Outlook

Summary

In a short outline, Ranke’s dictum is being used to question a chronological historiography of a positivst nature. Instead, the book suggests a retrospective cautioning against an apologetic writing of Christian origins. None of the authors of the first millennium intended to write history in the modern sense of ’Ranke’, very few of them made use of the canonical New Testament for making historical claims - quite contrary to our modern and contemporary text books. And it is questionable whether they were ever written and collected to produce such modern narratives. Instead, when authors of the first millennium used sources for evidence, they mainly relied on Jewish authors or non-canonical writings that are rather neglected or disregarded and understudied today, despite the continuous rise of research in these over the past decades.