Factors & Forces

The real challenge in historical understanding is to figure our not only what happened, but also how it happened and why. The accurate logging and descriptions of the sources and all relevant data is crucial, of course, and is itself a fully worthy and demanding historical task. But the difficult intellectual tasks are to identify the forces and factors that prompted and shaped people and events, and to understand how these forces and factors operated.

Larry Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ, (Eerdmans, 2003) pg. 27