咸錫憲의 역사서술과 역사인식

Ham, Seok-Heon's Historical Description and Perception - Focused on 『The History of Joseon(Korea) From the viewpoint of the Bible』 -

Ham, Seok-heon wrote a series of articles titled 『The History of Joseon(Korea) from the viewpoint of the Bible』 at 『Bible Joseon』 23 times from 1934 to 1935. This study is to discuss his writings from the perspective of Korean historiography of the 1930s. It is meaningless to discuss whether he is a historian. That is because he narrated Korean history from his unique view and published his thought through many types of publication. His conscience would have not allowed him to ignore the reality of Korea under the Japanese imperial occupation. However, there were difficulties in his times to directly describe what he really thought. In this regard, his views on the histories of Christianity, Religious, providence, apocalypse, suffering, morality and so on would be one outlet for him to describe the history of Korea indirectly. His view on the history of suffering is not confined to the religious perspective and meaning. It is appropriate to recognize it as a way through which Korean people can reflect on their reality under the Japanese occupation, overcome those memories and ultimately revitalize Korean history again. His historical description and perception was structured through idealistic spiritualism which was very similar to those of nationalistic historians. Meanwhile, he not only strongly rejected the colonial view of history but also denounced historical materialism and some nationalistic historiography such as the heroic view of history and the cultural historiography. However, the main concept of his historical view was nationalism. The spirit of Korean people which he emphasized as the main pillar of our history shared the similar idea with the idealistic view supported by some nationalistic historians. Rather, his idea had much more nationalistic characteristics than their ones. What he sincerely pursued was the history of Korean people. In this regard, he thought that the value of a historian rest not on recording facts accurately, but on his judgement and interpretation of historical facts. However, his publications were not organised well as full-scale historic writings. In addition, those publications are shunned by the academic community. There were few people who read his writings. His way of narrating the history is not systematic and his theory is rough and not sophisticated. So it is quite understandable that there are many who are skeptical about the effects of his 『Bible Joseon』 on his times. However, after Korea was liberalized, 『Bible Joseon』 started being published several times and its value was recognized again. This is why 『Bible Joseon』 should be evaluated as a historic publication which has a unique position in the history of historiography of Korea.