The Bible in History: How Writers Create A Past - The Minimalist/maximalist Debate

The Minimalist/maximalist Debate

Thompson is a leading biblical minimalist, a group of like-minded scholars including Niels Peter Lemche, Philip R. Davies, and Keith W. Whitelam among others who say that the Hebrew bible cannot be treated as history, because it was not intended as history. The minimalist argument has been received with emotions bordering on outrage by other scholars, somewhat inaccurately known as "maximalists" - most of them do not in fact subscribe to a view that would take all or even most of the bible as being historically accurate, but object strongly to the minimalist contention that it is completely or almost completely ahistorical. The debate has been frequently framed in political terms, with the minimalists accused of subverting the existence of the modern state of Israel and worse. "The Bible in History", Thompson's attempt to summarise the minimalist thesis and set it before a wider public, was the immediate cause for William G. Dever's rejoinder, What Did the Biblical Writers Know and When Did They Know It?, (2001), which then led into a long and frequently heated debate (in which Davies, rather than Thompson, championed the minimalist side) on the merits of the bible as history.