Advanced textual analysis did not beat naive compilation in finding historical truth
Evidence
In doing so, he conjured up what have since been shown to be imaginary Medinese and Iraqi schools of transmission of historical information. His conclusions were demolished by Albrecht Noth in the twentieth century. Thus Wellhausen’s sophisticated techniques of textual analysis do not in the end seem to have brought him any closer to the historical truth than did Muir’s methodological naivety. — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 331
Categorization
- DEEPTHINKING: A genuinely counterintuitive result worth sitting with: methodological sophistication can invent phantom source-schools and land no closer to truth than naive compilation — a quiet rebuke to method-fetishism in historiography.
- XREF: Mirrors Milgrom/economic-institution reading that ‘better’ formal procedure doesn’t always beat plain practice; also parallels the Dragnet/source-criticism anxiety about reconstructing lost originals.