History is largely peace punctuated by wars, rather than wars punctuated by peace. The problem is that we humans are prone to the availability heuristic, by which the salient is mistaken for the statistical, and the conspicuous and emotional effect of an event makes us think it is occurring more regularly than in reality. This helps us to be pruden

“Do you really believe in the decisive role of the individual in history?” “Well, I think it’s a question that can’t be proven or disproven, unless we restart time, kill off a few great men, and see how history proceeds. Of course, you can’t rule out the possibility that the course of history was determined by the rivers carved out and dammed up by

Reducing it to a narrative retroactively creates a clarity that never was and never will be there.

There is, of course, no such thing as uninterpreted historical narrative; Crossan knows that as well as anyone. But if the sign of interpretative activity is the give-away clue that the history has been invented, how then can there ever be any history at all?