All of history should be taken with a grain of salt. Was a historical figure as bad as history said? Or did the patron of the guy writing things down really hate him? “Hey scribe, write on that scroll that this guy fucks donkeys.”

Or maybe the patron of the scribe really likes someone. “Write down that the Emperor made Rome Great Again!”

And you may be shocked to learn about many non-christian documents mentioning the gods they believed in at the time. Should they be ignored too?

Everything in history requires interpretation. And many times religious texts do contain indication of things that happened. Viking Sagas talked about going to North America. Next page they might talk about fighting dragons. Should all of it be ignored.

This is the importance of archaeology. Gotta dig up some stuff to confirm or reject the things they were writing down back then. Because none of it is really things we can fully trust.

History is just a story that tell each other until we find evidence that conflicts with it.

Read this wiki about Boudica: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boudica

Seems convincing, right? It’s all made up. The only thing we know of this person (if she even existed) comes from two accounts from Tacitus who wrote about her many years later (sound familiar?) and Cassius Dio who wrote about her a centurey later. There’s archaeological evidence that four towns in Britain were burned to the ground in the same time period. I guess that might have been Boudica? It’s possible, so we’ll go with that.

“It is not as a woman descended from noble ancestry, but as one of the people that I am avenging lost freedom, my scourged body, the outraged chastity of my daughters” - Boudica to her army, as documented by a Roman historian that wasn’t there.