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Historicity of the Bible

February 15, 2024

The historicity of the Bible is the question of the Bible's relationship to history—covering not just the Bible's acceptability as history but also the ability to understand the literary forms of biblical narrative.[1] One can extend biblical historicity to the evaluation of whether or not the Christian New Testament is an accurate record of the historical Jesus and of the Apostolic Age. This tends to vary depending upon the opinion of the scholar.

When studying the books of the Bible, scholars examine the historical context of passages, the importance ascribed to events by the authors, and the contrast between the descriptions of these events and other historical evidence. Being a collaborative work composed and redacted over the course of several centuries,[2] the historicity of the Bible is not consistent throughout the entirety of its contents.

According to theologian Thomas L. Thompson, a representative of the Copenhagen School, also known as "biblical minimalism", the archaeological record lends sparse and indirect evidence for the Old Testament's narratives as history.[3][4][5][6][7] Others, like archaeologist William G. Dever, felt that biblical archaeology has both confirmed and challenged the Old Testament stories.[8] While Dever has criticized the Copenhagen School for its more radical approach, he is far from being a biblical literalist, and thinks that the purpose of biblical archaeology is not to simply support or discredit the biblical narrative, but to be a field of study in its own right.[9][10]

Materials and methods edit

Manuscripts and canons edit

The Bible exists in multiple manuscripts, none of them an autograph, and multiple biblical canons, which do not completely agree on which books have sufficient authority to be included or their order. The early discussions about the exclusion or integration of various apocrypha involve an early idea about the historicity of the core.[11] The Ionian Enlightenment influenced early patrons like Justin Martyr and Tertullian—both saw the biblical texts as being different from (and having more historicity than) the myths of other religions. Augustine was aware of the difference between science and scripture and defended the historicity of the biblical texts, e.g., against claims of Faustus of Mileve.[12]

Historians hold that the Bible should not be treated differently from other historical (or literary) sources from the ancient world. One may compare doubts about the historicity of, for example, Herodotus; the consequence of these discussions is not that historians shall have to stop using ancient sources for historical reconstruction, but need to be aware of the problems involved when doing so.[13]

Very few texts survive directly from antiquity: most have been copied—some, many times. To determine the accuracy of a copied manuscript, textual critics examine the way the transcripts have passed through history to their extant forms. The higher the consistency of the earliest texts, the greater their textual reliability, and the less chance that the content has been changed over the years. Multiple copies may also be grouped into text types, with some types judged closer to the hypothetical original than others.

Writing and reading history edit

 
W.F. Albright, the doyen of biblical archaeology, in 1957

The meaning of the term "history" is itself dependent on social and historical context.[14] Paula McNutt, for instance, notes that the Old Testament narratives,

"Do not record 'history' in the sense that history is understood in the twentieth century. ...The past, for biblical writers as well as for twentieth-century readers of the Bible, has meaning only when it is considered in light of the present, and perhaps an idealized future."[15]

— Paula M. McNutt, Reconstructing the society of ancient Israel, page 4

Even from the earliest times, students of religious texts had an awareness that parts of the scriptures could not be interpreted as a strictly consistent sequence of events. The Talmud cites a dictum ascribed to the third-century teacher Abba Arika that "there is no chronological order in the Torah".[16] Examples were often presented and discussed in later Jewish exegesis with, according to Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–1972), an ongoing discourse between those who would follow the views of Rabbi Ishmael (born 90 CE) that "the Torah speaks in human language", compared to the more mystical approach of Rabbi Akiva (c. 50–135) that any such deviations should signpost some deeper order or purpose, to be divined.[17]

During the modern era, the focus of biblical history has also diversified. The project of biblical archaeology associated with W.F. Albright (1891–1971), which sought to validate the historicity of the events narrated in the Bible through the ancient texts and material remains of the Near East,[18] has a more specific focus compared to the more expansive view of history described by archaeologist William Dever (b. 1933). In discussing the role of his discipline in interpreting the biblical record, Dever has pointed to multiple histories within the Bible, including the history of theology (the relationship between God and believers), political history (usually the account of "Great Men"), narrative history (the chronology of events), intellectual history (treating ideas and their development, context and evolution), socio-cultural history (institutions, including their social underpinnings in family, clan, tribe and social class and the state), cultural history (overall cultural evolution, demography, socio-economic and political structure and ethnicity), technological history (the techniques by which humans adapt to, exploit and make use of the resources of their environment), natural history (how humans discover and adapt to the ecological facts of their natural environment), and material history (artifacts as correlates of changes in human behaviour).[19][20]

Sharply differing perspectives on the relationship between narrative history and theological meaning present a special challenge for assessing the historicity of the Bible. Supporters of biblical literalism "deny that Biblical infallibility and inerrancy are limited to spiritual, religious, or redemptive themes, exclusive of assertions in the fields of history and science. We further deny that scientific hypotheses about earth history may properly be used to overturn the teaching of Scripture on creation and the flood."[21] "History", or specifically biblical history, in this context appears to mean a definitive and finalized framework of events and actions—comfortingly familiar shared facts—like an omniscient medieval chronicle, shorn of alternative accounts,[22] psychological interpretations,[23] or literary pretensions. But prominent scholars have expressed diametrically opposing views:

[T]he stories about the promise given to the patriarchs in Genesis are not historical, nor do they intend to be historical; they are rather historically determined expressions about Israel and Israel's relationship to its God, given in forms legitimate to their time, and their truth lies not in their facticity, nor in the historicity, but their ability to express the reality that Israel experienced.[24]

Modern professional historians, familiar with the phenomenon of on-going historical revisionism, allow new findings and ideas into their interpretations of "what happened", and scholars versed in the study of texts (however sacred) see all narrators as potentially unreliable[25] and all accounts—especially edited accounts—as potentially historically incomplete, biased by times and circumstances.

Hebrew Bible/Old Testament edit

Authorship edit

Main article: Authorship of the Bible

A central pillar of the Bible's historical authority was the tradition that it had been composed by the principal actors or eyewitnesses to the events described—the Pentateuch was the work of Moses, the Book of Joshua was by Joshua, and so on. However, the Protestant Reformation had brought the actual texts to a much wider audience, which combined with the growing climate of intellectual ferment in the 17th century that was the start of the Age of Enlightenment. This threw a harsh, skeptical spotlight on these traditional claims. In Protestant England, the philosopher Thomas Hobbes in his major work Leviathan (1651) denied Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, and identified Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles as having been written long after the events they purported to describe. His conclusions rested on internal textual evidence, but in an argument that resonates with modern debates, he noted: "Who were the original writers of the several Books of Holy Scripture, has not been made evident by any sufficient testimony of other History, which is the only proof of matter of fact."[26][27]

 
Title page of Simon's Critical History, 1682.

The Jewish philosopher and pantheist Baruch Spinoza echoed Hobbes's doubts about the provenance of the historical books in his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (published in 1670),[28] and elaborated on the suggestion that the final redaction of these texts was post-exilic under the auspices of Ezra (Chapter IX). He had earlier been effectively excommunicated by the rabbinical council of Amsterdam for his perceived heresies. The French priest Richard Simon brought these critical perspectives to the Catholic tradition in 1678, observing "the most part of the Holy Scriptures that are come to us, are but Abridgments and as Summaries of ancient Acts which were kept in the Registries of the Hebrews," in what was probably the first work of biblical textual criticism in the modern sense.[29]

In response Jean Astruc, applying to the Pentateuch source criticism methods common in the analysis of classical secular texts, believed he could detect four different manuscript traditions, which he claimed Moses himself had redacted (p. 62–64).[30] His 1753 book initiated the school known as higher criticism that culminated in Julius Wellhausen formalising the documentary hypothesis in the 1870s,[31] which identifies these narratives as the Jahwist, Elohist, Deuteronomist, and the Priestly source. While versions of the documentary hypothesis vary in the order in which they were composed, the circumstances of their composition, and the date of their redaction(s), their shared terminology continues to provide the framework for modern theories on the composite nature and origins of the Torah.[32]

By the end of the 19th century the scholarly consensus was that the Pentateuch was the work of many authors writing from 1000 BCE (the time of David) to 500 BCE (the time of Ezra) and redacted c. 450, and as a consequence whatever history it contained was more often polemical than strictly factual—a conclusion reinforced by the then fresh scientific refutations of what were at the time widely classed as biblical mythologies.

Torah (Pentateuch) edit

Genesis creation narrative edit

 
The Garden of Eden. By Lucas Cranach der Ältere (1472–1553)
See also: Genesis creation narrative and Book of Genesis

There is a Christian tradition of criticism of the creation narratives in Genesis dating back to at least St Augustine of Hippo (354–430), and Jewish tradition has also maintained a critical thread in its approach to biblical primeval history. The influential medieval philosopher Maimonides maintained a skeptical ambiguity toward creation ex nihilo and considered the stories about Adam more as "philosophical anthropology, rather than as historical stories whose protagonist is the 'first man'."[33] Greek philosophers Aristotle,[34] Critolaus[35] and Proclus[36] held that the world was eternal. Such interpretations are inconsistent with what was after the Protestant Reformation to be "commonly perceived in evangelicalism as traditional views of Genesis".[37]

The publication of James Hutton's Theory of the Earth in 1788 was an important development in the scientific revolution that would dethrone Genesis as the ultimate authority on primeval earth and prehistory. The first casualty was the Creation story itself, and by the early 19th century "no responsible scientist contended for the literal credibility of the Mosaic account of creation."[38] The battle between uniformitarianism and catastrophism kept the flood alive in the emerging discipline, until Adam Sedgwick, the president of the Geological Society, publicly recanted his previous support in his 1831 presidential address:

We ought indeed to have paused before we first adopted the diluvian theory, and referred all our old superficial gravel to the action of the Mosaic Flood. For of man, and the works of his hands, we have not yet found a single trace among the remnants of the former world entombed in those deposits.[39]

All of which left the "first man" and his putative descendants in the awkward position of being stripped of all historical context, until Charles Darwin naturalized the Garden of Eden with the publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859. Public acceptance of this scientific revolution was, at the time, uneven, but has since grown significantly. The mainstream scholarly community soon arrived at a consensus, which holds today, that Genesis 1–11 is a highly schematic literary work representing theology/symbolic mythology rather than actual history or science.[30][page needed]

The Patriarchs edit

Main article: Patriarchs (Bible)

In the following decades Hermann Gunkel drew attention to the mythic aspects of the Pentateuch, and Albrecht Alt, Martin Noth and the tradition history school argued that although its core traditions had genuinely ancient roots, the narratives were fictional framing devices and were not intended as history in the modern sense. Though doubts have been cast on the historiographic reconstructions of this school (particularly the notion of oral traditions as a primary ancient source), much of its critique of biblical historicity found wide acceptance. Gunkel's position is that

if, however, we consider figures like Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob to be actual persons with no original mythic foundations, that does not at all mean that they are historical figures. ...For even if, as may well be assumed, there was once a man call "Abraham," everyone who knows the history of legends is sure that the legend is in no position at the distance of so many centuries to preserve a picture of the personal piety of Abraham. The "religion of Abraham" is, in reality, the religion of the legend narrators which they attribute to Abraham.[40]

— Gunkel, 1997, page xviii

This has in various forms become a commonplace of contemporary criticism.[41]

In the United States the biblical archaeology movement, under the influence of Albright, counterattacked, arguing that the broad outline within the framing narratives was also true, so that while scholars could not realistically expect to prove or disprove individual episodes from the life of Abraham and the other patriarchs, these were real individuals who could be placed in a context proven from the archaeological record. But as more discoveries were made, and anticipated finds failed to materialise, it became apparent that archaeology did not in fact support the claims made by Albright and his followers.

Following Albright's death, his interpretation of the patriarchal age came under increasing criticism: such dissatisfaction marked its culmination with the publication of The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives by Thomas L. Thompson[42] and Abraham in History and Tradition by John Van Seters.[43] Thompson, a literary scholar, argued on the lack of compelling evidence that the patriarchs lived in the 2nd millennium BCE, and noted how certain biblical texts reflected first millennium conditions and concerns, while Van Seters examined the patriarchal stories and argued that their names, social milieu, and messages strongly suggested that they were Iron Age creations.[44] Van Seter and Thompson's works were a paradigm shift in biblical scholarship and archaeology, which gradually led scholars to no longer consider the patriarchal narratives as historical.[45] Some conservative scholars attempted to defend the patriarchal narratives in the following years,[46][47] but this position has not found acceptance among scholars.[48][6]

Today, although there continues to be some debate on the historical background of the narratives, many scholars (possibly most) reject the existence of the Patriarchal age.[49] William Dever stated in 1993 that

[Albright's] central theses have all been overturned, partly by further advances in biblical criticism, but mostly by the continuing archaeological research of younger Americans and Israelis to whom he himself gave encouragement and momentum. ...The irony is that, in the long run, it will have been the newer "secular" archaeology that contributed the most to Biblical studies, not "Biblical archaeology".[50]

— William Dever, The Biblical Archaeologist, "What Remains of the House that Albright Built?", March 1993, pp. 25–35

The Exodus edit

Main articles: The Exodus, Sources and parallels of the Exodus, and Book of Exodus

Most mainstream scholars do not accept the biblical Exodus account as history for a number of reasons. It is generally agreed that the Exodus stories reached the current form centuries after the apparent setting of the stories.[51] The Book of Exodus itself attempts to ground the event firmly in history, dating the exodus to the 2666th year after creation (Exodus 12:40–41), the construction of the tabernacle to year 2667 (Exodus 40:1–2, 17), stating that the Israelites dwelled in Egypt for 430 years (Exodus 12:40–41), and including place names such as Goshen (Gen. 46:28), Pithom and Ramesses (Exod. 1:11), as well as stating that 600,000 Israelite men were involved (Exodus 12:37).[52] The Book of Numbers further states that the number of Israelites in the desert during the wandering were 603,550, including 22,273 first-borns, which modern estimates put at 2.5–3 million total Israelites, a clearly fanciful number that could never have been supported by the Sinai Desert.[53] The geography is vague with regions such as Goshen unidentified, and there are internal problems with dating in the Pentateuch.[54] No modern attempt to identify a historical Egyptian prototype for Moses has found wide acceptance, and no period in Egyptian history matches the biblical accounts of the Exodus.[55] Some elements of the story are miraculous and defy rational explanation, such as the Plagues of Egypt and the Crossing of the Red Sea.[56] The Bible also fails to mention the names of any of the pharaohs involved in the Exodus narrative.[57]

While ancient Egyptian texts from the New Kingdom mention "Asiatics" living in Egypt as slaves and workers, these people cannot be securely connected to the Israelites, and no contemporary Egyptian text mentions a large-scale exodus of slaves like that described in the Bible.[58] The earliest surviving historical mention of the Israelites, the Egyptian Merneptah Stele (c. 1207 BCE), appears to place them in or around Canaan and gives no indication of any exodus.[59]

Despite the absence of any archaeological evidence, a majority of scholars agree that the Exodus probably has some historical basis,[60][61] with Kenton Sparks referring to it as "mythologized history."[62] Scholars posit that small groups of people of Egyptian origin may have joined the early Israelites, and then contributed their own Egyptian Exodus story to all of Israel.[63] William G. Dever cautiously identifies this group with the Tribe of Joseph, while Richard Elliott Friedman identifies it with the Tribe of Levi.[64][65] Most scholars who accept a historical core of the exodus date this possible exodus group to the thirteenth century BCE at the time of Ramses II, with some instead dating it to the twelfth century BCE at the time of Ramses III.[60] Evidence in favor of historical traditions forming a background to the Exodus narrative include the documented movements of small groups of Ancient Semitic-speaking peoples into and out of Egypt during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Dynasties, some elements of Egyptian folklore and culture in the Exodus narrative,[66] and the names Moses, Aaron and Phinehas, which seem to have an Egyptian origin.[67] Scholarly estimates for how many people could have been involved in such an exodus range from a few hundred to a few thousand people.[60]

Deuteronomistic history edit

Main article: Deuteronomist

Many scholars believe that the Deuteronomistic history preserved elements of ancient texts and oral tradition, including geo-political and socio-economic realities and certain information about historical figures and events. However, large portions of it are legendary and it contains many anachronisms.[68]

The "conquest narrative" in Joshua and Judges edit

Main article: Book of Joshua

A major issue in the historicity debate was the narrative of the Israelite conquest of Canaan, described in Joshua and Judges. The American Albright school asserted that the biblical narrative of conquest would be affirmed by archaeological record; and indeed for much of the 20th century archaeology appeared to support the biblical narrative, including excavations at Beitin (identified as Bethel), Tel ed-Duweir, (identified as Lachish), Hazor, and Jericho.[69][70]

However, flaws in the conquest narrative appeared. The most high-profile example was the "fall of Jericho", excavated by John Garstang in the 1930s.[69] Garstang originally announced that he had found fallen walls dating to the time of the biblical Battle of Jericho, but later revised the destruction to a much earlier period.[70] Kathleen Kenyon dated the destruction of the walled city to the middle of the 16th century (c. 1550 BCE), too early to match the usual dating of the Exodus to Pharaoh Ramses, on the basis of her excavations in the early 1950s.[71] The same conclusion, based on an analysis of all the excavation findings, was reached by Piotr Bienkowski.[72] By the 1960s it had become clear that the archaeological record did not, in fact, support the account of the conquest given in Joshua: the cities which the Bible records as having been destroyed by the Israelites were either uninhabited at the time, or, if destroyed, were destroyed at widely different times, not in one brief period.[69]

The consensus for the conquest narrative was eventually abandoned in the late 20th century.[69]

Peake's Commentary on the Bible argues that the Book of Joshua conflates several independent battles between disparate groups over the centuries, and artificially attributes them to a single leader, Joshua.[73] However, there are a few cases where the biblical record is not contradicted by the archaeological record. For example, stratum[which?] in Tel Hazor, found in a destruction layer from around 1200 BCE, shows signs of catastrophic fire, and cuneiform tablets found at the site refer to monarchs named Ibni Addi, where Ibni may be the etymological origin of Yavin (Jabin), the Canaanite leader referred to in the Hebrew Bible.[74][75] The city also shows signs of having been a magnificent Canaanite city prior to its destruction, with great temples and opulent palaces,[75] split into an upper acropolis and lower city; the town evidently had been a major Canaanite city. Israel Finkelstein theorized that the destruction of Hazor was the result of civil strife, attacks by the Sea Peoples, and/or a result of the general collapse of civilization across the whole eastern Mediterranean in the Late Bronze Age, rather than being caused by the Israelites.[75]

Amnon Ben-Tor (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) believes that recently unearthed evidence of violent destruction by burning verifies the biblical account.[76] In 2012, a team led by Ben-Tor and Sharon Zuckerman discovered a scorched palace from the 13th century BC in whose storerooms they found 3,400-year-old ewers holding burned crops; however, Sharon Zuckerman did not agree with Ben-Tor's theory, and claimed that the burning was the result of the city's numerous factions opposing each other with excessive force.[77] Biblical scholar Richard Elliot Friedman (University of Georgia) argues that the Israelites did destroy Hazor, but that such destruction fits better with the account of the Book of Judges, in which the prophetess Deborah defeats the king of Hazor.[78]

Books of Samuel edit

Main article: Books of Samuel

The Books of Samuel are considered to be based on both historical and legendary sources, primarily serving to fill the gap in Israelite history after the events described in Deuteronomy. According to Donald Redford, the Books of Samuel exhibit too many anachronisms to have been compiled in the 11th century BCE.[79] For example, there is mention of later armor (1 Samuel 17:4–7, 38–39; 25:13), use of camels (1 Samuel 30:17), and cavalry (as distinct from chariotry; 1 Samuel 13:5, 2 Samuel 1:6), iron picks and axes (as though they were common; 2 Samuel 12:31), and sophisticated siege techniques (2 Samuel 20:15). There is a gargantuan troop called up (2 Samuel 17:1), a battle with 20,000 casualties (2 Samuel 18:7), and a reference to Kushite paramilitary and servants, clearly giving evidence of a date in which Kushites were common, after the 26th Dynasty of Egypt, the period of the last quarter of the 8th century BCE.[79] Alan Millard argues that those elements of the Biblical narrative are not anachronistic.[80][81]

United Monarchy edit

Main article: Kingdom of Israel (united monarchy)

Much of the focus of modern criticism has been the historicity of the United Monarchy of Israel, which according to the Hebrew Bible ruled over both Judea and Samaria around the 10th century BCE.

Thomas L. Thompson, a minimalist scholar, for example, has written:

There is no evidence of a United Monarchy, no evidence of a capital in Jerusalem or of any coherent, unified political force that dominated western Palestine, let alone an empire of the size the legends describe. We do not have evidence for the existence of kings named Saul, David or Solomon; nor do we have evidence for any temple at Jerusalem in this early period. What we do know of Israel and Judah of the tenth century does not allow us to interpret this lack of evidence as a gap in our knowledge and information about the past, a result merely of the accidental nature of archeology. There is neither room nor context, no artifact or archive that points to such historical realities in Palestine's tenth century. One cannot speak historically of a state without a population. Nor can one speak of a capital without a town. Stories are not enough.

— [82]

In Iron Age IIa (corresponding to the Monarchal period) Judah seems to have been limited to small, mostly rural and unfortified settlements in the Judean hills.[68] This contrasts to the upper Samaria which was becoming urbanized. This archaeological evidence as well as textual criticism has led many modern historians to treat Israel/Samaria and Judah as arising separately as distinct albeit related entities centered at Shechem and Jerusalem, respectively, and not as a united kingdom with a capital in Jerusalem.

Excavations at Khirbet Qeiyafa, an Iron Age site located in Judah, support the biblical account of a United Monarchy. The Israel Antiquities Authority stated: "The excavations at Khirbat Qeiyafa clearly reveal an urban society that existed in Judah already in the late eleventh century BCE. It can no longer be argued that the Kingdom of Judah developed only in the late eighth century BCE or at some other later date."[83]

The status of Jerusalem in the 10th century BCE is a major subject of debate.[68] The oldest part of Jerusalem and its original urban core is the City of David, which does show evidence of significant Judean residential activity around the 10th century.[84] Some unique administrative structures such as the Stepped Stone Structure and the Large Stone Structure, which originally formed one structure, contain material culture dated to Iron I.[68] On account of the alleged lack of settlement activity in the 10th century BCE, Israel Finkelstein argues that Jerusalem in the century was a small country village in the Judean hills, not a national capital, and Ussishkin argues that the city was entirely uninhabited. Amihai Mazar contends that if the Iron I/Iron IIa dating of administrative structures in the City of David are correct (as he believes), "Jerusalem was a rather small town with a mighty citadel, which could have been a center of a substantial regional polity."[68]

It has been argued that recent archaeological discoveries at the City of David and the Ophel seem to indicate that Jerusalem was sufficiently developed as a city to be the capital of the United Monarchy in the 10th century BCE.[85]

Since the discovery of the Tel Dan Stele dated to the 9th or 8th century BCE containing bytdwd, interpreted by many as a reference to the "House of David" as a monarchic dynasty in Judah[86][87] (another possible reference occurs in the Mesha Stele),[88] the majority of scholars accept the existence of a polity ruled by David and Solomon, albeit on a more modest scale than described in the Bible. Most scholars believe that David and Solomon reigned over large sections of Cisjordan and probably parts of Transjordan.[89] William G. Dever argues that David only reigned over the current territories of Israel and West Bank and that he did defeat the invading Philistines, but that the other conquests are fictitious.[90]

New Testament edit

Historicity of Jesus edit

Main articles: Historicity of Jesus and Split of early Christianity and Judaism

The majority of modern scholars of antiquity agree that Jesus existed historically, that he was baptized by John the Baptist and crucified by order of Roman prefect Pontius Pilate.[a] The "quest for the historical Jesus" began as early as the 18th century, and has continued to this day. The most notable recent scholarship came in the 1980s and 1990s, with the work of J. D. Crossan,[98] James D. G. Dunn,[99] John P. Meier,[100] E. P. Sanders[101] and N. T. Wright[102] being the most widely read and discussed. Other works on the matter were published by Dale Allison,[103] Bart D. Ehrman,[104] Richard Bauckham[105] and Maurice Casey.[106]

The earliest New Testament texts which refer to Jesus, the Pauline epistles, are usually dated in the 50s CE. Since Paul records very little of Jesus' life and activities, these are of little help in determining facts about the life of Jesus, although they may contain references to information given to Paul from the eyewitnesses of Jesus.[107]

The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls has shed light into the context of 1st century Judea, noting the diversity of Jewish belief as well as shared expectations and teachings. For example, the expectation of the coming messiah, the beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount and much else of the early Christian movement are found to have existed within apocalyptic Judaism of the period.[108] This has had the effect of centering Early Christianity much more within its Jewish roots than was previously the case. It is now recognised that Rabbinic Judaism and Early Christianity are only two of the many strands which survived until the Jewish revolt of 66 to 70 CE.[109][110]

Most historical critics agree that a historical figure named Jesus taught throughout the Galilean countryside c. 30 CE, was believed by his followers to have performed supernatural acts, and was sentenced to death by the Romans, possibly for insurrection.[111]

Historicity of the Gospels edit

Main article: Historical reliability of the Gospels

Most modern scholars hold that the canonical gospel accounts were written between 70 and 100,[112] four to eight decades after the crucifixion, although based on earlier traditions and texts, such as "Q", Logia or sayings gospels, the passion account or other earlier literature (See List of Gospels). Some scholars argue that these accounts were compiled by witnesses[105][113] although this view is disputed by other scholars.[114]

Some scholars believe that the Gospel of Mark shows signs of a lack of knowledge of geographical, political and religious matters in Judea in the time of Jesus. Thus, today the most common opinion is that the author is unknown and both geographically and historically at a distance from the narrated events;[115][page needed][116][117] however, opinion varies, and scholars such as Craig Blomberg accept the more traditional view.[118] The use of expressions that may be described as awkward and rustic cause the Gospel of Mark to appear somewhat unlettered or even crude.[119] This may be attributed to the influence that Saint Peter, a fisherman, is suggested to have on the writing of Mark.[120] It is commonly thought that the writers of the Gospel of Matthew and Gospel of Luke used Mark as a source, with changes and improvement to peculiarities and crudities in Mark.[119]

Historicity of Acts edit

Main article: Historical reliability of the Acts of the Apostles

Archaeological inscriptions and other independent sources show that Acts contains some accurate details of 1st century society with regard to titles of officials, administrative divisions, town assemblies, and rules of the Jewish temple in Jerusalem. However, the historicity of the depiction of Paul the Apostle in Acts is contested. Acts describes Paul differently from how Paul describes himself, both factually and theologically.[121] Acts differs from Paul's letters on important issues, such as the Law, Paul's own apostleship, and his relation to the Jerusalem church.[121] Scholars generally prefer Paul's account over that in Acts.[122]: 316 [123]: 10 

Schools of archaeological and historical thought edit

Overview of academic views edit

Further information: Dating the Bible

According to Spencer Mizen of BBC History Magazine, "The origins of the Bible are still cloaked in mystery. When was it written? Who wrote it? And how reliable is it as an historical record?"[124]

An educated reading of the biblical text requires knowledge of when it was written, by whom, and for what purpose. For example, many academics would agree that the Pentateuch was in existence some time shortly after the 6th century BCE, but they disagree about when it was written. Proposed dates vary from the 15th century BCE to the 6th century BCE. One popular hypothesis points to the reign of Josiah (7th century BCE). In this hypothesis, the events of, for example, Exodus would have happened centuries before they were finally edited.[citation needed]

The documentary hypothesis claims, using the biblical evidence itself, to demonstrate that the current version of the Bible is based on older written sources that are lost. It has been modified heavily over the years, and some scholars accept some form of this hypothesis. There have also been and are a number of scholars who reject it, for example Egyptologist Kenneth Kitchen[125] and Old Testament scholar Walter Kaiser, Jr.,[126] as well as R. N. Whybray, Umberto Cassuto, O. T. Allis, Gleason Archer, John Sailhamer,[127] Bruce Waltke,[128] and Joshua Berman.[129]

Maximalist–minimalist dichotomy edit

There is great scholarly controversy on the historicity of events recounted in the biblical narratives prior to the Babylonian captivity in the 6th century BCE. There is a split between scholars who reject the biblical account of Ancient Israel as fundamentally ahistorical, and those who accept it as a largely reliable source of history—termed biblical minimalists and biblical maximalists, respectively. The major split of biblical scholarship into two opposing schools is strongly disapproved by non-fundamentalist biblical scholars, as being an attempt by conservative Christians to portray the field as a bipolar argument, of which only one side is correct.[130]

Recently the difference between the Maximalist and Minimalist has reduced, and a new school started with a work, The Quest for the Historical Israel: Debating Archaeology and the History of Early Israel by Israel Finkelstein, Amihai Mazar, and Brian B. Schmidt.[131] This school argues that post-processual archaeology enables us to recognize the existence of a middle ground between minimalism and maximalism, and that both these extremes need to be rejected. Archaeology offers both confirmation of parts of the biblical record and also poses challenges to the interpretations made by some. The careful examination of the evidence demonstrates that the historical accuracy of the first part of the Old Testament is greatest during the reign of Josiah. Some feel that the accuracy diminishes the further backwards one proceeds from this date. This, they claim, would confirm that a major redaction of the texts seems to have occurred at about that date.[citation needed]

Biblical minimalism edit

Further information: Biblical minimalism

The viewpoint sometimes called biblical minimalism generally holds that the Bible is principally a theological and apologetic work, and all stories within it are of an aetiological character.[citation needed] The early stories are held to have a historical basis that was reconstructed centuries later, and the stories possess at most only a few tiny fragments of genuine historical memory, which by their definition are only those points which are supported by archaeological discoveries. In this view, all of the stories about the biblical patriarchs are fictional, and the patriarchs mere legendary eponyms to describe later historical realities. Further, biblical minimalists hold that the twelve tribes of Israel were a later construction, the stories of King David and King Saul were modeled upon later Irano-Hellenistic examples, and that there is no archaeological evidence that the united Kingdom of Israel—where the Bible says that David and Solomon ruled over an empire from the Euphrates to Eilath—ever existed. Archaeological evidence suggesting otherwise, such as the Mesha Stele, is often rejected as allegorical.[citation needed]

It is hard to pinpoint when the movement started but 1968 seems to be a reasonable date. During this year, two prize-winning essays were written in Copenhagen; one by Niels Peter Lemche, the other by Heike Friis, which advocated a complete rethinking of the way we approach the Bible and attempt to draw historical conclusions from it.[132]

In published books, one of the early advocates of the current school of thought known as biblical minimalism is Giovanni Garbini, Storia e ideologia nell'Israele antico (1986), translated into English as History and Ideology in Ancient Israel (1988).[133] In his footsteps followed Thomas L. Thompson with his lengthy Early History of the Israelite People: From the Written & Archaeological Sources (1992) and,[134] building explicitly on Thompson's book, P. R. Davies' shorter work, In Search of 'Ancient Israel' (1992).[135] In the latter, Davies finds historical Israel only in archaeological remains, biblical Israel only in scripture, and recent reconstructions of "ancient Israel" to be an unacceptable amalgam of the two. Thompson and Davies see the entire Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) as the imaginative creation of a small community of Jews at Jerusalem during the period which the Bible assigns to after the return from the Babylonian exile, from 539 BCE onward. Niels Peter Lemche, Thompson's fellow faculty member at the University of Copenhagen, also followed with several titles that show Thompson's influence, including The Israelites in history and tradition (1998). The presence of both Thompson and Lemche at the same institution has led to the use of the term "Copenhagen school". The effect of biblical minimalism from 1992 onward was debate with more than two points of view.[136][137][138]

Biblical maximalism edit

Main article: Biblical maximalism

There is great scholarly controversy on the historicity particularly of those events recounted in the biblical narratives prior to the Babylonian captivity in the 6th century BCE. Regarding the debate over the historicity of ancient Israel, the maximalist position holds that the accounts of the United Monarchy and the early kings of Israel, David and Saul, are to be taken as largely historical.[139]

Decreasing conflict edit

In 2001, Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman published The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts which advocated a view midway toward biblical minimalism and caused an uproar among many conservatives.[140] In the 25th anniversary issue of Biblical Archaeology Review (March/April 2001 edition), editor Hershel Shanks quoted several biblical scholars who insisted that minimalism was dying,[141] although leading minimalists deny this and a claim has been made "We are all minimalists now" (an allusion to "We are all Keynesians now").[142]

Apart from the well-funded (and fundamentalist) "biblical archaeologists," we are in fact nearly all "minimalists" now.

— Philip Davies.[143]

The fact is that we are all minimalists—at least, when it comes to the patriarchal period and the settlement. When I began my PhD studies more than three decades ago in the USA, the "substantial historicity" of the patriarchs was widely accepted as was the unified conquest of the land. These days it is quite difficult to find anyone who takes this view. In fact, until recently I could find no 'maximalist' history of Israel since Wellhausen. ...In fact, though, "maximalist" has been widely defined as someone who accepts the biblical text unless it can be proven wrong. If so, very few are willing to operate like this, not even John Bright (1980) whose history is not a maximalist one according to the definition just given.

— Lester L. Grabbe.[144], pages 57–58

However, other more mainstream scholars have rejected these claims:

The skeptical approaches peaked in the 1990s, with the emergence of the minimalist school which attempted to deny the Bible any relevance for the study of the Iron Age, but this extreme approach was rejected by mainstream scholarship.

— Avraham Faust.[145], page 79

In 2003, Kenneth Kitchen, a scholar who adopts a more maximalist point of view, authored the book On the Reliability of the Old Testament. Kitchen advocated the reliability of many (although not all) parts of the Torah and in no uncertain terms criticizes the work of Finkelstein and Silberman.[146]

Jennifer Wallace describes archaeologist Israel Finkelstein's view in her article "Shifting Ground in the Holy Land", appearing in Smithsonian Magazine, May 2006:

He (Israel Finkelstein) cites the fact—now accepted by most archaeologists—that many of the cities Joshua is supposed to have sacked in the late 13th century B.C. had ceased to exist by that time. Hazor was destroyed in the middle of that century, Ai was abandoned before 2000 B.C. Even Jericho (Tell es-Sultan), where Joshua is said to have brought the walls tumbling down by circling the city seven times with blaring trumpets, was destroyed in 1500 B.C. Now controlled by the Palestinian Authority, the Jericho site consists of crumbling pits and trenches that testify to a century of fruitless digging.[147]

— Wallace

However, despite problems with the archaeological record, some maximalists place Joshua in the mid-second millennium, at about the time the Egyptian Empire came to rule over Canaan, and not the 13th century as Finkelstein or Kitchen claim, and view the destruction layers of the period as corroboration of the biblical account. The destruction of Hazor in the mid-13th century is seen as corroboration of the biblical account of the later destruction carried out by Deborah and Barak as recorded in the Book of Judges. The location that Finkelstein refers to as "Ai" is generally dismissed as the location of the biblical Ai, since it was destroyed and buried in the 3rd millennium. The prominent site has been known by that name since at least Hellenistic times, if not before. Minimalists all hold that dating these events as contemporary are etiological explanations written centuries after the events they claim to report.

Both Finkelstein and Silberman do accept that David and Solomon were really existing persons (not kings but bandit leaders or hill country chieftains)[148][149] from Judah about the 10th century BCE,[150] but they do not assume that there was such a thing as United Monarchy with a capital in Jerusalem.

The Bible reports that Jehoshaphat, a contemporary of Ahab, offered manpower and horses for the northern kingdom's wars against the Arameans. He strengthened his relationship with the northern kingdom by arranging a diplomatic marriage: the Israelite princess Athaliah, sister or daughter of King Ahab, married Jehoram, the son of Jehoshaphat (2 Kings 8:18). The house of David in Jerusalem was now directly linked to (and apparently dominated by) the Israelite royalty of Samaria. In fact, we might suggest that this represented the north's takeover by marriage of Judah. Thus in the ninth century BCE—nearly a century after the presumed time of David—we can finally point to the historical existence of a great united monarchy of Israel, stretching from Dan in the north to Beer-sheba in the south, with significant conquered territories in Syria and Transjordan. But this united monarchy—a real united monarchy—was ruled by the Omrides, not the Davidides, and its capital was Samaria, not Jerusalem.

— Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman[151], page 103

Others, such as David Ussishkin, argue that those who follow the biblical depiction of a United Monarchy do so on the basis of limited evidence while hoping to uncover real archaeological proof in the future.[152] Gunnar Lehmann suggests that there is still a possibility that David and Solomon were able to become local chieftains of some importance and claims that Jerusalem at the time was at best a small town in a sparsely populated area in which alliances of tribal kinship groups formed the basis of society. He goes on further to claim that it was at best a small regional centre, one of three to four in the territory of Judah and neither David nor Solomon had the manpower or the requisite social/political/administrative structure to rule the kind of empire described in the Bible.[153]

These views are strongly criticized by William G. Dever,[154] Helga Weippert, Amihai Mazar and Amnon Ben-Tor.

André Lemaire states in Ancient Israel: From Abraham to the Roman Destruction of the Temple[155] that the principal points of the biblical tradition with Solomon are generally trustworthy. Kenneth Kitchen shares this view, arguing that Solomon ruled over a comparatively wealthy "mini-empire", rather than a small city-state.

Recently, Finkelstein has joined with the more conservative Amihai Mazar to explore the areas of agreement and disagreement and there are signs the intensity of the debate between the so-called minimalist and maximalist scholars is diminishing.[131] This view is also taken by Richard S. Hess,[156] which shows there is in fact a plurality of views between maximalists and minimalists. Jack Cargill[157] has shown that popular textbooks not only fail to give readers up-to-date archaeological evidence, but that they also fail to correctly represent the diversity of views present on the subject. Megan Bishop Moore and Brad E. Kelle provide an overview of the respective evolving approaches and attendant controversies, especially during the period from the mid-1980s through 2011, in their book Biblical History and Israel's Past.[158]

See also edit

Notes edit

  1. ^ In a 2011 review of the state of modern scholarship, Bart Ehrman wrote, "He certainly existed, as virtually every competent scholar of antiquity, Christian or non-Christian, agrees".[91] Richard A. Burridge states: "There are those who argue that Jesus is a figment of the Church's imagination, that there never was a Jesus at all. I have to say that I do not know any respectable critical scholar who says that any more".[92] Robert M. Price does not believe that Jesus existed, but agrees that this perspective runs against the views of the majority of scholars.[93] James D. G. Dunn calls the theories of Jesus' non-existence "a thoroughly dead thesis".[94] Michael Grant (a classicist) wrote in 1977, "In recent years, 'no serious scholar has ventured to postulate the non historicity of Jesus' or at any rate very few, and they have not succeeded in disposing of the much stronger, indeed very abundant, evidence to the contrary".[95] Robert E. Van Voorst states that biblical scholars and classical historians regard theories of non-existence of Jesus as effectively refuted.[96] Writing on The Daily Beast, Candida Moss and Joel Baden state that "there is nigh universal consensus among biblical scholars - the authentic ones, at least - that Jesus was, in fact, a real guy"[97]

References edit

Citations edit

  1. ^ Thompson 2014, p. 164.
  2. ^ Greifenhagen, Franz V. (2003). Egypt on the Pentateuch's Ideological Map. Bloomsbury. p. 206. ISBN 978-0-567-39136-0.
  3. ^ Enns 2013: "Biblical archaeology has helped us understand a lot about the world of the Bible and clarified a considerable amount of what we find in the Bible. But the archaeological record has not been friendly for one vital issue, Israel's origins: the period of slavery in Egypt, the mass departure of Israelite slaves from Egypt, and the violent conquest of the land of Canaan by the Israelites. The strong consensus is that there is at best sparse indirect evidence for these biblical episodes, and for the conquest there is considerable evidence against it."
  4. ^ Davies, Philip (April 2010). "Beyond Labels: What Comes Next?". The Bible and Interpretation. Retrieved 2016-05-31. It has been accepted for decades that the Bible is not in principle either historically reliable or unreliable, but both: it contains both memories of real events and also fictions.
  5. ^ Golden 2009, p. 275: "So although much of the archaeological evidence demonstrates that the Hebrew Bible cannot in most cases be taken literally, many of the people, places and things probably did exist at some time or another."
  6. ^ a b Grabbe 2007: "The fact is that we are all minimalists—at least, when it comes to the patriarchal period and the settlement. When I began my PhD studies more than three decades ago in the USA, the 'substantial historicity' of the patriarchs was widely accepted as was the unified conquest of the land. These days it is quite difficult to find anyone who takes this view.

    "In fact, until recently I could find no 'maximalist' history of Israel since Wellhausen. ... In fact, though, 'maximalist' has been widely defined as someone who accepts the biblical text unless it can be proven wrong. If so, very few are willing to operate like this, not even John Bright (1980) whose history is not a maximalist one according to the definition just given."
  7. ^ Nur Masalha (20 October 2014). The Zionist Bible: Biblical Precedent, Colonialism and the Erasure of Memory. Routledge. p. 228. ISBN 978-1-317-54465-4. critical archaeology—which has become an independent professional discipline with its own conclusions and its observations—presents us with a picture of a reality of ancient Palestine completely different from the one that is described in the Hebrew Bible; Holy Land archaeology is no longer using the Hebrew Bible as a reference point or an historical source; the traditional biblical archaeology is no longer the ruling paradigm in Holy Land archaeology; for the critical archaeologists the Bible is read like other ancient texts: as literature which may contain historical information (Herzog, 2001: 72–93; 1999: 6–8).
  8. ^ Dever, William G. (March–April 2006). "The Western Cultural Tradition Is at Risk". Biblical Archaeology Review. 32 (2): 26 & 76. "Archaeology as it is practiced today must be able to challenge, as well as confirm, the Bible stories. Some things described there really did happen, but others did not. The biblical narratives about Abraham, Moses, Joshua and Solomon probably reflect some historical memories of people and places, but the "larger than life" portraits of the Bible are unrealistic and contradicted by the archaeological evidence."
  9. ^ William G. Dever (1992). "Archeology". In David Noel Freedman (ed.). The Anchor Bible dictionary. Doubleday. p. 358. ISBN 978-0-385-19361-0.
  10. ^ J.K. Hoffmeier (2015). Thomas E. Levy; Thomas Schneider; William H.C. Propp (eds.). Israel's Exodus in Transdisciplinary Perspective: Text, Archaeology, Culture, and Geoscience. Springer. p. 200. ISBN 978-3-319-04768-3.
  11. ^ Grosse, Sven (2011). Theologie des Kanons: der christliche Kanon, seine Hermeneutik und die Historizität seiner Aussagen; die Lehren der Kirchenväter als Grundlegung der Lehre von der Heiligen Schrift (in German). LIT Verlag Münster. pp. 91–92. ISBN 978-3643800787.
  12. ^ Grosse, Sven (2011). Theologie des Kanons: der christliche Kanon, seine Hermeneutik und die Historizität seiner Aussagen; die Lehren der Kirchenväter als Grundlegung der Lehre von der Heiligen Schrift (in German). LIT Verlag Münster. p. 94. ISBN 978-3643800787. One does not read in the Gospel that the Lord said: "I will send you the Paraclete who will teach you about the course of the sun and moon." For He willed to make them Christians, not mathematicians. (Translation of the German Quote according to wikiquote)
  13. ^ Barstad, Hans M. (2008). History and the Hebrew Bible: Studies in Ancient Israelite and Ancient Near Eastern Historiography. Mohr Siebeck. pp. 40–42. ISBN 978-3161498091.
  14. ^ Compare Herodotus and Ranke.
  15. ^ McNutt, Paula M. (1999). Reconstructing the society of ancient Israel. London: SPCK. p. 4. ISBN 978-0281052592.
  16. ^ "JCR - The Babylonian Talmud, Pesachim". juchre.org. Retrieved 2023-05-11.
  17. ^ Heschel, Abraham Joshua (2005-01-01). Heavenly Torah: As Refracted Through the Generations. A&C Black. ISBN 978-0-8264-0802-0.
  18. ^ Albright, William Foxwell (1985). Archaeology of Palestine. Peter Smith Pub Inc. p. 128. ISBN 978-0844600031. Discovery after discovery has established the accuracy of innumerable details of the Bible as a source of history.
  19. ^ Dever, William G. (2008), "Did God Have a Wife?: Archaeology and Folk Religion in Ancient Israel" (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company)
  20. ^ Ingram, Thomas C. (2019). "Ecological Facts About The Bible". funfactoday.com. Retrieved 2020-03-19.
  21. ^ Henry, Carl Ferdinand Howard (1999) [1979]. . God, Revelation and Authority. Vol. 4. Wheaton, Ill: Crossway Books. pp. 211–219. ISBN 978-1581340563. Archived from the original on 2006-11-15.
  22. ^ Note the varying creation accounts of Genesis 1 versus Genesis 2.
  23. ^ "And it repented the LORD that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart." – Genesis 6:6.
  24. ^ Thompson, Thomas (2002) [1974]. The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives: The Quest for the Historical Abraham. Valley Forge, Pa: Trinity Press International. ISBN 978-1563383892.
  25. ^ Jaeger, Stephan (2015). "Unreliable Narration in Historical Studies". In Nünning, Vera (ed.). Unreliable Narration and Trustworthiness: Intermedial and Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Naratologia. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. ISBN 9783110408416. Retrieved 8 July 2020. [...] witnesses' narratives or the sources in general could be unreliable. This locates unreliable narration on the axis of primary narration which the historian needs to verify and make reliable through source criticism and interpretation in order to balance the subjective, objective, and reflexive orientations of meaning.
  26. ^ Hobbes, Thomas (1651). "Chapter XXXIII. Of the number, antiquity, scope, authority and interpreters of the books of Holy Scripture". Leviathan. Green Dragon in St. Paul's Churchyard: Andrew Crooke.
  27. ^ Driver 1911, p. 861, para 2, "Hobbes".
  28. ^ Spinoza, Baruch (1670). "Chapter VIII. Of the authorship of the Pentateuch and the other historical books of the Old Testament". A Theologico-Political Treatise (Part II).
  29. ^ Simon, Richard (1682). A critical history of the Old Testament. London: Walter Davis. p. 21.
  30. ^ a b Wenham, Gordon J. (2003). "Genesis 1–11". Exploring the Old Testament: A Guide to the Pentateuch. Downers Grove, Ill: InterVarsity Press. ISBN 978-0830825516.
  31. ^ Wellhausen, Julius (1885). Prolegomena to the History of Israel. Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black.
  32. ^ Wenham, Gordon (1996). "Pentateuchal Studies Today". Themelios. 22 (1): 3–13.
  33. ^ Klein-Braslavy, Sara (1986). "The Creation of the world and Maimonides' interpretation of Gen. i–v". In Pines, S.; Yovel, Y. (eds.). Maimonides and Philosophy (International Archives of the History of Ideas / Archives internationales d'histoire des idées). Berlin: Springer. pp. 65–78. ISBN 978-9024734399.
  34. ^ Physics I, 7
  35. ^ Dorandi 1999, p. 50.
  36. ^ Lang 2001, p. 2.
  37. ^ Young 1988, pp. 42–45: "But someone may ask: 'Is not Scripture opposed to those who hold that heaven is spherical, when it says, who stretches out heaven like a skin?' Let it be opposed indeed if their statement is false.... But if they are able to establish their doctrine with proofs that cannot be denied, we must show that this statement of Scripture about the skin is not opposed to the truth of their conclusions."
  38. ^ Gillispie, Charles Coulston (1996) [1951]. Genesis and geology: a study in the relations of scientific thought, natural theology, and social opinion in Great Britain, 1790–1850. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. p. 224. ISBN 978-0674344815.
  39. ^ Quoted in Gillispie, Charles Coulston (1996) [1951]. Genesis and geology: a study in the relations of scientific thought, natural theology, and social opinion in Great Britain, 1790–1850. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. pp. 142–143. ISBN 978-0674344815.
  40. ^ Gunkel 1997, p. lxviii.
  41. ^ Moore & Kelle 2011, p. 62:

    BIBLICAL HISTORY AND ISRAEL'S PAST The Changing Views of Scholars in Their Own Words

    The dramatic shifts in the study of the patriarchs and matriarchs that occurred during and after the 1970s can be illustrated by quotations from two works on the history of Israel separated by several decades. In a history originally written in the 1950s, John Bright asserted, "Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were clan chiefs who actually lived in the second millennium B.C.... The Bible's narrative accurately reflects the times to which it refers. But to what it tells of the lives of the patriarchs we can add nothing."1 Assessing the situation in scholarship four decades later, William Dever in 2001 concluded, "After a century of exhaustive investigation, all respectable archaeologists have given up hope of recovering any context that would make Abraham, Isaac, or Jacob credible 'historical figures.'"2

    1. John Bright, A History of Israel, 4th ed. (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2000), p. 93.

    2. William G. Dever, What Did the Biblical Writers Know, and When Did They Know It? What Archaeology Can Tell Us about the Reality of Ancient Israel (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001), p. 98.

    ... historical figures but as literary creations of this later period. Though the evidentiary underpinnings of this thesis were new, the thesis itself was quite similar to the views held by Alt and Noth. Thompson, Van Seters, and others had shown that the earlier scholarly consensus of a second-millennium date for the traditions depended upon coincidences and harmonization of evidence that could not be sustained. Thompson provided one of the most representative statements of this change in the study of Israel's past: "[N]ot only has 'archaeology' not proven a single event of the patriarchal traditions to be historical, it has not shown any of the traditions to be likely. On the basis of what we know of Palestinian history of the Second Millennium B.C., and of what we understand about the formation of the literary traditions of Genesis, it must be concluded that any such historicity as is commonly spoken of in both scholarly and popular works about the patriarchs of Genesis is hardly possible and totally improbable".
  42. ^ Thompson, Thomas L. (1974). The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives: The Quest for the Historical Abraham. Text. Gruyter, Walter de, & Company. ISBN 9783110040968.
  43. ^ Seters, John Van (1975). Abraham in History and Tradition. Echo Point Books and Media. ISBN 978-1-62654-910-4.
  44. ^ Moore & Kelle 2011, pp. 18–19.
  45. ^ Moorey, Peter Roger Stuart (1991-01-01). A Century of Biblical Archaeology. Westminster John Knox Press. ISBN 978-0-664-25392-9.
  46. ^ Kitchen, Kenneth (1995). "The Patriarchal Age: Myth or History?". Biblical Archaeology Review. Retrieved 2021-07-12.
  47. ^ Kitchen 2003, p. 313.
  48. ^ Dever 2001, p. 98: "There are a few sporadic attempts by conservative scholars to "save" the patriarchal narratives as history, such as Kenneth Kitchen [...] By and large, however, the minimalist view of Thompson's pioneering work, The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives, prevails."
  49. ^ Faust 2022, pp. 69, 71–72.
  50. ^ Dever, William (March 1993). "What Remains of the House that Albright Built?". The Biblical Archaeologist. 56 (1): 25–35. doi:10.2307/3210358. JSTOR 3210358. S2CID 166003641.
  51. ^ Moore & Kelle 2011, p. 81.
  52. ^ Dozeman & Shectman 2016, pp. 138–139.
  53. ^ Dever 2003, pp. 18–19.
  54. ^ Dozeman & Shectman 2016, p. 139.
  55. ^ Grabbe 2014, pp. 63–64.
  56. ^ Dever 2003, pp. 15–17.
  57. ^ Grabbe 2014, p. 69.
  58. ^ Barmash, Pamela (2015). "Out of the Mists of History: The Exaltation of the Exodus in the Bible". In Barmash, Pamela; Nelson, W. David (eds.). Exodus in the Jewish Experience: Echoes and Reverberations. Lexington Books. pp. 1–22. ISBN 9781498502931.
  59. ^ Grabbe 2014, pp. 65–67.
  60. ^ a b c Faust 2015, p. 476.
  61. ^ Redmount 2001, p. 87: "To some, the lack of a secure historical grounding for the biblical Exodus narrative merely reflects its nonhistorical nature. [...] To others, still in the majority among scholars, the ultimate historicity of the Exodus narrative is indisputable. The details of the story may have become clouded or obscured through the transmission process, but a historical core is mandated by that major tenet of faith that permeates the Bible: God acts in history."
  62. ^ Sparks, Kenton L. (2010). "Genre Criticism". In Dozeman, Thomas B. (ed.). Methods for Exodus. Cambridge University Press. p. 73. ISBN 9781139487382.
  63. ^ Faust 2015, p. 476: "While there is a consensus among scholars that the Exodus did not take place in the manner described in the Bible, surprisingly most scholars agree that the narrative has a historical core, and that some of the highland settlers came, one way or another, from Egypt ... Archaeology does not really contribute to the debate over the historicity or even historical background of the Exodus itself, but if there was indeed such a group, it contributed the Exodus story to that of all Israel. While I agree that it is most likely that there was such a group, I must stress that this is based on an overall understanding of the development of collective memory and of the authorship of the texts (and their editorial process). Archaeology, unfortunately, cannot directly contribute (yet?) to the study of this specific group of Israel's ancestors."
  64. ^ Dever 2003, p. 231.
  65. ^ Friedman, Richard Elliott (2017-09-12). The Exodus. HarperCollins. ISBN 978-0-06-256526-6.
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  67. ^ Redmount 2001, p. 65.
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  143. ^ Philip Davies "Beyond Labels: What Comes Next?"
  144. ^ Grabbe 2007, pp. 57–58.
  145. ^ Faust 2022, p. 79.
  146. ^ Kitchen 2003, p. unpaginated.
  147. ^ Wallace 2006, p. unpaginated.
  148. ^ David and Solomon 2012-03-06 at the Wayback Machine Beschrijving. Bol.com
  149. ^ Richard N. Ostling Was King David legend or fiction? 2011-04-27 at the Wayback Machine The Associated Press
  150. ^ Finkelstein & Silberman 2006, p. 20
  151. ^ Finkelstein & Silberman 2006, p. 103
  152. ^ Ussishkin, David, "Solomon's Jerusalem: The Texts and the Facts on the Ground", in Vaughn Andrew G. and Killebrew, Ann E. eds. (2003), Jerusalem in Bible and Archaeology: The First Temple Period (SBL Symposium Series 18; Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature)
  153. ^ Lehrmann, Gunnar, "The United Monarchy in the Countryside: Jerusalem, Judah, and the Shephelah during the Tenth Century BCE", in Vaughn Andrew G. and Killebrew, Ann E. eds. (2003), Jerusalem in Bible and Archaeology: The First Temple Period (SBL Symposium Series 18; Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature)
  154. ^ Dever 2001, p. 160.
  155. ^ Shanks 1999, p. 113.
  156. ^ Hess, Richard S. (2007) Israelite Religions: An Archaeological and Biblical Survey, Baker Academic, ISBN 0801027179
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  158. ^ Moore & Kelle 2011.

Sources edit

  • Brettler, Marc Z. (2003). "The Copenhagen School: The Historiographical Issues". AJS Review. 27 (1): 1–21. doi:10.1017/S0364009403000011. JSTOR 4131767. S2CID 144265632.
  • Davies, Philip R. (1995) [1992]. In Search of 'Ancient Israel'. Continuum International Publishing Group. ISBN 978-1850757375.
  • Davies, Philip R. (2015). Minimalism, 'Ancient Israel', and Anti-Semitism. The Bible and Interpretation.
  • Dever, William G. (2001). "Getting at the "History behind the History"". What Did the Biblical Writers Know and When Did They Know It?: What Archeology Can Tell Us About the Reality of Ancient Israel. Grand Rapids, Michigan and Cambridge, U.K.: Wm. B. Eerdmans. pp. 97–102. ISBN 978-0-8028-2126-3. OCLC 46394298.
  • Dever, William G. (2003). Who Were the Early Israelites and Where Did They Come From?. Eerdmans. ISBN 9780802844163.
  • Dever, William G. (2012). The Lives of Ordinary People in Ancient Israel. Eerdmans. ISBN 978-0802867018.
  • Dorandi, Tiziano (1999). "Chapter 2: Chronology". In Algra, Keimpe; et al. (eds.). The Cambridge History of Hellenistic Philosophy. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. p. 50. ISBN 978-0521250283.
  • Dozeman, Thomas B.; Shectman, Sarah (2016). "Exodus". In Yee, Gale A.; Page, Hugh R. Jr.; Coomber, Matthew J. M. (eds.). The Pentateuch: Fortress Commentary on the Bible Study Edition. Fortress Press. pp. 137–178. doi:10.2307/j.ctt1b3t6qt.11. ISBN 9781506414423. JSTOR j.ctt1b3t6qt.11.
  • Driver, Samuel Rolles (1911). "Bible" . In Chisholm, Hugh (ed.). Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 03 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 849–894, see page 861.
  • Enns, Peter (January 10, 2013). "3 Things I Would Like to See Evangelical Leaders Stop Saying about Biblical Scholarship". Peter Enns.
  • Faust, Avraham (2015). "The Emergence of Iron Age Israel: On Origins and Habitus". In Thomas E. Levy; Thomas Schneider; William H.C. Propp (eds.). Israel's Exodus in Transdisciplinary Perspective: Text, Archaeology, Culture, and Geoscience. Springer. ISBN 978-3-319-04768-3.
  • Faust, Avraham (2022). "Between the Biblical Story and History: Writing an Archaeological History of Ancient Israel". In Keimer, Kyle H.; Pierce, George A. (eds.). The Ancient Israelite World. Taylor & Francis. pp. 67–82. ISBN 978-1-000-77324-8.
  • Finkelstein, Israel; Silberman, Neil Asher (2001). The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts. New York: Simon and Schuster.
  • Finkelstein, Israel; Silberman, Neil Asher (2006). David and Solomon: In Search of the Bible's Sacred Kings and the Roots of the Western Tradition. New York: Free Press. ISBN 978-0743243636.
  • Finkelstein, Israel; Mazar, Amihay; Schmidt, Brian B. (2007). The Quest for the Historical Israel. Society of Biblical Literature. ISBN 978-1589832770.
  • Garbini, Giovanni (1988). History and Ideology in Ancient Israel. Translated by Bowden, John. New York: Crossroad. ISBN 9780824508876. — a translation of the original Italian publication.
  • Golden, Jonathan Michael (2009). Ancient Canaan and Israel: new perspectives. Oxford University Press. p. 275.
  • Grabbe, Lester L. (2007-10-25). "Some Recent Issues in the Study of the History of Israel". Understanding the History of Ancient Israel. British Academy. pp. 57–67. doi:10.5871/bacad/9780197264010.003.0005. ISBN 978-0-19-726401-0.
  • Grabbe, Lester (2014). "Exodus and History". In Dozeman, Thomas; Evans, Craig A.; Lohr, Joel N. (eds.). The Book of Exodus: Composition, Reception, and Interpretation. Leiden: Brill Publishers. pp. 61–87. ISBN 9789004282667.
  • Gunkel, Hermann (1997) [1901]. Genesis. Translated by Biddle, Mark E. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press. p. lxviii. ISBN 978-0865545175.
  • Hayes, Christine (2012). "The Modern Critical Study of the Bible". Introduction to the Bible. The Open Yale Courses Series. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. pp. 58–75. ISBN 9780300181791. JSTOR j.ctt32bxpm.9.
  • Kitchen, K. A. (2003). On the reliability of the Old Testament. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans. ISBN 978-0802849601.
  • Lambert, David (February 2016). "How the "Torah of Moses" Became Revelation: An Early, Apocalyptic Theory of Pentateuchal Origins". Journal for the Study of Judaism in the Persian, Hellenistic, and Roman Period. Leiden: Brill Publishers. 47 (1): 22–54. doi:10.1163/15700631-12340440. ISSN 1570-0631. JSTOR 26551161. S2CID 170140782.
  • Lang, Helen (2001). Introduction. On the Eternity of the World. By Proclus. Berkeley: University of California Press. p. 2. ISBN 978-0520225541.
  • Mazar, Amihay (1992). Archaeology of the land of the Bible, 10,000-586 BCE. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. ISBN 978-0385425902.
  • Miller, Merrill P. (January 1971). "Targum, Midrash, and the Use of the Old Testament in the New Testament". Journal for the Study of Judaism in the Persian, Hellenistic, and Roman Period. Leiden: Brill Publishers. 2 (1): 29–82. doi:10.1163/157006371X00037. ISSN 1570-0631. JSTOR 24656132. S2CID 161934539.
  • Mykytiuk, Lawrence J. (2010). "Strengthening Biblical Historicity vis-à-vis Minimalism, 1992–2008, Part 1: Introducing a Bibliographic Essay in Five Parts". Journal of Religious and Theological Information. 9 (3–4): 76. doi:10.1080/10477845.2010.526920. S2CID 170314161.
  • Mykytiuk, Lawrence J. (2012). "Strengthening Biblical Historicity vis-à-vis Minimalism, 1992–2008 and Beyond, Part 2.1: The Literature of Perspective, Critique, and Methodology, First Half". Journal of Religious and Theological Information. 11 (3–4): 101–137. doi:10.1080/10477845.2012.673111. S2CID 8509370. — In which the relevant section is "Toward a Balanced View of Minimalism: A Summary of Published Critiques", the Official version of record is available at Strengthening Biblical Historicity vis-à-vis Minimalism, 1992–2008 and Beyond, Part 2.1: The Literature of Perspective, Critique, and Methodology, First Half . Author's Accepted Draft if freely available at Strengthening Biblical Historicity vis-à-vis Minimalism, 1992-2008 and Beyond, Part 2.1: The Literature of Perspective, Critique, and Methodology, First Half.
  • Moore, Megan Bishop; Kelle, Brad E. (2011). Biblical History and Israel's Past. Eerdmans. ISBN 978-0802862600.
  • Redmount, Carol A. (2001) [1998]. "Bitter Lives: Israel in and out of Egypt". In Coogan, Michael D. (ed.). The Oxford History of the Biblical World. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 58–89. ISBN 9780195139372.
  • Schlimm, Matthew R. (2011). "Part 3. In Search of A Brother's Keeper: Anger and Its Antitheses in Genesis – A Land of Limitations: Anger among Shepherds". From Fratricide to Forgiveness: The Language and Ethics of Anger in Genesis. Siphrut: Literature and Theology of the Hebrew Scriptures. Vol. 7. University Park, Pennsylvania: Eisenbrauns, imprint of Penn State University Press. pp. 144–153. doi:10.5325/j.ctv1bxgwgm.16. ISBN 978-1-57506-224-2. S2CID 209438529.
  • Shanks, Hershel (1999). Ancient Israel: From Abraham to the Roman Destruction of the Temple. Pearson. ISBN 978-0130853639.
  • Stavrakopoulou, Francesca (2016). "The Historical Framework: Biblical and Scholarly Portrayals of the Past". In Barton, John (ed.). The Hebrew Bible: A Critical Companion. Princeton, New Jersey and Oxford, U.K.: Princeton University Press. pp. 24–53. doi:10.2307/j.ctv7h0snt.6. ISBN 9781400880584.
  • Thompson, Thomas L. (1992). Early History of the Israelite People. Brill. ISBN 978-9004119437.
  • Thompson, Thomas L. (2014). Biblical Narrative and Palestine's History: Changing Perspectives 2. Routledge. ISBN 978-1317543428.
  • Young, Davis A. (March 1988). "The contemporary relevance of Augustine's view of Creation". Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith. 40 (1): 42–45.
  • Wallace, Jennifer (May 2006). "Shifting Ground in the Holy Land". Smithsonian Magazine.

Further reading edit

  • Banks, Diane (2006). Writing The History Of Israel. Continuum International Publishing Group. ISBN 978-0567026620.
  • Barenboim, Peter (2005). Biblical Roots of Separation of Powers. Moscow: Letny Sad. ISBN 978-5943811234. LCCN 2006400578.
  • Biran, Avraham (1994). "'David' Found at Dan". Biblical Archaeology Review. 20 (2): 26–39.
  • Brettler, Marc Zvi (2005). How to Read the Bible. Jewish Publication Society. ISBN 978-0827610019.
  • Christopher, Hayes (2014). Hidden riches : a source-book for the comparative study of the Hebrew Bible and ancient Near East. Presbyterian Publishing Corp. ISBN 978-0664237011. OCLC 879468366.
  • Coogan, Michael D. (1993). "Canaanites: Who Were They and Where Did They Live?". Bible Review. 9 (3): 44, ff.
  • Davies, Philip R. (1998). Scribes and Schools: The Canonization of the Hebrew Scriptures.
  • Davies, Philip R. (2008). Memories of Ancient Israel. Westminster John Knox Press. ISBN 978-0664232887.
  • Finkelstein, Israel (1988). The Archaeology of the Israelite Settlement. Leiden: Brill.
  • Halpern, Baruch (December 1995). "Erasing History: The Minimalist Assault on Ancient Israel". Bible Review: 26–35, 47.
  • Hinnels, John R., ed. (1975). Mithraic Studies: Proceedings of the First International Congress of Mithraic Studies. Manchester University Press.
  • Kugel, James L. (1997). The Bible As It Was. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-06940-4.
  • Larsson, G. (2007). The Chronological System of the Old Testament. Bern: Peter Lang.
  • Lemche, Niels Peter (1985). Early Israel: Anthropological and Historical Studies on the Israelite Society Before the Monarchy. Leiden, South Holland: Bril l.
  • Lemche, Niels Peter (1998). The Israelites in History and Tradition. Westminster John Knox Press. ISBN 978-0664227272.
  • Miller, James Maxwell (1986). A History of Ancient Israel and Judah. Westminster John Knox Press. ISBN 978-0664212629.
  • Na'aman, Nadav (1996). "The Contribution of the Amarna Letters to the Debate on Jerusalem's Political Position in the Tenth Century B.C.E". BASOR. 304: 17–27.
  • Na'aman, Nadav (August 1997). "Cow Town or Royal Capital: Evidence for Iron Age Jerusalem". Biblical Archaeology Review. 23 (4): 43–47, 67.
  • Noth, Martin (1981) [1943]. Uberlieferungsgeschichtliche Studien (The Deuteronomistic History). Sheffield.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link) — also "The Chronicler's History", Sheffield, 1987.
  • Provan, Iain W. (1995). "Ideologies, Literary and Critical Reflections on Recent Writing on the History of Israel". Journal of Biblical Literature. 114 (4): 585–606. doi:10.2307/3266476. JSTOR 3266476. — a critique of the Copenhagen School of Thought - with responses in the same journal by Davies (above) and Thompson (1995 see below)
  • Seters, John Van (1975). Abraham in History and Tradition. New Haven: Yale University Press.
  • Shanks, Hershel (1995). Jerusalem: An Archaeological Biography. New York: Random House.
  • Shanks, Hershel (August 1997). "Face to Face: Biblical Minimalists Meet Their Challengers". Biblical Archaeology Review. 23 (4): 26–42, 66.
  • Smith, Mark S. (2002) [1990]. The Early History of God. Eerdmans.
  • Steiner, Margareet; Cahill, Jane (1998). "David's Jerusalem: Fiction or Reality?". Biblical Archaeology Review. 24 (4): 25–33, 62–63, 34–41, 63. — This article presents a debate between a Biblical minimalist and a Biblical maximalist.
  • Thompson, Thomas L. (1995). "A Neo-Albrightean School in History and Biblical Scholarship?". Journal of Biblical Literature. 114 (4): 683–698. doi:10.2307/3266481. JSTOR 3266481. — a response to the article by Iain W. Provan(1995– above)
  • Thompson, Thomas L. (1999). The Mythic Past: Biblical Archaeology And The Myth Of Israel. Basic Book. ISBN 9780465006229.
  • Thompson, Thomas L. (1999). The Bible in History: How Writers Create a Past. London.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  • Thompson, Thomas L. (2015). A view from Copenhagen: Israel and the History of Palestine. The Bible and Interpretation.
  • Tubb, Jonathan N. (1998). Canaanites. University of Oklahoma Press. ISBN 978-0806131085.
  • Vaughn, Andrew G.; Killebrew, Ann E., eds. (1992). Jerusalem in Bible and Archaeology: The First Temple Period. Sheffield. ISBN 978-1589830660.
  • Whitelam, Keith W. (1996). The Invention of Ancient Israel. Routledge. ISBN 978-0415107587.
  • Yamauchi, Edwin (1972). The Stones and the Scriptures. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company.

External links edit

  • 'Minimalism' – The Copenhagen School of Thought in Biblical Studies. 2011-06-04 at the Wayback Machine.
  • Biblical Archaeology Society: examines discoveries and controversies about historical veracity of the Bible
  • Livius.org: Maximalism and minimalism

February 15, 2024
historicity, bible, historicity, bible, question, bible, relationship, history, covering, just, bible, acceptability, history, also, ability, understand, literary, forms, biblical, narrative, extend, biblical, historicity, evaluation, whether, christian, testa. The historicity of the Bible is the question of the Bible s relationship to history covering not just the Bible s acceptability as history but also the ability to understand the literary forms of biblical narrative 1 One can extend biblical historicity to the evaluation of whether or not the Christian New Testament is an accurate record of the historical Jesus and of the Apostolic Age This tends to vary depending upon the opinion of the scholar When studying the books of the Bible scholars examine the historical context of passages the importance ascribed to events by the authors and the contrast between the descriptions of these events and other historical evidence Being a collaborative work composed and redacted over the course of several centuries 2 the historicity of the Bible is not consistent throughout the entirety of its contents According to theologian Thomas L Thompson a representative of the Copenhagen School also known as biblical minimalism the archaeological record lends sparse and indirect evidence for the Old Testament s narratives as history 3 4 5 6 7 Others like archaeologist William G Dever felt that biblical archaeology has both confirmed and challenged the Old Testament stories 8 While Dever has criticized the Copenhagen School for its more radical approach he is far from being a biblical literalist and thinks that the purpose of biblical archaeology is not to simply support or discredit the biblical narrative but to be a field of study in its own right 9 10 Contents 1 Materials and methods 1 1 Manuscripts and canons 1 2 Writing and reading history 2 Hebrew Bible Old Testament 2 1 Authorship 2 2 Torah Pentateuch 2 2 1 Genesis creation narrative 2 2 2 The Patriarchs 2 3 The Exodus 2 4 Deuteronomistic history 2 4 1 The conquest narrative in Joshua and Judges 2 4 2 Books of Samuel 2 4 3 United Monarchy 3 New Testament 3 1 Historicity of Jesus 3 2 Historicity of the Gospels 3 3 Historicity of Acts 4 Schools of archaeological and historical thought 4 1 Overview of academic views 4 2 Maximalist minimalist dichotomy 4 3 Biblical minimalism 4 4 Biblical maximalism 4 5 Decreasing conflict 5 See also 6 Notes 7 References 7 1 Citations 7 2 Sources 8 Further reading 9 External linksMaterials and methods editManuscripts and canons edit The Bible exists in multiple manuscripts none of them an autograph and multiple biblical canons which do not completely agree on which books have sufficient authority to be included or their order The early discussions about the exclusion or integration of various apocrypha involve an early idea about the historicity of the core 11 The Ionian Enlightenment influenced early patrons like Justin Martyr and Tertullian both saw the biblical texts as being different from and having more historicity than the myths of other religions Augustine was aware of the difference between science and scripture and defended the historicity of the biblical texts e g against claims of Faustus of Mileve 12 Historians hold that the Bible should not be treated differently from other historical or literary sources from the ancient world One may compare doubts about the historicity of for example Herodotus the consequence of these discussions is not that historians shall have to stop using ancient sources for historical reconstruction but need to be aware of the problems involved when doing so 13 Very few texts survive directly from antiquity most have been copied some many times To determine the accuracy of a copied manuscript textual critics examine the way the transcripts have passed through history to their extant forms The higher the consistency of the earliest texts the greater their textual reliability and the less chance that the content has been changed over the years Multiple copies may also be grouped into text types with some types judged closer to the hypothetical original than others Writing and reading history edit nbsp W F Albright the doyen of biblical archaeology in 1957The meaning of the term history is itself dependent on social and historical context 14 Paula McNutt for instance notes that the Old Testament narratives Do not record history in the sense that history is understood in the twentieth century The past for biblical writers as well as for twentieth century readers of the Bible has meaning only when it is considered in light of the present and perhaps an idealized future 15 Paula M McNutt Reconstructing the society of ancient Israel page 4 Even from the earliest times students of religious texts had an awareness that parts of the scriptures could not be interpreted as a strictly consistent sequence of events The Talmud cites a dictum ascribed to the third century teacher Abba Arika that there is no chronological order in the Torah 16 Examples were often presented and discussed in later Jewish exegesis with according to Abraham Joshua Heschel 1907 1972 an ongoing discourse between those who would follow the views of Rabbi Ishmael born 90 CE that the Torah speaks in human language compared to the more mystical approach of Rabbi Akiva c 50 135 that any such deviations should signpost some deeper order or purpose to be divined 17 During the modern era the focus of biblical history has also diversified The project of biblical archaeology associated with W F Albright 1891 1971 which sought to validate the historicity of the events narrated in the Bible through the ancient texts and material remains of the Near East 18 has a more specific focus compared to the more expansive view of history described by archaeologist William Dever b 1933 In discussing the role of his discipline in interpreting the biblical record Dever has pointed to multiple histories within the Bible including the history of theology the relationship between God and believers political history usually the account of Great Men narrative history the chronology of events intellectual history treating ideas and their development context and evolution socio cultural history institutions including their social underpinnings in family clan tribe and social class and the state cultural history overall cultural evolution demography socio economic and political structure and ethnicity technological history the techniques by which humans adapt to exploit and make use of the resources of their environment natural history how humans discover and adapt to the ecological facts of their natural environment and material history artifacts as correlates of changes in human behaviour 19 20 Sharply differing perspectives on the relationship between narrative history and theological meaning present a special challenge for assessing the historicity of the Bible Supporters of biblical literalism deny that Biblical infallibility and inerrancy are limited to spiritual religious or redemptive themes exclusive of assertions in the fields of history and science We further deny that scientific hypotheses about earth history may properly be used to overturn the teaching of Scripture on creation and the flood 21 History or specifically biblical history in this context appears to mean a definitive and finalized framework of events and actions comfortingly familiar shared facts like an omniscient medieval chronicle shorn of alternative accounts 22 psychological interpretations 23 or literary pretensions But prominent scholars have expressed diametrically opposing views T he stories about the promise given to the patriarchs in Genesis are not historical nor do they intend to be historical they are rather historically determined expressions about Israel and Israel s relationship to its God given in forms legitimate to their time and their truth lies not in their facticity nor in the historicity but their ability to express the reality that Israel experienced 24 Modern professional historians familiar with the phenomenon of on going historical revisionism allow new findings and ideas into their interpretations of what happened and scholars versed in the study of texts however sacred see all narrators as potentially unreliable 25 and all accounts especially edited accounts as potentially historically incomplete biased by times and circumstances Hebrew Bible Old Testament editAuthorship edit Main article Authorship of the Bible A central pillar of the Bible s historical authority was the tradition that it had been composed by the principal actors or eyewitnesses to the events described the Pentateuch was the work of Moses the Book of Joshua was by Joshua and so on However the Protestant Reformation had brought the actual texts to a much wider audience which combined with the growing climate of intellectual ferment in the 17th century that was the start of the Age of Enlightenment This threw a harsh skeptical spotlight on these traditional claims In Protestant England the philosopher Thomas Hobbes in his major work Leviathan 1651 denied Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch and identified Joshua Judges Samuel Kings and Chronicles as having been written long after the events they purported to describe His conclusions rested on internal textual evidence but in an argument that resonates with modern debates he noted Who were the original writers of the several Books of Holy Scripture has not been made evident by any sufficient testimony of other History which is the only proof of matter of fact 26 27 nbsp Title page of Simon s Critical History 1682 The Jewish philosopher and pantheist Baruch Spinoza echoed Hobbes s doubts about the provenance of the historical books in his Tractatus Theologico Politicus published in 1670 28 and elaborated on the suggestion that the final redaction of these texts was post exilic under the auspices of Ezra Chapter IX He had earlier been effectively excommunicated by the rabbinical council of Amsterdam for his perceived heresies The French priest Richard Simon brought these critical perspectives to the Catholic tradition in 1678 observing the most part of the Holy Scriptures that are come to us are but Abridgments and as Summaries of ancient Acts which were kept in the Registries of the Hebrews in what was probably the first work of biblical textual criticism in the modern sense 29 In response Jean Astruc applying to the Pentateuch source criticism methods common in the analysis of classical secular texts believed he could detect four different manuscript traditions which he claimed Moses himself had redacted p 62 64 30 His 1753 book initiated the school known as higher criticism that culminated in Julius Wellhausen formalising the documentary hypothesis in the 1870s 31 which identifies these narratives as the Jahwist Elohist Deuteronomist and the Priestly source While versions of the documentary hypothesis vary in the order in which they were composed the circumstances of their composition and the date of their redaction s their shared terminology continues to provide the framework for modern theories on the composite nature and origins of the Torah 32 By the end of the 19th century the scholarly consensus was that the Pentateuch was the work of many authors writing from 1000 BCE the time of David to 500 BCE the time of Ezra and redacted c 450 and as a consequence whatever history it contained was more often polemical than strictly factual a conclusion reinforced by the then fresh scientific refutations of what were at the time widely classed as biblical mythologies Torah Pentateuch edit Genesis creation narrative edit nbsp The Garden of Eden By Lucas Cranach der Altere 1472 1553 See also Genesis creation narrative and Book of Genesis There is a Christian tradition of criticism of the creation narratives in Genesis dating back to at least St Augustine of Hippo 354 430 and Jewish tradition has also maintained a critical thread in its approach to biblical primeval history The influential medieval philosopher Maimonides maintained a skeptical ambiguity toward creation ex nihilo and considered the stories about Adam more as philosophical anthropology rather than as historical stories whose protagonist is the first man 33 Greek philosophers Aristotle 34 Critolaus 35 and Proclus 36 held that the world was eternal Such interpretations are inconsistent with what was after the Protestant Reformation to be commonly perceived in evangelicalism as traditional views of Genesis 37 The publication of James Hutton s Theory of the Earth in 1788 was an important development in the scientific revolution that would dethrone Genesis as the ultimate authority on primeval earth and prehistory The first casualty was the Creation story itself and by the early 19th century no responsible scientist contended for the literal credibility of the Mosaic account of creation 38 The battle between uniformitarianism and catastrophism kept the flood alive in the emerging discipline until Adam Sedgwick the president of the Geological Society publicly recanted his previous support in his 1831 presidential address We ought indeed to have paused before we first adopted the diluvian theory and referred all our old superficial gravel to the action of the Mosaic Flood For of man and the works of his hands we have not yet found a single trace among the remnants of the former world entombed in those deposits 39 All of which left the first man and his putative descendants in the awkward position of being stripped of all historical context until Charles Darwin naturalized the Garden of Eden with the publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859 Public acceptance of this scientific revolution was at the time uneven but has since grown significantly The mainstream scholarly community soon arrived at a consensus which holds today that Genesis 1 11 is a highly schematic literary work representing theology symbolic mythology rather than actual history or science 30 page needed The Patriarchs edit Main article Patriarchs Bible In the following decades Hermann Gunkel drew attention to the mythic aspects of the Pentateuch and Albrecht Alt Martin Noth and the tradition history school argued that although its core traditions had genuinely ancient roots the narratives were fictional framing devices and were not intended as history in the modern sense Though doubts have been cast on the historiographic reconstructions of this school particularly the notion of oral traditions as a primary ancient source much of its critique of biblical historicity found wide acceptance Gunkel s position is that if however we consider figures like Abraham Isaac and Jacob to be actual persons with no original mythic foundations that does not at all mean that they are historical figures For even if as may well be assumed there was once a man call Abraham everyone who knows the history of legends is sure that the legend is in no position at the distance of so many centuries to preserve a picture of the personal piety of Abraham The religion of Abraham is in reality the religion of the legend narrators which they attribute to Abraham 40 Gunkel 1997 page xviiiThis has in various forms become a commonplace of contemporary criticism 41 In the United States the biblical archaeology movement under the influence of Albright counterattacked arguing that the broad outline within the framing narratives was also true so that while scholars could not realistically expect to prove or disprove individual episodes from the life of Abraham and the other patriarchs these were real individuals who could be placed in a context proven from the archaeological record But as more discoveries were made and anticipated finds failed to materialise it became apparent that archaeology did not in fact support the claims made by Albright and his followers Following Albright s death his interpretation of the patriarchal age came under increasing criticism such dissatisfaction marked its culmination with the publication of The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives by Thomas L Thompson 42 and Abraham in History and Tradition by John Van Seters 43 Thompson a literary scholar argued on the lack of compelling evidence that the patriarchs lived in the 2nd millennium BCE and noted how certain biblical texts reflected first millennium conditions and concerns while Van Seters examined the patriarchal stories and argued that their names social milieu and messages strongly suggested that they were Iron Age creations 44 Van Seter and Thompson s works were a paradigm shift in biblical scholarship and archaeology which gradually led scholars to no longer consider the patriarchal narratives as historical 45 Some conservative scholars attempted to defend the patriarchal narratives in the following years 46 47 but this position has not found acceptance among scholars 48 6 Today although there continues to be some debate on the historical background of the narratives many scholars possibly most reject the existence of the Patriarchal age 49 William Dever stated in 1993 that Albright s central theses have all been overturned partly by further advances in biblical criticism but mostly by the continuing archaeological research of younger Americans and Israelis to whom he himself gave encouragement and momentum The irony is that in the long run it will have been the newer secular archaeology that contributed the most to Biblical studies not Biblical archaeology 50 William Dever The Biblical Archaeologist What Remains of the House that Albright Built March 1993 pp 25 35 The Exodus edit Main articles The Exodus Sources and parallels of the Exodus and Book of Exodus Most mainstream scholars do not accept the biblical Exodus account as history for a number of reasons It is generally agreed that the Exodus stories reached the current form centuries after the apparent setting of the stories 51 The Book of Exodus itself attempts to ground the event firmly in history dating the exodus to the 2666th year after creation Exodus 12 40 41 the construction of the tabernacle to year 2667 Exodus 40 1 2 17 stating that the Israelites dwelled in Egypt for 430 years Exodus 12 40 41 and including place names such as Goshen Gen 46 28 Pithom and Ramesses Exod 1 11 as well as stating that 600 000 Israelite men were involved Exodus 12 37 52 The Book of Numbers further states that the number of Israelites in the desert during the wandering were 603 550 including 22 273 first borns which modern estimates put at 2 5 3 million total Israelites a clearly fanciful number that could never have been supported by the Sinai Desert 53 The geography is vague with regions such as Goshen unidentified and there are internal problems with dating in the Pentateuch 54 No modern attempt to identify a historical Egyptian prototype for Moses has found wide acceptance and no period in Egyptian history matches the biblical accounts of the Exodus 55 Some elements of the story are miraculous and defy rational explanation such as the Plagues of Egypt and the Crossing of the Red Sea 56 The Bible also fails to mention the names of any of the pharaohs involved in the Exodus narrative 57 While ancient Egyptian texts from the New Kingdom mention Asiatics living in Egypt as slaves and workers these people cannot be securely connected to the Israelites and no contemporary Egyptian text mentions a large scale exodus of slaves like that described in the Bible 58 The earliest surviving historical mention of the Israelites the Egyptian Merneptah Stele c 1207 BCE appears to place them in or around Canaan and gives no indication of any exodus 59 Despite the absence of any archaeological evidence a majority of scholars agree that the Exodus probably has some historical basis 60 61 with Kenton Sparks referring to it as mythologized history 62 Scholars posit that small groups of people of Egyptian origin may have joined the early Israelites and then contributed their own Egyptian Exodus story to all of Israel 63 William G Dever cautiously identifies this group with the Tribe of Joseph while Richard Elliott Friedman identifies it with the Tribe of Levi 64 65 Most scholars who accept a historical core of the exodus date this possible exodus group to the thirteenth century BCE at the time of Ramses II with some instead dating it to the twelfth century BCE at the time of Ramses III 60 Evidence in favor of historical traditions forming a background to the Exodus narrative include the documented movements of small groups of Ancient Semitic speaking peoples into and out of Egypt during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Dynasties some elements of Egyptian folklore and culture in the Exodus narrative 66 and the names Moses Aaron and Phinehas which seem to have an Egyptian origin 67 Scholarly estimates for how many people could have been involved in such an exodus range from a few hundred to a few thousand people 60 Deuteronomistic history edit Main article Deuteronomist Many scholars believe that the Deuteronomistic history preserved elements of ancient texts and oral tradition including geo political and socio economic realities and certain information about historical figures and events However large portions of it are legendary and it contains many anachronisms 68 The conquest narrative in Joshua and Judges edit Main article Book of Joshua A major issue in the historicity debate was the narrative of the Israelite conquest of Canaan described in Joshua and Judges The American Albright school asserted that the biblical narrative of conquest would be affirmed by archaeological record and indeed for much of the 20th century archaeology appeared to support the biblical narrative including excavations at Beitin identified as Bethel Tel ed Duweir identified as Lachish Hazor and Jericho 69 70 However flaws in the conquest narrative appeared The most high profile example was the fall of Jericho excavated by John Garstang in the 1930s 69 Garstang originally announced that he had found fallen walls dating to the time of the biblical Battle of Jericho but later revised the destruction to a much earlier period 70 Kathleen Kenyon dated the destruction of the walled city to the middle of the 16th century c 1550 BCE too early to match the usual dating of the Exodus to Pharaoh Ramses on the basis of her excavations in the early 1950s 71 The same conclusion based on an analysis of all the excavation findings was reached by Piotr Bienkowski 72 By the 1960s it had become clear that the archaeological record did not in fact support the account of the conquest given in Joshua the cities which the Bible records as having been destroyed by the Israelites were either uninhabited at the time or if destroyed were destroyed at widely different times not in one brief period 69 The consensus for the conquest narrative was eventually abandoned in the late 20th century 69 Peake s Commentary on the Bible argues that the Book of Joshua conflates several independent battles between disparate groups over the centuries and artificially attributes them to a single leader Joshua 73 However there are a few cases where the biblical record is not contradicted by the archaeological record For example stratum which in Tel Hazor found in a destruction layer from around 1200 BCE shows signs of catastrophic fire and cuneiform tablets found at the site refer to monarchs named Ibni Addi where Ibni may be the etymological origin of Yavin Jabin the Canaanite leader referred to in the Hebrew Bible 74 75 The city also shows signs of having been a magnificent Canaanite city prior to its destruction with great temples and opulent palaces 75 split into an upper acropolis and lower city the town evidently had been a major Canaanite city Israel Finkelstein theorized that the destruction of Hazor was the result of civil strife attacks by the Sea Peoples and or a result of the general collapse of civilization across the whole eastern Mediterranean in the Late Bronze Age rather than being caused by the Israelites 75 Amnon Ben Tor Hebrew University of Jerusalem believes that recently unearthed evidence of violent destruction by burning verifies the biblical account 76 In 2012 a team led by Ben Tor and Sharon Zuckerman discovered a scorched palace from the 13th century BC in whose storerooms they found 3 400 year old ewers holding burned crops however Sharon Zuckerman did not agree with Ben Tor s theory and claimed that the burning was the result of the city s numerous factions opposing each other with excessive force 77 Biblical scholar Richard Elliot Friedman University of Georgia argues that the Israelites did destroy Hazor but that such destruction fits better with the account of the Book of Judges in which the prophetess Deborah defeats the king of Hazor 78 Books of Samuel edit Main article Books of Samuel The Books of Samuel are considered to be based on both historical and legendary sources primarily serving to fill the gap in Israelite history after the events described in Deuteronomy According to Donald Redford the Books of Samuel exhibit too many anachronisms to have been compiled in the 11th century BCE 79 For example there is mention of later armor 1 Samuel 17 4 7 38 39 25 13 use of camels 1 Samuel 30 17 and cavalry as distinct from chariotry 1 Samuel 13 5 2 Samuel 1 6 iron picks and axes as though they were common 2 Samuel 12 31 and sophisticated siege techniques 2 Samuel 20 15 There is a gargantuan troop called up 2 Samuel 17 1 a battle with 20 000 casualties 2 Samuel 18 7 and a reference to Kushite paramilitary and servants clearly giving evidence of a date in which Kushites were common after the 26th Dynasty of Egypt the period of the last quarter of the 8th century BCE 79 Alan Millard argues that those elements of the Biblical narrative are not anachronistic 80 81 United Monarchy edit Main article Kingdom of Israel united monarchy Much of the focus of modern criticism has been the historicity of the United Monarchy of Israel which according to the Hebrew Bible ruled over both Judea and Samaria around the 10th century BCE Thomas L Thompson a minimalist scholar for example has written There is no evidence of a United Monarchy no evidence of a capital in Jerusalem or of any coherent unified political force that dominated western Palestine let alone an empire of the size the legends describe We do not have evidence for the existence of kings named Saul David or Solomon nor do we have evidence for any temple at Jerusalem in this early period What we do know of Israel and Judah of the tenth century does not allow us to interpret this lack of evidence as a gap in our knowledge and information about the past a result merely of the accidental nature of archeology There is neither room nor context no artifact or archive that points to such historical realities in Palestine s tenth century One cannot speak historically of a state without a population Nor can one speak of a capital without a town Stories are not enough 82 In Iron Age IIa corresponding to the Monarchal period Judah seems to have been limited to small mostly rural and unfortified settlements in the Judean hills 68 This contrasts to the upper Samaria which was becoming urbanized This archaeological evidence as well as textual criticism has led many modern historians to treat Israel Samaria and Judah as arising separately as distinct albeit related entities centered at Shechem and Jerusalem respectively and not as a united kingdom with a capital in Jerusalem Excavations at Khirbet Qeiyafa an Iron Age site located in Judah support the biblical account of a United Monarchy The Israel Antiquities Authority stated The excavations at Khirbat Qeiyafa clearly reveal an urban society that existed in Judah already in the late eleventh century BCE It can no longer be argued that the Kingdom of Judah developed only in the late eighth century BCE or at some other later date 83 The status of Jerusalem in the 10th century BCE is a major subject of debate 68 The oldest part of Jerusalem and its original urban core is the City of David which does show evidence of significant Judean residential activity around the 10th century 84 Some unique administrative structures such as the Stepped Stone Structure and the Large Stone Structure which originally formed one structure contain material culture dated to Iron I 68 On account of the alleged lack of settlement activity in the 10th century BCE Israel Finkelstein argues that Jerusalem in the century was a small country village in the Judean hills not a national capital and Ussishkin argues that the city was entirely uninhabited Amihai Mazar contends that if the Iron I Iron IIa dating of administrative structures in the City of David are correct as he believes Jerusalem was a rather small town with a mighty citadel which could have been a center of a substantial regional polity 68 It has been argued that recent archaeological discoveries at the City of David and the Ophel seem to indicate that Jerusalem was sufficiently developed as a city to be the capital of the United Monarchy in the 10th century BCE 85 Since the discovery of the Tel Dan Stele dated to the 9th or 8th century BCE containing bytdwd interpreted by many as a reference to the House of David as a monarchic dynasty in Judah 86 87 another possible reference occurs in the Mesha Stele 88 the majority of scholars accept the existence of a polity ruled by David and Solomon albeit on a more modest scale than described in the Bible Most scholars believe that David and Solomon reigned over large sections of Cisjordan and probably parts of Transjordan 89 William G Dever argues that David only reigned over the current territories of Israel and West Bank and that he did defeat the invading Philistines but that the other conquests are fictitious 90 New Testament editHistoricity of Jesus edit Main articles Historicity of Jesus and Split of early Christianity and Judaism The majority of modern scholars of antiquity agree that Jesus existed historically that he was baptized by John the Baptist and crucified by order of Roman prefect Pontius Pilate a The quest for the historical Jesus began as early as the 18th century and has continued to this day The most notable recent scholarship came in the 1980s and 1990s with the work of J D Crossan 98 James D G Dunn 99 John P Meier 100 E P Sanders 101 and N T Wright 102 being the most widely read and discussed Other works on the matter were published by Dale Allison 103 Bart D Ehrman 104 Richard Bauckham 105 and Maurice Casey 106 The earliest New Testament texts which refer to Jesus the Pauline epistles are usually dated in the 50s CE Since Paul records very little of Jesus life and activities these are of little help in determining facts about the life of Jesus although they may contain references to information given to Paul from the eyewitnesses of Jesus 107 The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls has shed light into the context of 1st century Judea noting the diversity of Jewish belief as well as shared expectations and teachings For example the expectation of the coming messiah the beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount and much else of the early Christian movement are found to have existed within apocalyptic Judaism of the period 108 This has had the effect of centering Early Christianity much more within its Jewish roots than was previously the case It is now recognised that Rabbinic Judaism and Early Christianity are only two of the many strands which survived until the Jewish revolt of 66 to 70 CE 109 110 Most historical critics agree that a historical figure named Jesus taught throughout the Galilean countryside c 30 CE was believed by his followers to have performed supernatural acts and was sentenced to death by the Romans possibly for insurrection 111 Historicity of the Gospels edit Main article Historical reliability of the Gospels Most modern scholars hold that the canonical gospel accounts were written between 70 and 100 112 four to eight decades after the crucifixion although based on earlier traditions and texts such as Q Logia or sayings gospels the passion account or other earlier literature See List of Gospels Some scholars argue that these accounts were compiled by witnesses 105 113 although this view is disputed by other scholars 114 Some scholars believe that the Gospel of Mark shows signs of a lack of knowledge of geographical political and religious matters in Judea in the time of Jesus Thus today the most common opinion is that the author is unknown and both geographically and historically at a distance from the narrated events 115 page needed 116 117 however opinion varies and scholars such as Craig Blomberg accept the more traditional view 118 The use of expressions that may be described as awkward and rustic cause the Gospel of Mark to appear somewhat unlettered or even crude 119 This may be attributed to the influence that Saint Peter a fisherman is suggested to have on the writing of Mark 120 It is commonly thought that the writers of the Gospel of Matthew and Gospel of Luke used Mark as a source with changes and improvement to peculiarities and crudities in Mark 119 Historicity of Acts edit Main article Historical reliability of the Acts of the Apostles Archaeological inscriptions and other independent sources show that Acts contains some accurate details of 1st century society with regard to titles of officials administrative divisions town assemblies and rules of the Jewish temple in Jerusalem However the historicity of the depiction of Paul the Apostle in Acts is contested Acts describes Paul differently from how Paul describes himself both factually and theologically 121 Acts differs from Paul s letters on important issues such as the Law Paul s own apostleship and his relation to the Jerusalem church 121 Scholars generally prefer Paul s account over that in Acts 122 316 123 10 Schools of archaeological and historical thought editOverview of academic views edit Further information Dating the Bible According to Spencer Mizen of BBC History Magazine The origins of the Bible are still cloaked in mystery When was it written Who wrote it And how reliable is it as an historical record 124 An educated reading of the biblical text requires knowledge of when it was written by whom and for what purpose For example many academics would agree that the Pentateuch was in existence some time shortly after the 6th century BCE but they disagree about when it was written Proposed dates vary from the 15th century BCE to the 6th century BCE One popular hypothesis points to the reign of Josiah 7th century BCE In this hypothesis the events of for example Exodus would have happened centuries before they were finally edited citation needed The documentary hypothesis claims using the biblical evidence itself to demonstrate that the current version of the Bible is based on older written sources that are lost It has been modified heavily over the years and some scholars accept some form of this hypothesis There have also been and are a number of scholars who reject it for example Egyptologist Kenneth Kitchen 125 and Old Testament scholar Walter Kaiser Jr 126 as well as R N Whybray Umberto Cassuto O T Allis Gleason Archer John Sailhamer 127 Bruce Waltke 128 and Joshua Berman 129 Maximalist minimalist dichotomy edit There is great scholarly controversy on the historicity of events recounted in the biblical narratives prior to the Babylonian captivity in the 6th century BCE There is a split between scholars who reject the biblical account of Ancient Israel as fundamentally ahistorical and those who accept it as a largely reliable source of history termed biblical minimalists and biblical maximalists respectively The major split of biblical scholarship into two opposing schools is strongly disapproved by non fundamentalist biblical scholars as being an attempt by conservative Christians to portray the field as a bipolar argument of which only one side is correct 130 Recently the difference between the Maximalist and Minimalist has reduced and a new school started with a work The Quest for the Historical Israel Debating Archaeology and the History of Early Israel by Israel Finkelstein Amihai Mazar and Brian B Schmidt 131 This school argues that post processual archaeology enables us to recognize the existence of a middle ground between minimalism and maximalism and that both these extremes need to be rejected Archaeology offers both confirmation of parts of the biblical record and also poses challenges to the interpretations made by some The careful examination of the evidence demonstrates that the historical accuracy of the first part of the Old Testament is greatest during the reign of Josiah Some feel that the accuracy diminishes the further backwards one proceeds from this date This they claim would confirm that a major redaction of the texts seems to have occurred at about that date citation needed Biblical minimalism edit Further information Biblical minimalism The viewpoint sometimes called biblical minimalism generally holds that the Bible is principally a theological and apologetic work and all stories within it are of an aetiological character citation needed The early stories are held to have a historical basis that was reconstructed centuries later and the stories possess at most only a few tiny fragments of genuine historical memory which by their definition are only those points which are supported by archaeological discoveries In this view all of the stories about the biblical patriarchs are fictional and the patriarchs mere legendary eponyms to describe later historical realities Further biblical minimalists hold that the twelve tribes of Israel were a later construction the stories of King David and King Saul were modeled upon later Irano Hellenistic examples and that there is no archaeological evidence that the united Kingdom of Israel where the Bible says that David and Solomon ruled over an empire from the Euphrates to Eilath ever existed Archaeological evidence suggesting otherwise such as the Mesha Stele is often rejected as allegorical citation needed It is hard to pinpoint when the movement started but 1968 seems to be a reasonable date During this year two prize winning essays were written in Copenhagen one by Niels Peter Lemche the other by Heike Friis which advocated a complete rethinking of the way we approach the Bible and attempt to draw historical conclusions from it 132 In published books one of the early advocates of the current school of thought known as biblical minimalism is Giovanni Garbini Storia e ideologia nell Israele antico 1986 translated into English as History and Ideology in Ancient Israel 1988 133 In his footsteps followed Thomas L Thompson with his lengthy Early History of the Israelite People From the Written amp Archaeological Sources 1992 and 134 building explicitly on Thompson s book P R Davies shorter work In Search of Ancient Israel 1992 135 In the latter Davies finds historical Israel only in archaeological remains biblical Israel only in scripture and recent reconstructions of ancient Israel to be an unacceptable amalgam of the two Thompson and Davies see the entire Hebrew Bible Old Testament as the imaginative creation of a small community of Jews at Jerusalem during the period which the Bible assigns to after the return from the Babylonian exile from 539 BCE onward Niels Peter Lemche Thompson s fellow faculty member at the University of Copenhagen also followed with several titles that show Thompson s influence including The Israelites in history and tradition 1998 The presence of both Thompson and Lemche at the same institution has led to the use of the term Copenhagen school The effect of biblical minimalism from 1992 onward was debate with more than two points of view 136 137 138 Biblical maximalism edit Main article Biblical maximalism There is great scholarly controversy on the historicity particularly of those events recounted in the biblical narratives prior to the Babylonian captivity in the 6th century BCE Regarding the debate over the historicity of ancient Israel the maximalist position holds that the accounts of the United Monarchy and the early kings of Israel David and Saul are to be taken as largely historical 139 Decreasing conflict edit In 2001 Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman published The Bible Unearthed Archaeology s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts which advocated a view midway toward biblical minimalism and caused an uproar among many conservatives 140 In the 25th anniversary issue of Biblical Archaeology Review March April 2001 edition editor Hershel Shanks quoted several biblical scholars who insisted that minimalism was dying 141 although leading minimalists deny this and a claim has been made We are all minimalists now an allusion to We are all Keynesians now 142 Apart from the well funded and fundamentalist biblical archaeologists we are in fact nearly all minimalists now Philip Davies 143 The fact is that we are all minimalists at least when it comes to the patriarchal period and the settlement When I began my PhD studies more than three decades ago in the USA the substantial historicity of the patriarchs was widely accepted as was the unified conquest of the land These days it is quite difficult to find anyone who takes this view In fact until recently I could find no maximalist history of Israel since Wellhausen In fact though maximalist has been widely defined as someone who accepts the biblical text unless it can be proven wrong If so very few are willing to operate like this not even John Bright 1980 whose history is not a maximalist one according to the definition just given Lester L Grabbe 144 pages 57 58 However other more mainstream scholars have rejected these claims The skeptical approaches peaked in the 1990s with the emergence of the minimalist school which attempted to deny the Bible any relevance for the study of the Iron Age but this extreme approach was rejected by mainstream scholarship Avraham Faust 145 page 79 In 2003 Kenneth Kitchen a scholar who adopts a more maximalist point of view authored the book On the Reliability of the Old Testament Kitchen advocated the reliability of many although not all parts of the Torah and in no uncertain terms criticizes the work of Finkelstein and Silberman 146 Jennifer Wallace describes archaeologist Israel Finkelstein s view in her article Shifting Ground in the Holy Land appearing in Smithsonian Magazine May 2006 He Israel Finkelstein cites the fact now accepted by most archaeologists that many of the cities Joshua is supposed to have sacked in the late 13th century B C had ceased to exist by that time Hazor was destroyed in the middle of that century Ai was abandoned before 2000 B C Even Jericho Tell es Sultan where Joshua is said to have brought the walls tumbling down by circling the city seven times with blaring trumpets was destroyed in 1500 B C Now controlled by the Palestinian Authority the Jericho site consists of crumbling pits and trenches that testify to a century of fruitless digging 147 Wallace However despite problems with the archaeological record some maximalists place Joshua in the mid second millennium at about the time the Egyptian Empire came to rule over Canaan and not the 13th century as Finkelstein or Kitchen claim and view the destruction layers of the period as corroboration of the biblical account The destruction of Hazor in the mid 13th century is seen as corroboration of the biblical account of the later destruction carried out by Deborah and Barak as recorded in the Book of Judges The location that Finkelstein refers to as Ai is generally dismissed as the location of the biblical Ai since it was destroyed and buried in the 3rd millennium The prominent site has been known by that name since at least Hellenistic times if not before Minimalists all hold that dating these events as contemporary are etiological explanations written centuries after the events they claim to report Both Finkelstein and Silberman do accept that David and Solomon were really existing persons not kings but bandit leaders or hill country chieftains 148 149 from Judah about the 10th century BCE 150 but they do not assume that there was such a thing as United Monarchy with a capital in Jerusalem The Bible reports that Jehoshaphat a contemporary of Ahab offered manpower and horses for the northern kingdom s wars against the Arameans He strengthened his relationship with the northern kingdom by arranging a diplomatic marriage the Israelite princess Athaliah sister or daughter of King Ahab married Jehoram the son of Jehoshaphat 2 Kings 8 18 The house of David in Jerusalem was now directly linked to and apparently dominated by the Israelite royalty of Samaria In fact we might suggest that this represented the north s takeover by marriage of Judah Thus in the ninth century BCE nearly a century after the presumed time of David we can finally point to the historical existence of a great united monarchy of Israel stretching from Dan in the north to Beer sheba in the south with significant conquered territories in Syria and Transjordan But this united monarchy a real united monarchy was ruled by the Omrides not the Davidides and its capital was Samaria not Jerusalem Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman 151 page 103 Others such as David Ussishkin argue that those who follow the biblical depiction of a United Monarchy do so on the basis of limited evidence while hoping to uncover real archaeological proof in the future 152 Gunnar Lehmann suggests that there is still a possibility that David and Solomon were able to become local chieftains of some importance and claims that Jerusalem at the time was at best a small town in a sparsely populated area in which alliances of tribal kinship groups formed the basis of society He goes on further to claim that it was at best a small regional centre one of three to four in the territory of Judah and neither David nor Solomon had the manpower or the requisite social political administrative structure to rule the kind of empire described in the Bible 153 These views are strongly criticized by William G Dever 154 Helga Weippert Amihai Mazar and Amnon Ben Tor Andre Lemaire states in Ancient Israel From Abraham to the Roman Destruction of the Temple 155 that the principal points of the biblical tradition with Solomon are generally trustworthy Kenneth Kitchen shares this view arguing that Solomon ruled over a comparatively wealthy mini empire rather than a small city state Recently Finkelstein has joined with the more conservative Amihai Mazar to explore the areas of agreement and disagreement and there are signs the intensity of the debate between the so called minimalist and maximalist scholars is diminishing 131 This view is also taken by Richard S Hess 156 which shows there is in fact a plurality of views between maximalists and minimalists Jack Cargill 157 has shown that popular textbooks not only fail to give readers up to date archaeological evidence but that they also fail to correctly represent the diversity of views present on the subject Megan Bishop Moore and Brad E Kelle provide an overview of the respective evolving approaches and attendant controversies especially during the period from the mid 1980s through 2011 in their book Biblical History and Israel s Past 158 See also editAcademic view of Ezra Biblical archaeology school Biblical criticism Biblical inerrancy Rudolf Bultmann Census of Quirinius Chronology of Jesus Composition of the Book of Daniel Crucifixion darkness Development of the New Testament canon Flood geology Historical Jesus Historicity of Abraham Historicity of Esther Historicity of Joshua Historicity of King David Historicity of Moses Historicity of the Exodus Historicity of the Massacre of the Innocents Historicity of the United Monarchy Sanhedrin trial of Jesus TheudasNotes edit In a 2011 review of the state of modern scholarship Bart Ehrman wrote He certainly existed as virtually every competent scholar of antiquity Christian or non Christian agrees 91 Richard A Burridge states There are those who argue that Jesus is a figment of the Church s imagination that there never was a Jesus at all I have to say that I do not know any respectable critical scholar who says that any more 92 Robert M Price does not believe that Jesus existed but agrees that this perspective runs against the views of the majority of scholars 93 James D G Dunn calls the theories of Jesus non existence a thoroughly dead thesis 94 Michael Grant a classicist wrote in 1977 In recent years no serious scholar has ventured to postulate the non historicity of Jesus or at any rate very few and they have not succeeded in disposing of the much stronger indeed very abundant evidence to the contrary 95 Robert E Van Voorst states that biblical scholars and classical historians regard theories of non existence of Jesus as effectively refuted 96 Writing on The Daily Beast Candida Moss and Joel Baden state that there is nigh universal consensus among biblical scholars the authentic ones at least that Jesus was in fact a real guy 97 References editCitations edit Thompson 2014 p 164 Greifenhagen Franz V 2003 Egypt on the Pentateuch s Ideological Map Bloomsbury p 206 ISBN 978 0 567 39136 0 Enns 2013 Biblical archaeology has helped us understand a lot about the world of the Bible and clarified a considerable amount of what we find in the Bible But the archaeological record has not been friendly for one vital issue Israel s origins the period of slavery in Egypt the mass departure of Israelite slaves from Egypt and the violent conquest of the land of Canaan by the Israelites The strong consensus is that there is at best sparse indirect evidence for these biblical episodes and for the conquest there is considerable evidence against it Davies Philip April 2010 Beyond Labels What Comes Next The Bible and Interpretation Retrieved 2016 05 31 It has been accepted for decades that the Bible is not in principle either historically reliable or unreliable but both it contains both memories of real events and also fictions Golden 2009 p 275 So although much of the archaeological evidence demonstrates that the Hebrew Bible cannot in most cases be taken literally many of the people places and things probably did exist at some time or another a b Grabbe 2007 The fact is that we are all minimalists at least when it comes to the patriarchal period and the settlement When I began my PhD studies more than three decades ago in the USA the substantial historicity of the patriarchs was widely accepted as was the unified conquest of the land These days it is quite difficult to find anyone who takes this view In fact until recently I could find no maximalist history of Israel since Wellhausen In fact though maximalist has been widely defined as someone who accepts the biblical text unless it can be proven wrong If so very few are willing to operate like this not even John Bright 1980 whose history is not a maximalist one according to the definition just given Nur Masalha 20 October 2014 The Zionist Bible Biblical Precedent Colonialism and the Erasure of Memory Routledge p 228 ISBN 978 1 317 54465 4 critical archaeology which has become an independent professional discipline with its own conclusions and its observations presents us with a picture of a reality of ancient Palestine completely different from the one that is described in the Hebrew Bible Holy Land archaeology is no longer using the Hebrew Bible as a reference point or an historical source the traditional biblical archaeology is no longer the ruling paradigm in Holy Land archaeology for the critical archaeologists the Bible is read like other ancient texts as literature which may contain historical information Herzog 2001 72 93 1999 6 8 Dever William G March April 2006 The Western Cultural Tradition Is at Risk Biblical Archaeology Review 32 2 26 amp 76 Archaeology as it is practiced today must be able to challenge as well as confirm the Bible stories Some things described there really did happen but others did not The biblical narratives about Abraham Moses Joshua and Solomon probably reflect some historical memories of people and places but the larger than life portraits of the Bible are unrealistic and contradicted by the archaeological evidence William G Dever 1992 Archeology In David Noel Freedman ed The Anchor Bible dictionary Doubleday p 358 ISBN 978 0 385 19361 0 J K Hoffmeier 2015 Thomas E Levy Thomas Schneider William H C Propp eds Israel s Exodus in Transdisciplinary Perspective Text Archaeology Culture and Geoscience Springer p 200 ISBN 978 3 319 04768 3 Grosse Sven 2011 Theologie des Kanons der christliche Kanon seine Hermeneutik und die Historizitat seiner Aussagen die Lehren der Kirchenvater als Grundlegung der Lehre von der Heiligen Schrift in German LIT Verlag Munster pp 91 92 ISBN 978 3643800787 Grosse Sven 2011 Theologie des Kanons der christliche Kanon seine Hermeneutik und die Historizitat seiner Aussagen die Lehren der Kirchenvater als Grundlegung der Lehre von der Heiligen Schrift in German LIT Verlag Munster p 94 ISBN 978 3643800787 One does not read in the Gospel that the Lord said I will send you the Paraclete who will teach you about the course of the sun and moon For He willed to make them Christians not mathematicians Translation of the German Quote according to wikiquote Barstad Hans M 2008 History and the Hebrew Bible Studies in Ancient Israelite and Ancient Near Eastern Historiography Mohr Siebeck pp 40 42 ISBN 978 3161498091 Compare Herodotus and Ranke McNutt Paula M 1999 Reconstructing the society of ancient Israel London SPCK p 4 ISBN 978 0281052592 JCR The Babylonian Talmud Pesachim juchre org Retrieved 2023 05 11 Heschel Abraham Joshua 2005 01 01 Heavenly Torah As Refracted Through the Generations A amp C Black ISBN 978 0 8264 0802 0 Albright William Foxwell 1985 Archaeology of Palestine Peter Smith Pub Inc p 128 ISBN 978 0844600031 Discovery after discovery has established the accuracy of innumerable details of the Bible as a source of history Dever William G 2008 Did God Have a Wife Archaeology and Folk Religion in Ancient Israel Wm B Eerdmans Publishing Company Ingram Thomas C 2019 Ecological Facts About The Bible funfactoday com Retrieved 2020 03 19 Henry Carl Ferdinand Howard 1999 1979 The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy God Revelation and Authority Vol 4 Wheaton Ill Crossway Books pp 211 219 ISBN 978 1581340563 Archived from the original on 2006 11 15 Note the varying creation accounts of Genesis 1 versus Genesis 2 And it repented the LORD that he had made man on the earth and it grieved him at his heart Genesis 6 6 Thompson Thomas 2002 1974 The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives The Quest for the Historical Abraham Valley Forge Pa Trinity Press International ISBN 978 1563383892 Jaeger Stephan 2015 Unreliable Narration in Historical Studies In Nunning Vera ed Unreliable Narration and Trustworthiness Intermedial and Interdisciplinary Perspectives Naratologia Berlin Walter de Gruyter GmbH amp Co KG ISBN 9783110408416 Retrieved 8 July 2020 witnesses narratives or the sources in general could be unreliable This locates unreliable narration on the axis of primary narration which the historian needs to verify and make reliable through source criticism and interpretation in order to balance the subjective objective and reflexive orientations of meaning Hobbes Thomas 1651 Chapter XXXIII Of the number antiquity scope authority and interpreters of the books of Holy Scripture Leviathan Green Dragon in St Paul s Churchyard Andrew Crooke Driver 1911 p 861 para 2 Hobbes Spinoza Baruch 1670 Chapter VIII Of the authorship of the Pentateuch and the other historical books of the Old Testament A Theologico Political Treatise Part II Simon Richard 1682 A critical history of the Old Testament London Walter Davis p 21 a b Wenham Gordon J 2003 Genesis 1 11 Exploring the Old Testament A Guide to the Pentateuch Downers Grove Ill InterVarsity Press ISBN 978 0830825516 Wellhausen Julius 1885 Prolegomena to the History of Israel Edinburgh Adam and Charles Black Wenham Gordon 1996 Pentateuchal Studies Today Themelios 22 1 3 13 Klein Braslavy Sara 1986 The Creation of the world and Maimonides interpretation of Gen i v In Pines S Yovel Y eds Maimonides and Philosophy International Archives of the History of Ideas Archives internationales d histoire des idees Berlin Springer pp 65 78 ISBN 978 9024734399 Physics I 7 Dorandi 1999 p 50 Lang 2001 p 2 Young 1988 pp 42 45 But someone may ask Is not Scripture opposed to those who hold that heaven is spherical when it says who stretches out heaven like a skin Let it be opposed indeed if their statement is false But if they are able to establish their doctrine with proofs that cannot be denied we must show that this statement of Scripture about the skin is not opposed to the truth of their conclusions Gillispie Charles Coulston 1996 1951 Genesis and geology a study in the relations of scientific thought natural theology and social opinion in Great Britain 1790 1850 Cambridge Harvard University Press p 224 ISBN 978 0674344815 Quoted in Gillispie Charles Coulston 1996 1951 Genesis and geology a study in the relations of scientific thought natural theology and social opinion in Great Britain 1790 1850 Cambridge Harvard University Press pp 142 143 ISBN 978 0674344815 Gunkel 1997 p lxviii Moore amp Kelle 2011 p 62 BIBLICAL HISTORY AND ISRAEL S PAST The Changing Views of Scholars in Their Own WordsThe dramatic shifts in the study of the patriarchs and matriarchs that occurred during and after the 1970s can be illustrated by quotations from two works on the history of Israel separated by several decades In a history originally written in the 1950s John Bright asserted Abraham Isaac and Jacob were clan chiefs who actually lived in the second millennium B C The Bible s narrative accurately reflects the times to which it refers But to what it tells of the lives of the patriarchs we can add nothing 1 Assessing the situation in scholarship four decades later William Dever in 2001 concluded After a century of exhaustive investigation all respectable archaeologists have given up hope of recovering any context that would make Abraham Isaac or Jacob credible historical figures 21 John Bright A History of Israel 4th ed Louisville Westminster John Knox 2000 p 93 2 William G Dever What Did the Biblical Writers Know and When Did They Know It What Archaeology Can Tell Us about the Reality of Ancient Israel Grand Rapids Eerdmans 2001 p 98 historical figures but as literary creations of this later period Though the evidentiary underpinnings of this thesis were new the thesis itself was quite similar to the views held by Alt and Noth Thompson Van Seters and others had shown that the earlier scholarly consensus of a second millennium date for the traditions depended upon coincidences and harmonization of evidence that could not be sustained Thompson provided one of the most representative statements of this change in the study of Israel s past N ot only has archaeology not proven a single event of the patriarchal traditions to be historical it has not shown any of the traditions to be likely On the basis of what we know of Palestinian history of the Second Millennium B C and of what we understand about the formation of the literary traditions of Genesis it must be concluded that any such historicity as is commonly spoken of in both scholarly and popular works about the patriarchs of Genesis is hardly possible and totally improbable Thompson Thomas L 1974 The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives The Quest for the Historical Abraham Text Gruyter Walter de amp Company ISBN 9783110040968 Seters John Van 1975 Abraham in History and Tradition Echo Point Books and Media ISBN 978 1 62654 910 4 Moore amp Kelle 2011 pp 18 19 Moorey Peter Roger Stuart 1991 01 01 A Century of Biblical Archaeology Westminster John Knox Press ISBN 978 0 664 25392 9 Kitchen Kenneth 1995 The Patriarchal Age Myth or History Biblical Archaeology Review Retrieved 2021 07 12 Kitchen 2003 p 313 Dever 2001 p 98 There are a few sporadic attempts by conservative scholars to save the patriarchal narratives as history such as Kenneth Kitchen By and large however the minimalist view of Thompson s pioneering work The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives prevails Faust 2022 pp 69 71 72 Dever William March 1993 What Remains of the House that Albright Built The Biblical Archaeologist 56 1 25 35 doi 10 2307 3210358 JSTOR 3210358 S2CID 166003641 Moore amp Kelle 2011 p 81 Dozeman amp Shectman 2016 pp 138 139 Dever 2003 pp 18 19 Dozeman amp Shectman 2016 p 139 Grabbe 2014 pp 63 64 Dever 2003 pp 15 17 Grabbe 2014 p 69 Barmash Pamela 2015 Out of the Mists of History The Exaltation of the Exodus in the Bible In Barmash Pamela Nelson W David eds Exodus in the Jewish Experience Echoes and Reverberations Lexington Books pp 1 22 ISBN 9781498502931 Grabbe 2014 pp 65 67 a b c Faust 2015 p 476 Redmount 2001 p 87 To some the lack of a secure historical grounding for the biblical Exodus narrative merely reflects its nonhistorical nature To others still in the majority among scholars the ultimate historicity of the Exodus narrative is indisputable The details of the story may have become clouded or obscured through the transmission process but a historical core is mandated by that major tenet of faith that permeates the Bible God acts in history Sparks Kenton L 2010 Genre Criticism In Dozeman Thomas B ed Methods for Exodus Cambridge University Press p 73 ISBN 9781139487382 Faust 2015 p 476 While there is a consensus among scholars that the Exodus did not take place in the manner described in the Bible surprisingly most scholars agree that the narrative has a historical core and that some of the highland settlers came one way or another from Egypt Archaeology does not really contribute to the debate over the historicity or even historical background of the Exodus itself but if there was indeed such a group it contributed the Exodus story to that of all Israel While I agree that it is most likely that there was such a group I must stress that this is based on an overall understanding of the development of collective memory and of the authorship of the texts and their editorial process Archaeology unfortunately cannot directly contribute yet to the study of this specific group of Israel s ancestors Dever 2003 p 231 Friedman Richard Elliott 2017 09 12 The Exodus HarperCollins ISBN 978 0 06 256526 6 Meyers Carol 2005 Exodus Cambridge University Press pp 8 10 ISBN 9780521002912 Redmount 2001 p 65 a b c d e Mazar Amihai 2010 Archaeology and the Biblical Narrative The Case of the United Monarchy PDF In Kratz Reinhard G Spieckermann Hermann Corzilius Bjorn Pilger Tanja eds One God one cult one nation archaeological and biblical perspectives Berlin New York Walter de Gruyter pp 29 58 doi 10 1515 9783110223583 29 ISBN 978 3110223583 S2CID 55562061 Archived from the original PDF on 2017 04 02 a b c d Israel Finkelstein Neil Asher Silberman 2001 The Bible Unearthed Archaeology s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Sacred Texts Simon and Schuster pp 81 82 ISBN 978 0743223386 a b Holland Thomas A 1997 Jericho In Eric M Meyers ed The Oxford Encyclopedia of Archaeology in the Near East Oxford University Press pp 220 224 Kenyon Kathleen M 1957 Digging up Jericho The Results of the Jericho Excavations 1952 1956 New York Praeger p 229 Bienkowski Piotr 1986 Jericho in the Late Bronze Age Warminster pp 120 125 Peake A S Grieve A J eds 1919 A Commentary on the Bible 1st ed London T C and E C Jack Hatzor The Head of all those Kingdoms Retrieved 2018 09 18 a b c Finkelstein amp Silberman 2001 Ben tor Amnon 2013 01 01 Who Destroyed Canaanite Hazor BAR A 3 400 year old Mystery Who Burned the Palace of Canaanite Hatzor Haaretz Retrieved 2023 05 11 Friedman Richard Elliott 2017 09 12 The Exodus HarperCollins p 80 ISBN 978 0 06 256526 6 a b Redford Donald B 1992 Egypt Canaan and Israel in ancient times Princeton NJ Princeton University Press p 305 ISBN 978 0691000862 Millard Alan 2011 Are There Anachronisms in the Books of Samuel In Khan Geoffrey Lipton Diana eds Studies on the Text and Versions of the Hebrew Bible in Honour of Robert Gordon BRILL pp 39 48 ISBN 978 90 04 21730 0 Millard Alan R 2020 On Some Alleged Anachronisms in the Books of Samuel Tyndale Bulletin 71 1 65 73 doi 10 53751 001c 27735 ISSN 2752 7042 S2CID 239722609 The Bible in History How Writers Create a Past Thomas Thompson dannyreviews com Retrieved 2023 05 11 Garfinkel Yossi Ganor Sa ar Hasel Michael 19 April 2012 Journal 124 Khirbat Qeiyafa Preliminary Report Hadashot esi org il Archived from the original on 16 May 2012 Faust 2022 p 73 Geva Hillel 2019 Archaeological Research in Jerusalem from 1998 to 2018 Findings and Evaluations Ancient Jerusalem Revealed Archaeological Discoveries 1998 2018 Israel Exploration Society p 12 ISBN 978 965 221 124 8 Schniedewind W M 1996 Tel Dan Stela New Light on Aramaic and Jehu s Revolt Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 302 302 75 90 doi 10 2307 1357129 JSTOR 1357129 S2CID 163597208 Dever William G 2002 What Did the Biblical Writers Know and When Did They Know It Wm B Eerdmans Publishing Company ISBN 080282126X Lemaire Andre House of David Restored in Moabite Inscription Archived 2011 07 13 at the Wayback Machine Biblical Archaeology Review May June 1994 Orlin Eric 2015 Routledge Encyclopedia of Ancient Mediterranean Religions Routledge p 462 ISBN 9781134625529 Dever William G 2020 Has Archaeology Buried the Bible Wm B Eerdmans Publishing ISBN 978 1 4674 5949 5 Ehrman Bart 2011 Forged writing in the name of God Why the Bible s Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are HarperCollins p 285 ISBN 978 0 06 207863 6 Burridge Richard A Gould Graham 2004 Jesus Now and Then Wm B Eerdmans Publishing p 34 ISBN 978 0 8028 0977 3 Price Robert M 2009 Jesus at the Vanishing Point In Beilby James K Eddy Paul R eds The Historical Jesus Five Views InterVarsity pp 55 61 ISBN 978 0 8308 7853 6 Archived from the original on September 7 2015 Retrieved August 14 2015 Sykes Stephen W 2007 Paul s understanding of the death of Jesus Sacrifice and Redemption Cambridge University Press pp 35 36 ISBN 978 0 521 04460 8 Grant Michael 1977 Jesus An Historian s Review of the Gospels Scribner s p 200 ISBN 978 0 684 14889 2 Robert E Van Voorst 2000 Jesus Outside the New Testament An Introduction to the Ancient Evidence Wm B Eerdmans Publishing p 16 ISBN 978 0 8028 4368 5 Baden Candida Moss October 5 2014 So Called Biblical Scholar Says Jesus a Made Up Myth The Daily Beast Crossan J D The Historical Jesus A Mediterranean Jewish Peasant HarperOne 1993 ISBN 0060616296 James D G Dunn Jesus Remembered Christianity in the Making Vol 1 Eerdmans 2003 John P Meier A Marginal Jew Rethinking the Historical Jesus 5 vols the most recent volume from Yale University Press 2016 Sanders E P The Historical Figure of Jesus Penguin 1996 ISBN 0141928220 Wright N T Jesus and the Victory of God Christian Origins and the Question of God Vol 2 Augsburg Fortress Press 1997 ISBN 0800626826 Allison Dale C 1998 Jesus of Nazareth Millenarian Prophet Fortress Press ISBN 978 1 4514 0556 9 Ehrman Bart D 1999 Jesus Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium Oxford University Press ISBN 978 0 19 983943 8 a b Richard Bauckham 2017 Jesus and the Eyewitnesses 2nd ed Wm B Eerdmans Publishing ISBN 978 0 8028 7431 3 Casey Maurice 2010 12 30 Jesus of Nazareth An Independent Historian s Account of His Life and Teaching A amp C Black ISBN 978 0 567 64517 3 John P Meier A Marginal Jew Volume I Doubleday 1991 Fitzmyer Joseph A 2000 03 03 The Dead Sea Scrolls and Christian Origins Wm B Eerdmans Publishing pp 28ff ISBN 978 0 8028 4650 1 Bernstein Richard April 1 1998 BOOKS OF THE TIMES Looking for Jesus and Jews in the Dead Sea Scrolls The New York Times Retrieved May 25 2010 Shanks Hershel 1992 Understanding the Dead Sea scrolls a reader from the Biblical archaeology review Internet Archive New York Random House ISBN 978 0 679 41448 3 Meier John P A Marginal Jew Vol II Doubleday 1994 ISBN 0300140339 Mack Burton 1996 Who Wrote the New Testament The Making of the Christian Myth Harper One ISBN 0060655186 Byrskog Samuel 2000 Story as History History as Story The Gospel Tradition in the Context of Ancient Oral History Mohr Siebeck ISBN 978 3 16 147305 0 Is There Historical Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus A Debate between William Lane Craig and Bart D Ehrman PDF 2009 03 05 Archived from the original PDF on 2009 03 05 Retrieved 2023 05 11 Analecta Romana Instituti Danici Danske selskab Copenhagen Denmark 1998 Nineham Dennis Saint Mark Westminster Press 1978 ISBN 0664213448 p 193 McDonald Lee Martin and Porter Stanley Early Christianity and its Sacred Literature Hendrickson Publishers 2000 p 286 ISBN 1565632664 Strobel Lee The Case for Christ 1998 Chapter one an interview with Blomberg ISBN 0310209307 a b Hurtado Larry W 1981 Text critical Methodology and the Pre Caesarean Text Codex W in the Gospel of Mark Wm B Eerdmans Publishing p 25 ISBN 978 0 8028 1872 0 Biblical literature Definition Types Significance Survey amp Development Britannica www britannica com Retrieved 2023 05 11 a b Cain Seymour et al Biblical literature Britannica com Online Retrieved 15 November 2018 Harris Stephen 1985 Understanding the Bible A Reader s Introduction 2nd ed Mayfield Pub Co ISBN 978 0874846966 Hornik Heidi J Parsons Mikeal C 2017 The Acts of the Apostles through the centuries 1st ed John Wiley amp Sons Ltd ISBN 9781118597873 A history of the Bible who wrote it and when HistoryExtra Kitchen 2003 p 492 Exploding the J E D P Theory The Documentary Hypothesis jashow org 6 September 1991 Sailhamer John 2009 The Meaning of the Pentateuch Revelation Composition and Interpretation Downers Grove IL IVP Academic pp 22 25 Waltke Bruce 2001 Genesis A Commentary Grand Rapids MI Zondervan pp 24 27 Berman Joshua 2017 Inconsistency in the Torah Ancient Literary Convention and the Limits of Source Criticism Oxford University Press ISBN 978 0 19 065880 9 Spong John Shelby 1992 Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism Harper a b Finkelstein Mazar amp Schmidt 2007 p page needed George Athas Minimalism The Copenhagen School of Thought in Biblical Studies edited transcript of lecture 3rd ed University of Sydney April 29 1999 Garbini 1988 Thompson 1992 Davies 1995 Mykytiuk 2010 p 76 Brettler 2003 pp 1 21 Mykytiuk 2012 pp 101 137 see the section Toward a Balanced View of Minimalism A Summary of Published Critiques Maximalists and Minimalists Livius www livius org Retrieved 2023 05 11 Finkelstein amp Silberman 2001 Ancient Civilizations Timeline The Complete List from Aboriginals to Incans History Cooperative 2019 12 15 Retrieved 2023 05 11 Quoting Amy Dockster Marcus about the minimalists The bottom line is that when it comes to the big picture they are often right Many of their ideas once considered far fetched are now solidly mainstream concepts American Journal of Theology amp Philosophy Vol 14 No 1 January 1993 PDF Archived from the original PDF on 2007 09 30 Retrieved 2018 09 18 Philip Davies Beyond Labels What Comes Next Grabbe 2007 pp 57 58 Faust 2022 p 79 Kitchen 2003 p unpaginated Wallace 2006 p unpaginated David and Solomon Archived 2012 03 06 at the Wayback Machine Beschrijving Bol com Richard N Ostling Was King David legend or fiction Archived 2011 04 27 at the Wayback Machine The Associated Press Finkelstein amp Silberman 2006 p 20 Finkelstein amp Silberman 2006 p 103 Ussishkin David Solomon s Jerusalem The Texts and the Facts on the Ground in Vaughn Andrew G and Killebrew Ann E eds 2003 Jerusalem in Bible and Archaeology The First Temple Period SBL Symposium Series 18 Atlanta Society of Biblical Literature Lehrmann Gunnar The United Monarchy in the Countryside Jerusalem Judah and the Shephelah during the Tenth Century BCE in Vaughn Andrew G and Killebrew Ann E eds 2003 Jerusalem in Bible and Archaeology The First Temple Period SBL Symposium Series 18 Atlanta Society of Biblical Literature Dever 2001 p 160 Shanks 1999 p 113 Hess Richard S 2007 Israelite Religions An Archaeological and Biblical Survey Baker Academic ISBN 0801027179 Jack Cargill Ancient Israel in Western Civ Textbooks The History Teacher 34 3 2001 12 12 Archived from the original on 29 June 2012 Retrieved 5 October 2014 Moore amp Kelle 2011 Sources edit Brettler Marc Z 2003 The Copenhagen School The Historiographical Issues AJS Review 27 1 1 21 doi 10 1017 S0364009403000011 JSTOR 4131767 S2CID 144265632 Davies Philip R 1995 1992 In Search of Ancient Israel Continuum International Publishing Group ISBN 978 1850757375 Davies Philip R 2015 Minimalism Ancient Israel and Anti Semitism The Bible and Interpretation Dever William G 2001 Getting at the History behind the History What Did the Biblical Writers Know and When Did They Know It What Archeology Can Tell Us About the Reality of Ancient Israel Grand Rapids Michigan and Cambridge U K Wm B Eerdmans pp 97 102 ISBN 978 0 8028 2126 3 OCLC 46394298 Dever William G 2003 Who Were the Early Israelites and Where Did They Come From Eerdmans ISBN 9780802844163 Dever William G 2012 The Lives of Ordinary People in Ancient Israel Eerdmans ISBN 978 0802867018 Dorandi Tiziano 1999 Chapter 2 Chronology In Algra Keimpe et al eds The Cambridge History of Hellenistic Philosophy Cambridge England Cambridge University Press p 50 ISBN 978 0521250283 Dozeman Thomas B Shectman Sarah 2016 Exodus In Yee Gale A Page Hugh R Jr Coomber Matthew J M eds The Pentateuch Fortress Commentary on the Bible Study Edition Fortress Press pp 137 178 doi 10 2307 j ctt1b3t6qt 11 ISBN 9781506414423 JSTOR j ctt1b3t6qt 11 Driver Samuel Rolles 1911 Bible In Chisholm Hugh ed Encyclopaedia Britannica Vol 03 11th ed Cambridge University Press pp 849 894 see page 861 Enns Peter January 10 2013 3 Things I Would Like to See Evangelical Leaders Stop Saying about Biblical Scholarship Peter Enns Faust Avraham 2015 The Emergence of Iron Age Israel On Origins and Habitus In Thomas E Levy Thomas Schneider William H C Propp eds Israel s Exodus in Transdisciplinary Perspective Text Archaeology Culture and Geoscience Springer ISBN 978 3 319 04768 3 Faust Avraham 2022 Between the Biblical Story and History Writing an Archaeological History of Ancient Israel In Keimer Kyle H Pierce George A eds The Ancient Israelite World Taylor amp Francis pp 67 82 ISBN 978 1 000 77324 8 Finkelstein Israel Silberman Neil Asher 2001 The Bible Unearthed Archaeology s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts New York Simon and Schuster Finkelstein Israel Silberman Neil Asher 2006 David and Solomon In Search of the Bible s Sacred Kings and the Roots of the Western Tradition New York Free Press ISBN 978 0743243636 Finkelstein Israel Mazar Amihay Schmidt Brian B 2007 The Quest for the Historical Israel Society of Biblical Literature ISBN 978 1589832770 Garbini Giovanni 1988 History and Ideology in Ancient Israel Translated by Bowden John New York Crossroad ISBN 9780824508876 a translation of the original Italian publication Golden Jonathan Michael 2009 Ancient Canaan and Israel new perspectives Oxford University Press p 275 Grabbe Lester L 2007 10 25 Some Recent Issues in the Study of the History of Israel Understanding the History of Ancient Israel British Academy pp 57 67 doi 10 5871 bacad 9780197264010 003 0005 ISBN 978 0 19 726401 0 Grabbe Lester 2014 Exodus and History In Dozeman Thomas Evans Craig A Lohr Joel N eds The Book of Exodus Composition Reception and Interpretation Leiden Brill Publishers pp 61 87 ISBN 9789004282667 Gunkel Hermann 1997 1901 Genesis Translated by Biddle Mark E Macon GA Mercer University Press p lxviii ISBN 978 0865545175 Hayes Christine 2012 The Modern Critical Study of the Bible Introduction to the Bible The Open Yale Courses Series New Haven and London Yale University Press pp 58 75 ISBN 9780300181791 JSTOR j ctt32bxpm 9 Kitchen K A 2003 On the reliability of the Old Testament Grand Rapids Michigan Wm B Eerdmans ISBN 978 0802849601 Lambert David February 2016 How the Torah of Moses Became Revelation An Early Apocalyptic Theory of Pentateuchal Origins Journal for the Study of Judaism in the Persian Hellenistic and Roman Period Leiden Brill Publishers 47 1 22 54 doi 10 1163 15700631 12340440 ISSN 1570 0631 JSTOR 26551161 S2CID 170140782 Lang Helen 2001 Introduction On the Eternity of the World By Proclus Berkeley University of California Press p 2 ISBN 978 0520225541 Mazar Amihay 1992 Archaeology of the land of the Bible 10 000 586 BCE Garden City NY Doubleday ISBN 978 0385425902 Miller Merrill P January 1971 Targum Midrash and the Use of the Old Testament in the New Testament Journal for the Study of Judaism in the Persian Hellenistic and Roman Period Leiden Brill Publishers 2 1 29 82 doi 10 1163 157006371X00037 ISSN 1570 0631 JSTOR 24656132 S2CID 161934539 Mykytiuk Lawrence J 2010 Strengthening Biblical Historicity vis a vis Minimalism 1992 2008 Part 1 Introducing a Bibliographic Essay in Five Parts Journal of Religious and Theological Information 9 3 4 76 doi 10 1080 10477845 2010 526920 S2CID 170314161 Mykytiuk Lawrence J 2012 Strengthening Biblical Historicity vis a vis Minimalism 1992 2008 and Beyond Part 2 1 The Literature of Perspective Critique and Methodology First Half Journal of Religious and Theological Information 11 3 4 101 137 doi 10 1080 10477845 2012 673111 S2CID 8509370 In which the relevant section is Toward a Balanced View of Minimalism A Summary of Published Critiques the Official version of record is available at Strengthening Biblical Historicity vis a vis Minimalism 1992 2008 and Beyond Part 2 1 The Literature of Perspective Critique and Methodology First Half Author s Accepted Draft if freely available at Strengthening Biblical Historicity vis a vis Minimalism 1992 2008 and Beyond Part 2 1 The Literature of Perspective Critique and Methodology First Half Moore Megan Bishop Kelle Brad E 2011 Biblical History and Israel s Past Eerdmans ISBN 978 0802862600 Redmount Carol A 2001 1998 Bitter Lives Israel in and out of Egypt In Coogan Michael D ed The Oxford History of the Biblical World Oxford and New York Oxford University Press pp 58 89 ISBN 9780195139372 Schlimm Matthew R 2011 Part 3 In Search of A Brother s Keeper Anger and Its Antitheses in Genesis A Land of Limitations Anger among Shepherds From Fratricide to Forgiveness The Language and Ethics of Anger in Genesis Siphrut Literature and Theology of the Hebrew Scriptures Vol 7 University Park Pennsylvania Eisenbrauns imprint of Penn State University Press pp 144 153 doi 10 5325 j ctv1bxgwgm 16 ISBN 978 1 57506 224 2 S2CID 209438529 Shanks Hershel 1999 Ancient Israel From Abraham to the Roman Destruction of the Temple Pearson ISBN 978 0130853639 Stavrakopoulou Francesca 2016 The Historical Framework Biblical and Scholarly Portrayals of the Past In Barton John ed The Hebrew Bible A Critical Companion Princeton New Jersey and Oxford U K Princeton University Press pp 24 53 doi 10 2307 j ctv7h0snt 6 ISBN 9781400880584 Thompson Thomas L 1992 Early History of the Israelite People Brill ISBN 978 9004119437 Thompson Thomas L 2014 Biblical Narrative and Palestine s History Changing Perspectives 2 Routledge ISBN 978 1317543428 Young Davis A March 1988 The contemporary relevance of Augustine s view of Creation Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith 40 1 42 45 Wallace Jennifer May 2006 Shifting Ground in the Holy Land Smithsonian Magazine Further reading editBanks Diane 2006 Writing The History Of Israel Continuum International Publishing Group ISBN 978 0567026620 Barenboim Peter 2005 Biblical Roots of Separation of Powers Moscow Letny Sad ISBN 978 5943811234 LCCN 2006400578 Biran Avraham 1994 David Found at Dan Biblical Archaeology Review 20 2 26 39 Brettler Marc Zvi 2005 How to Read the Bible Jewish Publication Society ISBN 978 0827610019 Christopher Hayes 2014 Hidden riches a source book for the comparative study of the Hebrew Bible and ancient Near East Presbyterian Publishing Corp ISBN 978 0664237011 OCLC 879468366 Coogan Michael D 1993 Canaanites Who Were They and Where Did They Live Bible Review 9 3 44 ff Davies Philip R 1998 Scribes and Schools The Canonization of the Hebrew Scriptures Davies Philip R 2008 Memories of Ancient Israel Westminster John Knox Press ISBN 978 0664232887 Finkelstein Israel 1988 The Archaeology of the Israelite Settlement Leiden Brill Halpern Baruch December 1995 Erasing History The Minimalist Assault on Ancient Israel Bible Review 26 35 47 Hinnels John R ed 1975 Mithraic Studies Proceedings of the First International Congress of Mithraic Studies Manchester University Press Kugel James L 1997 The Bible As It Was Belknap Press of Harvard University Press ISBN 0 674 06940 4 Larsson G 2007 The Chronological System of the Old Testament Bern Peter Lang Lemche Niels Peter 1985 Early Israel Anthropological and Historical Studies on the Israelite Society Before the Monarchy Leiden South Holland Bril l Lemche Niels Peter 1998 The Israelites in History and Tradition Westminster John Knox Press ISBN 978 0664227272 Miller James Maxwell 1986 A History of Ancient Israel and Judah Westminster John Knox Press ISBN 978 0664212629 Na aman Nadav 1996 The Contribution of the Amarna Letters to the Debate on Jerusalem s Political Position in the Tenth Century B C E BASOR 304 17 27 Na aman Nadav August 1997 Cow Town or Royal Capital Evidence for Iron Age Jerusalem Biblical Archaeology Review 23 4 43 47 67 Noth Martin 1981 1943 Uberlieferungsgeschichtliche Studien The Deuteronomistic History Sheffield a href Template Cite book html title Template Cite book cite book a CS1 maint location missing publisher link also The Chronicler s History Sheffield 1987 Provan Iain W 1995 Ideologies Literary and Critical Reflections on Recent Writing on the History of Israel Journal of Biblical Literature 114 4 585 606 doi 10 2307 3266476 JSTOR 3266476 a critique of the Copenhagen School of Thought with responses in the same journal by Davies above and Thompson 1995 see below Seters John Van 1975 Abraham in History and Tradition New Haven Yale University Press Shanks Hershel 1995 Jerusalem An Archaeological Biography New York Random House Shanks Hershel August 1997 Face to Face Biblical Minimalists Meet Their Challengers Biblical Archaeology Review 23 4 26 42 66 Smith Mark S 2002 1990 The Early History of God Eerdmans Steiner Margareet Cahill Jane 1998 David s Jerusalem Fiction or Reality Biblical Archaeology Review 24 4 25 33 62 63 34 41 63 This article presents a debate between a Biblical minimalist and a Biblical maximalist Thompson Thomas L 1995 A Neo Albrightean School in History and Biblical Scholarship Journal of Biblical Literature 114 4 683 698 doi 10 2307 3266481 JSTOR 3266481 a response to the article by Iain W Provan 1995 above Thompson Thomas L 1999 The Mythic Past Biblical Archaeology And The Myth Of Israel Basic Book ISBN 9780465006229 Thompson Thomas L 1999 The Bible in History How Writers Create a Past London a href Template Cite book html title Template Cite book cite book a CS1 maint location missing publisher link Thompson Thomas L 2015 A view from Copenhagen Israel and the History of Palestine The Bible and Interpretation Tubb Jonathan N 1998 Canaanites University of Oklahoma Press ISBN 978 0806131085 Vaughn Andrew G Killebrew Ann E eds 1992 Jerusalem in Bible and Archaeology The First Temple Period Sheffield ISBN 978 1589830660 Whitelam Keith W 1996 The Invention of Ancient Israel Routledge ISBN 978 0415107587 Yamauchi Edwin 1972 The Stones and the Scriptures Philadelphia J B Lippincott Company External links edit Minimalism The Copenhagen School of Thought in Biblical Studies Archived 2011 06 04 at the Wayback Machine Biblical Archaeology Society examines discoveries and controversies about historical veracity of the Bible Livius org Maximalism and minimalism Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Historicity of the Bible amp oldid 1207117825, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

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