Citizens of a Bygone Age

The historian Keith Thomas said that he tried "...to immerse myself in the past until I know it well enough for my judgment of what is or is not representative to seem acceptable without undue epistemological debate. Historians are like reliable local guides. Ideally, they will know the terrain like the backs of their hands. They recognise all the inhabitants and have a sharp eye for strangers and impostors."

This reminds me of C.S. Lewis. When people asked him how he knew that his detailed accounts of medieval religion and ideas were accurate, he said that he was a citizen of those bygone worlds. Lewis told his audience in his inaugural lecture as a professor at Cambridge that he was a dinosaur, one of the few remaining representatives of Old Western Man; mentally and culturally speaking, he belonged more to the medieval and Renaissance periods than to the twentieth century. Lewis said: "I read as a native texts that you must read as foreigners..."

A good scholar of New Testament studies will try his best to "inhabit" the late BC and early AD centuries until he gains a Lewisian familiarity with those ancient realms.