Looking Up the Mountain

From the ever-reliable Wikipedia:

The following core principles of source criticism were formulated by two Scandinavian historians, Olden-Jørgensen (1998) and Thurén (1997):^[4]

1. Human sources may be relics such as a fingerprint; or narratives such as a statement or a letter. Relics are more credible sources than narratives.
2. Any given source may be forged or corrupted. Strong indications of the originality of the source increase its reliability.
3. The closer a source is to the event which it purports to describe, the more one can trust it to give an accurate historical description of what actually happened.
4. An eyewitness is more reliable than testimony at second hand, which is more reliable than hearsay at further remove, and so on.
5. If a number of independent sources contain the same message, the credibility of the…