dead-on; more people, I think, should think of the NT texts the way Ruzer does. Here's an extended quote from the conclusion to Ruzer's essay:

It is clear that if the Qumran community and the nascent Jesus movement are perceived as merely two among a number of Second Temple Jewish groups, a comparative study of the respective corpora—if not necessarily pointing to a direct development of New Testament traditions from earlier Qumran ones—may contribute to a better understanding of the Jewish setting of the former. Our discussion of exegetical parallels corroborates this basic position. I suggested a complementing direction, which can also be fruitful: we should more intensively introduce evidence from the New Testament into the discussion of texts from Qumran. Thus in this case, investigation of Paul's epistles has turned out to be useful for elucidating the meaning of the Damascus Document's marital halakhah, while the combined evidence of the epistles and the Gospels may be helpful in clarifying the nature of CD's eschatological stance and/or identity of the opponents against whom the CD exegesis polemicizes. (250)

In other words, we should not simply adduce Jewish data into our efforts to contextualize and understand NT passages and texts, but we should also adduce NT data to contextualize and understand Second Temple Jewish phenomena. A one-way movement pays lip service to the "Jewishness" of the New Testament; the two-way movement Ruzer pursues rightly takes the NT's participation in Hellenistic Palestinian and Diaspora Jewish social, cultural, and political processes seriously. In this regard, it may also be appropriate to reproduce Menahem Kister's concluding remarks to his own essay in the same volume:

Usually, and for good reasons, we seek to understand the Jewish background of the New Testament. It is not rare, however, that a passage in the Gospels supplies us with valuable evidence for the Jewish background of the Jewish texts that have come down to us. ("Divorce, Reproof, and Other Sayings in the Synoptic Gospels: Jesus Traditions in the Context of 'Qumranic' and Other Texts," 229)

the messiness of ancient history

I am amazed at how uncomfortably historians of antiquity sometimes sit vis-à-vis the mind boggling lack of evidence with which we have to work. The reality of our situation is somewhat akin to trying to piece together a detailed picture of New York City solely on the basis of photographs from postcards. Large parts of the data we'd like to have simply doesn't exist (just as large swaths of New York City don't figure on any tourist advertising!), and our treatment of the pieces that we do have is always likely to require heavy revision as new pieces come to light. (For a prime example, see the dramatic reevaluations of Second Temple Judaism still underway in the wake of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls.)

Eliezer Segal ends his essay, "Aristeas or Haggadah: Talmudic Legend and the Greek Bible in Palestinian Judaism" (Common Judaism: Explorations in Second-Temple Judaism, edited by Wayne O. McCready and Adele Reinhartz [Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008], 159–72), with an excellent statement of the messiness of ancient historiography (and so of our knowledge of ancient history). We would all do well to remember that what we don't know—about Jesus, the early Christians, other Jews among whom they lived, and the larger world that all of these had to navigate daily—dwarfs what we do know, almost (almost) to the point of calling into question whether we know anything at all. (We do, of course, but everything we know is always subject to subsequent revision.) At any rate, here are Segal's closing words:

Only when speaking about rabbinic Jews as a theological category is it possible to imagine that they maintained a uniform Bible text, uniform observances, and uniform beliefs; and that they and their Pharisaic predecessors could impose them on all Jews. It is only by subscribing to those naïve beliefs that rabbinic literature can be used as the basis for reconstructions of Ptolemaic Alexandria or the age of Jesus. Compared to those neat classifications, the alternatives are just too . . . well, messy. Even if we could be persuaded that ancient Palestinian peasants were, for some reason, more consistent in their beliefs and practices than our own experience with human nature would suggest possible, a faith in clearly defined sectarian divisions is much easier to deal with than the evidence of, say, an Essene-like community that honored the Zadokite priesthood, observed Sadducee halakhah, and yet maintained a belief in survival after death, perhaps even in bodily resurrection. The tidy consistency of the older categories is unquestionably attractive, even if it is historically indefensible. (172)

As Moses might have said if he were the son of a different age: True dat.

Adele Reinhartz on historical reconstruction

At the end of her essay, "We, You, They: Boundary Language in 4QMMT and the New Testament Epistles" (Text, Thought, and Practice in Qumran and Early Christianity [Studies on the Texts of the Desert of Judah 84; Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2009], 89–105), Adele Reinhartz states clearly and concisely the perils that face any historian of antiquity who attempts to move from historical observation to historical hypothesizing. This shouldn't deter us from attempting both global (or synthetic) and local (or specific) theorizing, whether we're dealing with what became canonical biblical texts or with other texts from antiquity. But it should warn us to remember that what we think we know about the ancient world is like archipelagos amidst the vast ocean of missing and non-extant data we would like to know. The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the mid-twentieth century makes very clear that when the ocean of our ignorance recedes just a little bit the entire topography of our knowledge of antiquity may find itself in need of remapping.

As always, it is helpful to keep in mind [Lawrence] Schiffman's comment that the historian of Judaism has evidence for what was only a small part of the canvas of Jewish history in late antiquity. While it is important to examine our extant sources for clues to the meaning and context of MMT, we cannot rule out the possibility that MMT may allude to individuals, groups and events that are not present in the corpus of literature that has survived to our own days. Thus moving from any set of observations to a historical hypothesis is fraught with danger. (Reinhartz 2009: 104)