Timothy Barnes on Sound Scholarship

I encountered this gem in the preface to Timothy Barnes's monograph on Early Christian Hagiography (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010).

“In my first year of research ... I learned two fundamental truths about scholarship that are too often neglected: first, the most useful study of any subject or problem need not be either the most recent or indeed at all recent in date; second, that sound scholarship remains sound scholarship despite the passage of time and changes in intellectual fashion.” (p. x)

The book--originally a series of lectures delivered in German--was published three years after Barnes retired from his position as professor of Classics at the University of Toronto.

Here is a longer version:

 “Soon after I began research in Oxford in 1964, my supervisor Sir Ronald Syme encouraged me to investigate early Christian texts and documents in a spirit of extreme scepticism. … Syme suggested that I investigate the letters of Ignatius of Antioch and the acta martyrum of the second and third centuries on the assumption that every text needed to establish its claims to veracity and ought to be treated as inauthentic until it was proved otherwise. This was perhaps the most salutary and productive single item of advice that Syme ever gave me. For, while my investigation of the letters of Ignatius led nowhere at the time, it revealed to me the superb scholarship of Bishop Joseph Barber Lightfoot, who held the see of Durham from 1879 to 1889, and it convinced me that understanding of Ignatius had not progressed significantly in the three quarters of a century after Lightfoot. In my first year of research, therefore, I learned two fundamental truths about scholarship that are too often neglected: first, the most useful study of any subject or problem need not be either the most recent or indeed at all recent in date; second, that sound scholarship remains sound scholarship despite the passage of time and changes in intellectual fashion.” (pp. ix-x)