Of all religious beliefs in the world, past or present, none have more thoroughly based themselves on history than Judaism and Christianity. The divine-human encounter in the biblical faiths always involves claims about real people, living in real places, who acted in real events of the past, many of which are also cited in secular ancient history. Both testaments of the Bible use the past tense of narrative prose—more than any other form of language.
Because Judeao-Christianity has so thoroughly influenced Western culture, we are prone to imagine that all other world religions have a similarly solid historical base. This is by no means the case. It can, in fact, be argued that every religious system before or since Judaism and Christianity has avoided any significant interaction with history, and instead has asked its followers to believe, by sheer faith alone, the claimed revelation of its founder(s). This is true of the mythologies of yesterday and the cults of today, the religions of the East or of the “New Age” of the West.
Or, whenever links with genuine history are claimed—as in several modern belief systems today—these are never verified by secular history or the findings of archaeology. Typically, a single founder claims divine revelation, which is subsequently written down as a holy book for his or her following. The founder may well have been historical, of course, but one looks in vain for true correlations with secular history in the founder’s holy book. Rather than any private, once-for-all-time revelation, Judeo-Christianity’s Scriptures encompass a two-thousand-year-plus period—two millennia in which its holy books constantly interlaced themselves with history.
—Paul L. Maier, In the Fullness of Time: A Historian Looks at Christmas, Easter, and the Early Church
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