Time & Perspective Quote by Kenneth Scott Latourette

Latourette is doing something more pointed than waving at “bias” or “lost sources.” He’s staking out the historian’s most uncomfortable posture: confident enough to sketch a narrative of Christianity’s expansion, humble enough to admit how much of that narrative rests on partial archives and contested memory. The first clause grants the reader a familiar confidence, a “we know” that evokes maps of missions, martyrs, councils, and conversions. Then he pulls the floor back: “but much” disappeared, and “much” survived only as tradition, a word that carries both warmth (inheritance, continuity) and danger (embellishment, apologetics).

The subtext is methodological. Writing in the mid-20th century, Latourette belonged to a generation of church historians trying to professionalize a field long dominated by confessional storytelling. His phrasing signals a refusal to treat ecclesiastical tradition as either automatically trustworthy or automatically suspect. “Repeatedly questioned” is calibrated: it doesn’t sneer at tradition, but it insists that scrutiny is the price of using it.

Context matters because Christianity’s early spread is disproportionately known through winners’ documents: episcopal letters, hagiographies, polemics, and later institutional histories. Everyday belief, local hybridity, dissenting movements, and “failed” missions often leave thinner traces. Latourette’s intent is to keep the reader inside that asymmetry. The quote works because it dramatizes the historian’s double bind: to narrate an epochal expansion while admitting that the evidence itself was produced by communities invested in making that expansion look inevitable, coherent, and providential.