I was talking with a woman after a recent talk and she said she was surprised to hear that theologians argued. Theologians certainly argue: all academics argue. A street sweeper sweeps, we argue. We are trying to persuade our colleagues that we have found the best solution to something ambiguous or unsolved in what we study, they (naturally) question and test our work and suggest other solutions. Eventually, over decades, sometimes over most of a century of examination and testing someone’s answer comes to stand as the best solution.

I explained simply that we argue, we certainly do argue, and laughed. Then I added that I am not a theologian. A theologian tries to discover the nature of God by reasoning about what God has shown us of the divine’s nature and intentions ... to me that is a bit like studying electrons.  But unlike electrons, God cannot be photographed.  God cannot be interviewed nor invited here to explain divine actions; unlike Job we cannot query God directly. (Personal revelation is not a form of scholarship; not in academia in the 21^st century, and none of us knows the formula to bring about an epiphany, an appearance of God on earth.)

I am not a theologian, I am a historian – because I can know some things about other people. I can examine the clothes they wore, I know how they cooked lunch, I know how they sent their children to school, I know what they argued about in the tavern, I know what they felt about their rulers and the news of their day. I can bring a sock, a cooking pot, a textbook, a bit of tavern graffiti, or a political tract into a room (or, more often, a good photo of any of the above) where we can all look at it and talk about nalbinding, or cooking residues, or abedeciaries, or Latin slang, or why it was a bad idea to back the wrong person in a time of Roman imperial instability. We will try to find an agreement on what we’re seeing, usually everyone agrees fairly quickly, and then we apply it to whatever problem we’re trying to solve (the history of Egyptian tapestry, nutritional deficits in a certain set of bones, etc.) There the arguments start.

The nice thing about the long view of scholarship is that we do resolve these arguments. Sometimes we dig something up that provides a necessary piece of the puzzle, sometimes one of us points out that a parallel (with solution) exists in a slightly removed place or time from what we’re examining, sometimes we arrive at the best answer we can have given what we know.

Another man asked me if the Gospel of Thomas was true. I had to talk with him a bit to get at what he was asking: he meant "Was the Gospel of Thomas a revelation on par with the Biblical gospels?" I don’t know – I’m not a Church Father and I can’t go back to my office and place a call to God about what was meant by burying a small stack of books in the desert.
 
I think the people who used those books thought they were important, holy books (there was no Bible, yet). (There is a minority argument that whoever assembled and used the Nag Hammadi Library meant them as a gallery of things-not-to-do, spiritually – but there is nothing in these expensive, carefully maintained books that show any sign of disagreement or contempt. (i.e. no notes in the margin saying "And this part is particularly awful."))  All I can do is look for the tracks of what other people did in the past:  I cannot read the mind of God.

-Kushana