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Hebrew bible:
The Hebrew bible is not a single book but rather a collection of texts, most of them anonymous, and most of them the product of more or less extensive editing prior to reaching their modern form. These texts are in many different genres, but three distinct blocks approximating modern narrative history can be made out.
Torah: Genesis to Deuteronomy:
God creates the world; the world God creates is good, but it becomes corrupted with violence. God destroys it in a deluge, but accepts thereafter that mankind is inherently inclined to wickedness. God selects Abraham to inherit the land of Canaan (i.e., Palestine). The children of Israel, Abraham's grandson, go into Egypt, where their descendants are enslaved. The Israelites are led out of Egypt by Moses and receive the laws of God, who renews the promise of the land of Canaan.
Deuteronomic history: Joshua to 2 Kings
The Israelites conquer the land of Canaan under Joshua, successor to Moses. Under the Judges they live in a state of constant conflict and insecurity, until the prophet Samuel anoints Saul as king over them. Saul proves unworthy, and God selects David as his successor. Under David the Israelites are united and conquer their enemies, and under Solomon his son they live in peace and prosperity. But the kingdom is divided under Solomon's successors, Israel in the north and Judah in the south, and the kings of Israel fall away from God and eventually the people of the north are taken into captivity by outsiders. Judah, unlike Israel, has some kings who follow God, but others do not, and eventually it too is taken into captivity, and the Temple of God built by Solomon is destroyed.
Chronicler's history: Chronicles and Ezra/Nehemiah
(Chronicles begins by reprising the history of the Torah and the Deuteronomistic history, with some differences over details. It introduces new material following its account of the fall of Jerusalem, the event which concludes the Deuteronomic history). The Babylonians, who had destroyed the Temple and taken the people into captivity, are themselves defeated by the Persians under their king Cyrus. Cyrus permits the exiles to return to Jerusalem. The Temple is rebuilt, and the Laws of Moses are read to the people.
Other (Several other books of the Hebrew bible are set in a historical context or otherwise give information which can be regarded as historical, although these books do not present themselves as histories).
The prophets Amos and Hosea write of events during the 8th century kingdom of Israel; the prophet Jeremiah writes of events preceding and following the fall of Judah; Ezekiel writes of events during and preceding the exile in Babylon; and other prophets similarly touch on various periods, usually those in which they write.
Several books are included in some canons but not in others. Among these, Maccabees is a purely historical work that treats of the events of the 2nd century BC. Others are not historical in orientation but are set in historical contexts or reprise earlier histories, such as Enoch, an apocalyptic work of the 2nd century BC.
The Hebrew bible is not a single book but rather a collection of texts, most of them anonymous, and most of them the product of more or less extensive editing prior to reaching their modern form. These texts are in many different genres, but three distinct blocks approximating modern narrative history can be made out.
Torah: Genesis to Deuteronomy:
God creates the world; the world God creates is good, but it becomes corrupted with violence. God destroys it in a deluge, but accepts thereafter that mankind is inherently inclined to wickedness. God selects Abraham to inherit the land of Canaan (i.e., Palestine). The children of Israel, Abraham's grandson, go into Egypt, where their descendants are enslaved. The Israelites are led out of Egypt by Moses and receive the laws of God, who renews the promise of the land of Canaan.
Deuteronomic history: Joshua to 2 Kings
The Israelites conquer the land of Canaan under Joshua, successor to Moses. Under the Judges they live in a state of constant conflict and insecurity, until the prophet Samuel anoints Saul as king over them. Saul proves unworthy, and God selects David as his successor. Under David the Israelites are united and conquer their enemies, and under Solomon his son they live in peace and prosperity. But the kingdom is divided under Solomon's successors, Israel in the north and Judah in the south, and the kings of Israel fall away from God and eventually the people of the north are taken into captivity by outsiders. Judah, unlike Israel, has some kings who follow God, but others do not, and eventually it too is taken into captivity, and the Temple of God built by Solomon is destroyed.
Chronicler's history: Chronicles and Ezra/Nehemiah
(Chronicles begins by reprising the history of the Torah and the Deuteronomistic history, with some differences over details. It introduces new material following its account of the fall of Jerusalem, the event which concludes the Deuteronomic history). The Babylonians, who had destroyed the Temple and taken the people into captivity, are themselves defeated by the Persians under their king Cyrus. Cyrus permits the exiles to return to Jerusalem. The Temple is rebuilt, and the Laws of Moses are read to the people.
Other (Several other books of the Hebrew bible are set in a historical context or otherwise give information which can be regarded as historical, although these books do not present themselves as histories).
The prophets Amos and Hosea write of events during the 8th century kingdom of Israel; the prophet Jeremiah writes of events preceding and following the fall of Judah; Ezekiel writes of events during and preceding the exile in Babylon; and other prophets similarly touch on various periods, usually those in which they write.
Several books are included in some canons but not in others. Among these, Maccabees is a purely historical work that treats of the events of the 2nd century BC. Others are not historical in orientation but are set in historical contexts or reprise earlier histories, such as Enoch, an apocalyptic work of the 2nd century BC.
The Garden of Eden: from history to mythology. By Lucas Cranach der Ältere(1472–1553)
Until the 18th century, the general belief in Christendom was that the earth was created 4,000 years before the birth of Christ, and that the Garden of Eden, the Flood, the Tower of Babel, and the stories of Abraham and the Exodus described actual events, constituting a genuine narrative history from Creation to the founding of Israel. However, there had always been a critical tradition as well, dating back to at least St Augustine of Hippo (354-430), with interpretations "plainly at variance with what are commonly perceived in evangelicalism as traditional views of Genesis."[11] The Jewish tradition has also maintained a critical thread in its approach to biblical primeval history. The influential medieval philosopher Maimonides maintained a sceptical ambiguity towards creation ex nihilo and considered the stories about Adam more as "philosophical anthropology, rather than as historical stories whose protagonist is the 'first man'."[12] But in the absence of credible scientific or historical explanations, the Genesis accounts were widely held to be authoritative, and rarely challenged.
Galileo is the name most closely associated with the first scientific assault on biblical authority, but the heliocentric universe was sufficiently peripheral to biblical ontology to be accommodated, as is shown in its acceptance by today's fundamentalists. It was in fact the birth of geology, marked by the publication of James Hutton's Theory of the Earth in 1788, which set in train the intellectual 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 1800s "no responsible scientist contended for the literal credibility of the Mosaic account of creation." (p. 224)[13] 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.[14]
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 The Origin of Species in 1859. Public acceptance of this scientific revolution was, and remains, uneven but the mainstream scholarly community soon arrived at a consensus, which holds today, that Genesis 1–11 is a highly schematic literary work representing theology/mythology rather than history.[15]
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, Joshua was by Joshua, and so on. But 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 threw a harsh sceptical spotlight on these traditional claims. In Protestant England the philosopher Thomas Hobbes in his major work Leviathan 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 originall writers of the severall 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)."[16]
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 A Theologico-Political Treatise (published in 1670),[17] 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 "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 Registeries of the Hebrews," in what was probably the first work of biblical textual criticism in the modern sense.[18]
In response Jean Astruc, applying source criticism methods common in the analysis of classical secular texts to the Pentateuch, believed he could detect four different manuscript traditions, which he claimed Moses himself had redacted. (p. 62-64)[15] His 1753 book initiated the school known a higher criticism that culminated in Julius Wellhausen formalising the documentary hypothesis in the 1870s,[19] which in various modified forms still dominates understanding of the composition of the historical narratives.
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 now widely classed as biblical mythologies, as discussed above.
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 histriographic 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 obervation that
if, however, we consider figures like Abraham, Issac, 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[20]
has in various forms become a commonplace of contemporary criticism.[21]
In the United States the biblical archaeology movement, under the influence of Albright, counter-attacked, 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. Today, only a minority of scholars continue to work within this framework, mainly for reasons of religious conviction.[22] "[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'."[23]
The scholarly history of the Deuteronomic history parallels that of the Pentateuch: the European tradition history school argued that the narrative was untrustworthy and could not be used to construct a narrative history; the American Albright school asserted that it could when tested against the archaeological record; and modern archaeological techniques proved crucial in decidig the issue. The test case was the book of Joshua and its account of a rapid, destructive conquest of the Canaanite cities: but 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. The most high-profile example was the "fall of Jericho", when new excavations in the 1950s by Kathleen Kenyon revealed that the city had already been abandoned by the time of Joshua.[24]
This section needs additional citations for verification.Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (January 2010)
Thomas L. Thompson, a leading 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."
Proponents of this theory also point to the fact that the division of the land into two entities, centered at Jerusalem and Shechem, goes back to the Egyptian rule of Israel in the New Kingdom. Solomon's empire is said to have stretched from the Euphrates in the north to the Red Sea in the south; it would have required a large commitment of men and arms and a high level of organization to conquer, subdue, and govern this area. But there is little archaeological evidence of Jerusalem being a sufficiently large city in the 10th century BCE, and Judah seems to be sparsely settled in that time period. Since Jerusalem has been destroyed and then subsequently rebuilt approximately 15 to 20 times since the time of David and Solomon, some argue much of the evidence could easily have been eliminated.
The conquests of David and Solomon are also not mentioned in contemporary histories. Culturally, the Bronze Age collapse is otherwise a period of general cultural impoverishment of the whole Levantine region, making it difficult to consider the existence of any large territorial unit such as the Davidic kingdom, whose cultural features rather seem to resemble the later kingdom of Hezekiah or Josiah than the political and economic conditions of the 11th century. Moreover the biblical account makes no claim that they directly governed the areas included in their empires which are portrayed instead as tributaries[citation needed]. However, since the discovery of a 9th century BCE inscription on the Tel Dan Stele unearthed in the north of Israel, which may refer to the "house of David" as a monarchic dynasty[citation needed], the debate has continued.[citation needed] This is still hotly disputed, as well as a heated debate extends as to whether the united monarchy, the vast empire of King Solomon, and the rebellion of Jeroboam ever existed, or whether they are a late fabrication.
Once again there is a problem here with the sources for this period of history. There are no contemporary independent documents other than the claimed accounts of the Books of Samuel, which clearly shows too many anachronisms to have been a contemporary account. For example there is mention of late 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), sophisticated siege techniques (2 Samuel 20:15), there is a gargantuan troop (2 Samuel 17:1), a battle with 20,000 casualties (2 Samuel 18:7), and refer 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.[25].
Until the 18th century, the general belief in Christendom was that the earth was created 4,000 years before the birth of Christ, and that the Garden of Eden, the Flood, the Tower of Babel, and the stories of Abraham and the Exodus described actual events, constituting a genuine narrative history from Creation to the founding of Israel. However, there had always been a critical tradition as well, dating back to at least St Augustine of Hippo (354-430), with interpretations "plainly at variance with what are commonly perceived in evangelicalism as traditional views of Genesis."[11] The Jewish tradition has also maintained a critical thread in its approach to biblical primeval history. The influential medieval philosopher Maimonides maintained a sceptical ambiguity towards creation ex nihilo and considered the stories about Adam more as "philosophical anthropology, rather than as historical stories whose protagonist is the 'first man'."[12] But in the absence of credible scientific or historical explanations, the Genesis accounts were widely held to be authoritative, and rarely challenged.
Galileo is the name most closely associated with the first scientific assault on biblical authority, but the heliocentric universe was sufficiently peripheral to biblical ontology to be accommodated, as is shown in its acceptance by today's fundamentalists. It was in fact the birth of geology, marked by the publication of James Hutton's Theory of the Earth in 1788, which set in train the intellectual 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 1800s "no responsible scientist contended for the literal credibility of the Mosaic account of creation." (p. 224)[13] 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.[14]
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 The Origin of Species in 1859. Public acceptance of this scientific revolution was, and remains, uneven but the mainstream scholarly community soon arrived at a consensus, which holds today, that Genesis 1–11 is a highly schematic literary work representing theology/mythology rather than history.[15]
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, Joshua was by Joshua, and so on. But 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 threw a harsh sceptical spotlight on these traditional claims. In Protestant England the philosopher Thomas Hobbes in his major work Leviathan 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 originall writers of the severall 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)."[16]
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 A Theologico-Political Treatise (published in 1670),[17] 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 "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 Registeries of the Hebrews," in what was probably the first work of biblical textual criticism in the modern sense.[18]
In response Jean Astruc, applying source criticism methods common in the analysis of classical secular texts to the Pentateuch, believed he could detect four different manuscript traditions, which he claimed Moses himself had redacted. (p. 62-64)[15] His 1753 book initiated the school known a higher criticism that culminated in Julius Wellhausen formalising the documentary hypothesis in the 1870s,[19] which in various modified forms still dominates understanding of the composition of the historical narratives.
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 now widely classed as biblical mythologies, as discussed above.
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 histriographic 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 obervation that
if, however, we consider figures like Abraham, Issac, 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[20]
has in various forms become a commonplace of contemporary criticism.[21]
In the United States the biblical archaeology movement, under the influence of Albright, counter-attacked, 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. Today, only a minority of scholars continue to work within this framework, mainly for reasons of religious conviction.[22] "[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'."[23]
The scholarly history of the Deuteronomic history parallels that of the Pentateuch: the European tradition history school argued that the narrative was untrustworthy and could not be used to construct a narrative history; the American Albright school asserted that it could when tested against the archaeological record; and modern archaeological techniques proved crucial in decidig the issue. The test case was the book of Joshua and its account of a rapid, destructive conquest of the Canaanite cities: but 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. The most high-profile example was the "fall of Jericho", when new excavations in the 1950s by Kathleen Kenyon revealed that the city had already been abandoned by the time of Joshua.[24]
This section needs additional citations for verification.Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (January 2010)
Thomas L. Thompson, a leading 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."
Proponents of this theory also point to the fact that the division of the land into two entities, centered at Jerusalem and Shechem, goes back to the Egyptian rule of Israel in the New Kingdom. Solomon's empire is said to have stretched from the Euphrates in the north to the Red Sea in the south; it would have required a large commitment of men and arms and a high level of organization to conquer, subdue, and govern this area. But there is little archaeological evidence of Jerusalem being a sufficiently large city in the 10th century BCE, and Judah seems to be sparsely settled in that time period. Since Jerusalem has been destroyed and then subsequently rebuilt approximately 15 to 20 times since the time of David and Solomon, some argue much of the evidence could easily have been eliminated.
The conquests of David and Solomon are also not mentioned in contemporary histories. Culturally, the Bronze Age collapse is otherwise a period of general cultural impoverishment of the whole Levantine region, making it difficult to consider the existence of any large territorial unit such as the Davidic kingdom, whose cultural features rather seem to resemble the later kingdom of Hezekiah or Josiah than the political and economic conditions of the 11th century. Moreover the biblical account makes no claim that they directly governed the areas included in their empires which are portrayed instead as tributaries[citation needed]. However, since the discovery of a 9th century BCE inscription on the Tel Dan Stele unearthed in the north of Israel, which may refer to the "house of David" as a monarchic dynasty[citation needed], the debate has continued.[citation needed] This is still hotly disputed, as well as a heated debate extends as to whether the united monarchy, the vast empire of King Solomon, and the rebellion of Jeroboam ever existed, or whether they are a late fabrication.
Once again there is a problem here with the sources for this period of history. There are no contemporary independent documents other than the claimed accounts of the Books of Samuel, which clearly shows too many anachronisms to have been a contemporary account. For example there is mention of late 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), sophisticated siege techniques (2 Samuel 20:15), there is a gargantuan troop (2 Samuel 17:1), a battle with 20,000 casualties (2 Samuel 18:7), and refer 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.[25].
New Testament
While the authorship of a number of the Pauline epistles are largely undisputed, but there is no scholarly consensus on the authors of the other books of the New Testament.Gospels/ActsJesus is born to Joseph and Mary; he is baptised by John the Baptist and begins a preaching and healing mission in Galilee; he comes up to Jerusalem to celebrate Passover, is arrested, tried, condemned, and crucified. He is raised from the dead by God, appears before his followers, issuing the Great Commission, and ascends to Heaven, with a promise to return. The followers of Jesus, who had been fearful following the Crucifixion, are encouraged by Jesus' resurrection and continue to practice and to preach his teachings. The Apostle Paul preaches throughout the eastern Mediterranean, is arrested, and appeals. He is sent to Rome for trial, and the narrative breaks off.Epistles/RevelationThe epistles (literally "letters") are largely concerned with theology, but the theological arguments they present form a "history of theology". Revelation deals with the last judgement and the end of the world.
The historicity, teachings, and nature of Jesus are currently debated among biblical scholars. 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 '90s with the work of J.D. Crossan[26], James D.G. Dunn[27], John P. Meier[28], E.P. Sanders[29] and N.T. Wright [30] being the most widely read and discussed. The earliest New Testament texts which refer to Jesus, Paul's letters, 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.[31]
The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls has shed light into the context of first century Palestine, noting the diversity of Jewish belief as well as shared expectations and teachings. For example the expectation of the coming messiah, the beatitudes of theSermon on the Mount and much else of the early Christian movement are found to have existed within apocalyptic Judaism of the period. 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 Rabbinical Judaism and Christianity are only two of the many strands which survived the Jewish revolt of 66 to 70 CE[32][33], see also List of events in early Christianity.
Most modern scholars hold that the canonical Gospel accounts were written between 70 and 110 CE, four to six decades after the crucifixion, although based on earlier traditions and texts, such as "Q," sayings gospels, the passion account or other earlier literature (See List of Gospels). Some scholars argue that these accounts were compiled by witnesses[34] although this view is disputed by critics.[35] There are also secular references to the life of Jesus, although they are few and quite late. Almost all historical critics agree, however, 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.[36]
The absence of evidence of Jesus' life before his meeting with John the Baptist has led to many speculations. It would seem that part of the explanation may lie in the early conflict between Paul and the Desposyni Ebionim, led by James the Just, supposedly the brother of Jesus, that led to Gospel passages critical of Jesus' family[37]
[edit] Schools of archaeological and historical thought
[edit] Overview of academic views
An educated reading of the biblical text requires knowledge of when it was written, by whom, and for what purpose. For example, most 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 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. This topic is expanded upon in dating the Bible.
An important point to keep in mind is the documentary hypothesis, which using the biblical evidence itself, claims to demonstrate that our current version was based on older written sources that were lost. (See documentary hypothesis for details.) Although it has been modified heavily over the years, most scholars accept some form of this hypothesis (the Vatican estimates 90% of scholars). There have also been and are a number of scholars who reject it, for example Egyptologist Kenneth Kitchen[38] and the late Umberto Cassuto and Gleason Archer.
There are two loosely defined historical schools of thought with regard to the historical accuracy of the Bible, biblical minimalism and biblical maximalism, as well as a non-historical method of reading the Bible, the traditional religious reading of the Bible.
Note that historical opinions fall on a spectrum, rather than in two tightly defined camps. Since there is a wide range of opinions regarding the historical accuracy of the Bible, it should not be surprising that any given scholar may have views that fall anywhere between these two loosely defined camps.
[edit] Maximalist - Minimalist Dichotomy
The major split of biblical Scholarship into two opposing schools is strongly disapproved by non-fundamentalist biblical scholars, as being an attempt by so-called "conservative" Christians to portray the field as a bipolar argument, of which only one side is correct[39]. Examination of the so-called "liberal/secular" views in detail shows many differences of opinion, clearly demonstrating that to portray biblical scholarship in such "us" against "them" terms reflects a particular sectarian point of view, not supported by the evidence.
Recently the difference between the Maximalist and Minimalist has reduced, however 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[40]. This schools argues that Post-processual archaeology enables us to recognise 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 naive 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. This middle school has little support.
[edit] Biblical minimalism
Main article: Biblical minimalism
Biblical minimalists generally hold that the Bible is principally a theological and apologetic work, and all stories within it are of an aetiological character. 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, which the Bible says that David and Solomon ruled over an empire from the Euphrates to Eilath, ever existed.
"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"[41]
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). In his footsteps followed Thomas L. Thompson with his lengthy Early History of the Israelite People: From the Written & Archaeological Sources (1992) and, building explicitly on Thompson's book, P. R. Davies' shorter work, In Search of 'Ancient Israel' (1992). In the latter, Davies finds historical Israel only in archaeological remains, biblical Israel only in Scripture, and recent reconstructions of "ancient Israel" are 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".
[edit] Biblical maximalism
While there is no scholarly controversy on the historicity of the events recounted from the Babylonian captivity in the 6th century BC, and that the events predating the United Monarchy cannot be shown to have any historicity, the positions of "maximalists" vs. "minimalists" concern the monarchy period, spanning the 10th to 7th centuries BC. The maximalist position holds that the accounts of the United Monarchy and the early kings of Israel, king David and king Saul, are to be taken as largely historical.[42]
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