Primary Sources

What makes a source “primary”? What makes it “secondary”? The answer is very human and simple.

A Practical Example

Starting at 12:12 below, Dave Wright of Ethnos Canada gives a simple demonstration of what a primary source is. The further a person is in time or physical distance from an event or other person, the farther they are from direct knowledge of it.

A primary source has direct, eyewitness, experiential knowledge of an event.

As you can see from the Ethnos teaching illustration, the best primary sources are those which are the closest in time, place, and depth of knowledge to events or people.

The Christian Foundation

The concept of primary source material is an outworking of the Judeo-Christian principle of the divine authorship and authority of Scripture. Western scholarship bases its standards of truth on the standard given us by our culture’s Christian past.

The Bible claims to be the ultimate primary source text, written by the ultimate Truth-Teller. It lives up to these claims, which are pretty outrageous and easy to debunk if false.

In comparison to this perfect standard, we know that all other records are going to be flawed in some way by sin, death, distance, the weakness of human memory, and the passage of time.

In order to account for our human limitations, we use the biblical text’s standards of authority as an example for how to seek out the most accurate truth among our human flaws.

Question the Text

You can use these three criteria to question the quality of a source.

  1. Did the author live at the same time as the subject he/she recorded?
  2. Did the author live in the same place as the subject he/she recorded?
  3. Did the author live in the same culture and language as the subject he/she recorded?
    • What about social class, education, religious background, and other relationships that create distance or closeness to the subject material?

After using those three questions to narrow down your options, there’s one more question that will help choose a good quality of selections for primary sources:

4. Did the author intend to create a survey of perspectives and information on the topic, or give a record of personal experience of the topic? (Do they use headings that create categories of information, or headings that describe the different angles or parts of their experiences?)

In studying the Bible, this is called “knowing the genre of the text.”

Questioning your sources with this fourth question gives you some idea of whether the material is quantitative (data-oriented) or qualitative (experience-oriented). Most sources will be a combination of both. In the best sources, it will be relatively easy to tell which parts are which.

The classic methods of studying the Bible–authenticity, hermeneutics, cultural studies–supply all your needs for understanding source materials for your academic writing.

Why Do Primary Sources Matter?

Direct accounts matter because lies (attempts to discredit observable reality) rely on taking two or three steps away from reality.

When you weren’t an observer yourself, your own lack of experience is one of those steps of separation from reality. Humility and love of truth require that we all account for that in our writing and speech.

It’s that simple.

This is why gossip is forbidden in the Bible. It’s why “hearsay” can’t be used in court. It’s why only primary and secondary sources are allowed in good academic writing.

A great example is Manetho, the Egyptian propagandist. He may have been a secondary source (working off older primary sources), but the only remaining documents of his work are copies: Tertiary (3 degrees separated) sources.

Despite that, these indirect sources of his propaganda has been leaned on in ways that have created great confusion in Egyptology in the past and led people without better information to doubt whether they can trust the Bible.

If we intend to represent Christ in the world, we must do better scholarship than that, especially with information we can’t give witness to ourselves.

See this video from Creation Ministries International for the explanation.

Self-Evaluation:

How many generations of my own family have I met? (Parents, grandparents, great-grandparents?) Of the ones I’ve met, could I accurately tell a friend anything about their lives?

How many generations of my own family could I name by their full name? Their first or last name?

How many friends of my parents do I know? How many are familiar only through my parents’ stories about them? How well did my parents know the people in their stories (for how many years and how closely)?

How accurate are my parents’ stories of things I’ve never witnessed directly? Do they argue or discuss over the details of events?

How close in time and place to the events of Jesus’ life were the Twelve Apostles? How close in time and place are well-known pastors of today who write about Jesus?

Why do I believe the Bible is reliable? How can I apply this reasoning to determine how accurate and reliable other source materials are?

Can I combine these skills with triangulation?


Word Count: 850 | Time to read: 5 minutes | Time to write: 1 hour

Time to watch included materials: 46 minutes of permanent value-add.