ABSTRACT
The use of religious documents as a source of historical information is a practice that can be found in some form wherever religious institutions were associated with the production of written materials. The danger, naturally, lies in the need to interpret the ways in which this type of textual evidence relates to historical events. Such documents were rarely, if ever, written as historical records, at least in the way that history is now generally understood. Still, religious literature is at times the only extant documentation pertaining to the ways communities interpreted and understood the events and ideas that affected their lives.
