It's really important to consider the source of your information. The past is gone. We're only getting it through the perspective of a person who created a source, and then that source had to survive and someone had to say, “Oh, we want to keep that in a library” and you have to find it. So there's all these layers of judgments that people have made. The person decided what to write. Someone decided it should be kept. And so we always have to work back kind of through those judgments. And one of the things we often assume about the past is that everybody kind of thought the same thing. So you find one letter where somebody says, “I’m frustrated with the situation,” and then you say, “Oh, everybody in the past was frustrated.” And we have to remember, no, we've got that's one person at one perspective, one point in time. And so then the historical approach is to say, well, let's see who else was in that same experience or who else had a similar experience, and then try to put together a bigger picture. And along the way, sometimes we learn that sources aren't reliable. Sometimes it's intentional. They're trying to to cover something up, but other times it's just kind of part of what they're doing. People emphasize their experience because they don't have any other experience to talk about. People will want to make themselves seem more important. We should always just have a careful eye of who’s the source,

where did it come from, what’s their interest in telling the story and and telling it in this way? And then are there other ways that we can go and corroborate it? So if one person said they gave a sermon and it was boring, we'll try and find someone else there. And if two people say it was boring, then it might have been boring. But if the other one says, “This was the most exciting sermon I’ve ever heard,” well then it gets really interesting. Then we want to figure out what was going on during that sermon.