The Myth of Post-Enlightenment Objectivity

"It is therefore a chasing after the wind to imagine that anyone, ancient or modern, could or can 'simply record the facts'... One learns to suspect people who claim to be the only unbiased voice on their subject; normally this simply means that their agenda is so large that, like a mountain which blots out the sky, they forget that it is there at all. There is no such thing as a point of view which is no-one's point of view. To imagine, therefore, as some post-Enlightenment thinkers have, that we in the modern world have discovered 'pure history', so that all we do is record 'how it actually happened', with no interpretative element or observer's point of view entering into the matter- and that this somehow elevates us to a position of great superiority over those poor benighted former folk who could only approximate to such an undertaking because they kept getting in their own light- such a view is an arrogant absurdity. "

-N.T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God, 86. 1992.