This is an except from my Gospels' notes. I came across it studying for the exam I have to take tomorrow. It refers to the currently-chic academic position that the Gospels are unreliable sources of information because of the obvious bias of their authors. Thought it was interesting.
Oh, and the part in brackets is definitely still notes from the lecture.
Because there’s a theological agenda there can’t
be real history [Says who? This is a false dichotomy!! You cannot make claims like that without interposing your own suppositions about reality into the very argument. The idea that you can witness this kind of stuff and not have an opinion is ridiculous. To say that you can’t trust a person with an agenda is to say that you can’t trust anyone, ever, including yourself. Compare this to the way we do history now – like the Holocaust, for example. The assumption that if you are intimately involved in the events themselves and therefore have an emotional opinion about it necessarily means that you must be untrustworthy is quite absurd and unhelpful.]