Abstract

Secular academic historians of religious subject matter often characterize their approach as objective, contrasting it with the approaches of religiously-oriented historians. On the assumption that the denial of a theological claim is itself a theological claim, I question this characterization. After a brief discussion of Spinoza and Hume on miracles, I survey the work of several secular, academic historians of the New Testament in order to illustrate how on the issue of miracles they are committed to theological conclusions in advance of their study of the evidence. I point this out not as a criticism, but merely as something that needs to be taken into account in assessing their claims to objectivity. In my view, secular historians, like all historians, bring to their study of the historical evidence a certain framework of real possibilities. It is only within this framework, if anywhere, that they are genuinely open-minded. What lies outside their frameworks has already been exclu