Later on, Wright explores the psychology behind a “point of view”: (boldface mine)
At a general level, it is clear from a moment’s thought that all history involves selection. History shares this with other knowing. At any given waking moment I am aware of a vast number of sense-impression, out of which I make a very limited selection for my current focus of attention and interest.
(One of the reasons why art, or for that matter falling in love, are what they are, may perhaps be that they involve the heady experience of a wider-than-usual set of simultaneous selections.)
At the most trivial level, any attempt to record ‘what happened’ without selection would fail, for the sheer overwhelming volume of information – every breath taken by every human being, every falling leaf, every passing cloud in the sky. SOME human breaths might be worth recording: that of aperson thought to be dead, for instance. SOME falling leaves and passing clouds might suddenly attain significance, depending on the context (consider the small cloud Elijah’s servant saw from the top of Mount Carmel.
But even a video camera set up at random would not result in a completely ‘neutral’ perspective on events. It must be sited in one spot only; it will only have one focal length;it will onloy look in one direction. If in one sense the camera never lies, we can see that in another sense it never does anything else. It excludes far more than it includes.
-N.T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God, p.83
And later on:
The fact that a human mind has to organize and arrange the material does not ‘falsify’ the history. This is simply what ‘history’ is.
At the same time, Thucydides and the rest were every bit as aware as we are of the historian’s solemn duty to strive towards intellectual honesty and severe impartiality. It is not the ancients who were deceived about the nature of isotry, living in a pre-modern age and not knowing what critical though consisted of. It is we who, in the Enlightenment’s rejection of reliance on auctores, ‘authorities’ in a multiple sense, have come to imagine ourselves to be the first to see the difference between subjects and objects, and so have both misjudged our forebears and deceived ourselves.
Inventing ‘history’ by a backwards projection of idealogy is as much if not more a modern phenomenon as it is an ancient one.
It is something from which New Testament scholars themselves are not exempt.
-p.85