If you spend some time on the internet researching the history of early Palestine/Israel, often termed biblical archeaology, you will probably encounter heated arguments between the holders of two general categories of opinions. We can describe these two groups fairly easily: those who believe the Bible can be used as a historical source of information and those who are not afraid to question its dependability. Thomas Thompson would fall into the latter category of people.
Those of the former category do not like Thomas Thompson, to say the least. The majority of these individuals are Christians, and reflecting the simplistic logic of their perspective they will often refer to their viewpoint as "Maximalist" (as in having a maximal belief in the Bible), and by extension they label those who think like Thompson as "Minimalists".
The self-styled "Maximalists" basically strive to reassert the dominance of traditional unquestioning religious piety in scholarship, while those they call "Minimalists" strive to reinforce and build further upon the tentative gains made by two centuries of patient skepticism and rational application of scientific analysis to real evidence in order to improve upon our understanding of humanity's past.
It is somewhat disappointing that so many people are quite willing to be "Maximalists" in this day and age. The widespread ignorance and fearful superstition of the European dark ages seems understandable and excusable when compared to what is happening today. So few people in those oppressed times were educated at all, and education itself and all historical information and speculation was strictly controlled by a dominant religious and political hierarchy. How could anyone's mind break free of that vice grip in such a world. But today, these "Maximalists" have no such excuses for their delusions. They stubbornly choose to believe in religious fantasies even after the quiet exposing light of plain facts and rational explanations reveals the utter daftness and flakiness of their beloved assertion that the biblical stories are historical facts.
3 comments:
Hey Ed... just came upon your blog. Looks interesting and provocative. I'm not sure that you are representing the "maximalists" fairly. To be sure you described some people, but there is so much diversity of those who get the label "maximalist" that the label is actually quite useless! (As is minimalist, IMHO)
Take care
Hi Tyler,
Thanks for the comment! I very much agree with you: It looks like I simplified the situation too much.
Although in a sense, every instance of labeling simplifies a situation to a degree. Hopefully it is done to assist in our understanding. But too often the act of labeling is done to boost one viewpoint over another, or mischaracterize a view or even create the impression that there are only limited views, when in fact there are a many more. Maybe I inadvertently did this myself?
Or maybe my understanding is too simplified!
What major points would you include in order to characterize the "Maximilists" more fairly? Or perhaps how should the spectrum as it exists in the field of Biblical scholarship be described? (Or maybe there is a good discussion that already exists.)
:)
I have a post I have been working on where I argue we have to get beyond the minimalist/maximalist debate. In regards to "maximalists" the problem that I see is that it would conceivably include fundamentalist Christians who would hold that the narratives in the Hebrew Bible portray exactly what happened (and their doctrine of Scripture requires such a view) as well as scholars such as Baruch Halpern who would argue that the biblical texts do contain a fair bit of historical information (at least starting with the united monarchy), and everyone else in between (e.g., Long, Longman, Provan, Brettler, Dever, etc.). At least with the "minimalists" it is a smaller more homogenous group (but even then there are big differences between Davies, Van Seters, Lemche, and Thompson… just to name a few!).
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