If simplicity (of a spurious kind) has ruled for too long, producing the Myth of a Gloomy Judaism or the Myth of a Fresh-Faced Early Christianity, it is time that unsorted data were given a fresh hearing. But there is a counter-myth present here too, the Myth of Objective Data or of Presuppositionless History, and the purpose of my present argument is to challenge it: there is in fact no such thing as ‘mere history’.
