When 2016 finished, dictionaries picked their “word of the year.” Oxford Dictionaries chose post-truth, an adjective defined as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”

Mainstream media would give you the impression that a post-truth phenomenon is merely a recent trend, based on the excesses of President Donald Trump and right-wing populism. But a historian or philosopher would give you a different story: Relativism has been around for millennia. More importantly, the idea that there is no absolute truth—“You can have your truth, and I’ll have mine”—has been the dominant idea in universities for decades.

Alan Bloom, a philosopher who taught at Cornell and Yale Universities, pointed out this rampant relativism in his 1987 magnum opus The Closing of the American Mind. “There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative,” Bloom wrote in his introduction.

Relativism, even while Professor Bloom taught, was the unquestioned basis for interpreting the world:

If this belief [of relativism] is put to the test, one can count on the students’ reaction: They will be uncomprehending. That anyone should regard the proposition as not self-evident astonishes them, as though he were calling into question 2 + 2 = 4. These are things you don’t think about. …That it is a moral issue for students is revealed by the character of their response when challenged—a combination of disbelief and indignation: “Are you an absolutist?,” the only alternative they know, uttered in the same tone as, “Are you a monarchist?” or “Do you really believe in witches?”

A vivid illustration of the nonsense and gullibility this philosophy produced was given in 1996, when a physicist named Alan Sokal decided to submit a paper to the “cultural studies” journal Social Text. Sokal’s paper is now one of the most famous examples of “fake-papers.”

For their special “Science Wars” edition, Social Text accepted Sokal’s paper, which has been described as a “word salad of solemn academic jargon.” Sokal titled his paper “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.” In it was contained “arguments” about how scientific laws were not objective and mathematics agreed with feminist theory.

The day the paper was published, Sokal revealed it was a hoax in American intellectual and literary magazine Lingua Franca. He described it as “a pastiche of left-wing cant, fawning references, grandiose quotations, and outright nonsense,” which was “structured around the silliest quotations he could find about mathematics and physics.”

“Anyone who believes that the laws of physics are mere social conventions,” Sokal wrote in Lingua Franca, “is invited to try transgressing those conventions from the windows of my apartment. (I live on the 21st floor.)”

It is in the intellectual environment where Alan Sokal could submit—and have accepted—a bogus paper that “post-truth” existed, rather than from a recent right-wing conspiracy.

Melanie Phillips, a brilliant journalist who parted from the “left” after decades of writing for their associated outlets, pushed the origin past the 1980s, back into the middle 20th century. “In fact, ‘post-truth’ culture,” Phillips wrote for the Times, was promoted “by the doctrine of postmodernism. This held that there was no such thing as objective truth, only a series of relative, subjective and competing narratives.”

Phillips traced the idea to its logical conclusion:

Evidence became merely a matter of opinion. It followed, moreover, that if there was no such thing as truth there could be no such thing as a lie. That was just an alternative narrative.

As you might be able to picture, when there is no such thing as truth, a post-truth world, as Oxford Dictionaries believes we have entered, is entirely plausible.

But you need to look further back than the 20th century to find the origins of post-truth. Going back nearly 2,000 years ago, we can recall the story of a Roman prefect discussing the nature of truth with a disruptive Jew. In modern terms, one might say it was a discussion between an absolutist and a relativist. As the conversation ended, the prefect—Pontius Pilate—asked his final question: “Τί ἐστιν ἀλήθεια?,” or, in English, “What is truth?”

Looking back another 1,000 years still, we can recall the story of the Israelite judge, Jephthah. In a scene which seems familiar to the modern reader, the nation of Israel was being attacked for supposedly unlawfully “occupying” the Ammonite’s territory. “Because Israel, on coming up from Egypt, took away my land,” the Ammonite king said, “now therefore restore it peaceably.” Jephthah had to explain to him the history: The land had not belonged to them when Israel took it. Unfortunately, “fake news” was ubiquitous even back then; because the war continued anyway.

The truth is, as long as man has lived, it has been a post-truth world.

In his search for the truth, the founder of the Plain Truth magazine, the Trumpet’s predecessor, Herbert W. Armstrong, took an absolutist approach. When he was challenged on some of his most foundational beliefs, he came “to the point,” as he wrote in his Autobiography, “where I wanted the truth!”

Finding the truth, for this man searching in the summer of 1924, meant “standing at the front entrance of the public library when its doors were opened” and leaving “at 9 p.m., closing time.” Most nights, he would continue to “study at home until my wife, at 1 a.m. or later, would waken from her sleep and urge me to break off and get to bed.”

The fruits of his search were that there was truth, and it could be found in the words of the Bible. But for Mr. Armstrong, it was not enough that those who agreed with him did so without proof, without searching for the evidence. Over 30 years after his initial search, he wrote:

Most believers in the Bible and in the existence of God have probably just grown up believing it, because they were reared in an atmosphere where it was believed. But perhaps few ever studied into it deeply enough to obtain irrefutable proof.

The same, he would continue, went for those who rejected the idea of an objective source of truth—the Bible. Truth was not easy to come by: not in the days where Pontius Pilate had his argument; not in the centuries where the Roman Empire made “Christianity” the state religion; not in the 15th century where the printing press broke the Catholic Church’s monopoly on education; and not now, in the Oxford Dictionaries’ post-truth world of instant communication.

That’s why Herbert W. Armstrong’s search is still as relevant as ever. When he wrote up some of his findings in 1958, they were both for those who agreed and disagreed. His booklet The Proof of the Bible was unashamedly against the relativism of its time. And that’s just one of the reasons, even after 50 years, it’s still worth reading.