While affirming the essential historical veracity of the Gospel accounts and the importance of real history to which they testify, we must not in theory or in practice supplant the text with our reconstruction of the events behind it, nor should we make this reconstruction the end goal of our reading. We have no access to the events behind the text other than the testimony of the Gospels themselves, and to avidly seek such data would be to deny what we do have in the canonical, inspired Gospels: testimony to those events. To seek the behind-the-text realities is to fall back into the errors of modern historicism, which eschews testimony, distrusts witnesses, and desires to reach the supposed, original, objective truth of the matter. But this…is epistemologically and historically naive and impossible! One must finally trust testimony, or not; we can evaluate the trustworthiness of a witness, but we can never objectively get beyond the irreducibility of testimony.