This confused me. Quotes from Manetho and Josephus seemed to show that ancient writers sometimes wrote things that weren't true, because they wanted to write those things for purposes other than recounting historical fact. Okay, that seems clear. People have no doubt been telling inaccurate stories for all kinds of reasons since the first mastodon got away.
But then somehow at the end we are counting a statement as true as long as it is trying to communicate something of value. This seems like too far a stretch. If I make a social media post endorsing a conspiracy theory does my post count as true just because I'm trying to convey something of value to and about my fellow conspiracy freaks?
I can see that we may be able to identify some amount of truth in or behind a text that also holds falsehoods. I can even buy that we might legitimately discard some amount of false chaff by classifying it as linguistic convention rather than content. A text in French makes practically everything male or female grammatically, and we don't count all those genders as biological errors. In kind of the same way, ancient writers and their audiences might have shared background assumptions that we now consider false, but we may decide not to count those ancient cultural conventions as part of the content of an ancient text. So we might for example judge an ancient geography as substantially accurate even if it was all written in terms of a flat-earth cosmology which the author and original readers took literally.
And I can see how it could be tempting to boldly slap the "true" label onto texts that too many people dismiss as completely worthless, or even harmful, just because they aren't literally accurate. I just don't think that conferring the "true" badge is the right way to rehabilitate these sidelined texts. If a soldier runs away in a battle we can find extenuating circumstances, and we can praise his civilian achievements, but we shouldn't give him a medal for bravery. That's serving the seed corn as a side dish.
Thanks for another thought-provoking post, PG. I get something out of practically every post you write. This holds true in this case. True is kind of a slippery term. I have to study it a lot more. Factual is but one possible meaning. Faithful might be another useful one for the present context.
History in antiquity was not primarily, not to mention exclusively, about discovering the facts. It is a rhetorical exercise. Someone uses data of various kinds and rhetorical tropes to convince you of their point of view. That’s history. The texts in the Bible and LDS scripture have different generic and rhetorical aims than history. It is difficult to
say anything that applies well to all three of these snippets, but I tried.
For a culture’s sacred text, I would say true probably means useful in the community’s quest to negotiate meaning, identity, and a way of life. Deemed faithful and authoritative to the community’s sense of itself. Factual? I don’t see how.
"He disturbs the laws of his country, he forces himself upon women, and he puts men to death without trial.” ~Otanes on the monarch, Herodotus Histories 3.80.
