Have been a good girl today - done lots of reading and note taking. Not quite sure how to weave it into my essay but never mind, it's all grist to the mill in the end.
Murray A Rae, History and Hermeneutics, London, T&T Clark, 2005 is a nice read, the sort I like - in normal English (well most of the time) and basically talks common sense. Whilst it is really about Bibilcal hermeneutics (~interpretation) and has to keep coming down to a faith position that God speaks somehow through scripture, it is of some use as I try to get my head around the kind of history writing that might be more helpful for theological reflection, and how concepts of tradition and testimony might (or might not) be useful.
In a chapter on testimony and its relationship to knowledge is this lovely citation from Karl Popper which is the best kind of common sense you can get in regard to reserach or knowledge...
It is a very simple and a decisive point, but nevertheless one that is often not sufficiently realized by rationalists - that we cannot start afresh; that we must make use of what people before us have done in science. If we start afresh, then, when we die, we shall be about as far as Adam and Eve were when they died (or, if you prefer, as far as Neanderthal man). In science we want to make progress, and this means that we must stand on the shoulders of our predecessors. We must carry on a certain tradition.
Karl Popper 'Towards a Rational Theory of Tradition' in Conjectures and Refutations: the Growth of Scientific Knowledge, London, Routledge and Keagan Paul, 1963, 129 (cited in Rae, above, p 124)
What Rae is addressing is the claim of some that you can only know what you have experienced, and therefore that people who read the Bible cannot know about Jesus' life. Whilst what we know is mediated through testimony, something Rae equates to what happens in law courts, it is still knowledge.
What struck me most was the simple reality of human limitation - it is only by accepting testimony, albeit with appropriate testing, that we are able to discover new knowledge and extend the 'frontiers' of what is known and understood. As I said at the start, not actually what I'm studying, but somehow reassuring!