Biblical Minimalism - Biblical Minimalism - Bible As An Historical Source Document

Bible As An Historical Source Document

The first of the minimalists' two central claims is based on a recognition that history-writing is never objective, but involves the selection of data and the construction of a narrative using preconceived ideas of the meaning of the past - the fact that history is thus never neutral or objective raises questions about the accuracy of any historical account. The minimalists cautioned that the literary form of the biblical history books is so apparent and the authors' intentions so obvious that modern scholars should be extremely cautious in taking them at face value; moreover, even if the Bible does preserve some accurate information, we lack the means to sift that information from the inventions with which it has been mixed. The minimalists did not claim that the Bible is useless as a historical source; rather, they suggested that its proper use is in understanding the period in which it was written, a period which some of them place in the Persian period (5th-4th centuries BCE) and others in the Hellenistic period (3rd-2nd centuries).