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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. Questions on biblical historicity are typically separated into evaluations of whether the Old Testament and Hebrew Bible accurately record the history of ancient Israel and Judah and the second Temple period, and whether 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, 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. Others, like archaeologist William G. Dever, felt that biblical archaeology has both confirmed and challenged the Old Testament stories. 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.

Some scholars argue that the Bible is national history, with an "imaginative entertainment factor that proceeds from artistic expression" or a "midrash" on history.

Materials and methods

Manuscripts and canons

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. 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.

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.

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

The meaning of the term "history" is itself dependent on social and historical context. 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.

— 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". 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.

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, 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).

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." "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, psychological interpretations, or literary pretensions. But prominent scholars have expressed diametrically opposing views:

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.

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 and all accounts—especially edited accounts—as potentially historically incomplete, biased by times and circumstances.

Hebrew Bible/Old Testament

Authorship

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. As early as the Middle Ages, scholars such as Abraham ibn Ezra noted internal contradictions that suggested the Pentateuch was not authored by Moses. For example, Moses could not have written an account of his own death in Deuteronomy 34.

These ideas became more common during the Protestant Reformation. The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes in his major work Leviathan (1651) argued that the biblical texts themselves provide significant evidence for when they were written. Readers, he notes, should be guided by what the text itself says rather than relying on later tradition: "The light therefore that must guide us in this question, must be that which is held out unto us from the books themselves: and this light, though it shew us not the author of every book, yet it is not unuseful to give us knowledge of the time wherein they were written." Using such textual clues, Hobbes found it was impossible for Moses to have authored the Pentateuch. He also believed Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles were written long after the events they describe.

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), 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.

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). His 1753 book initiated the school known as higher criticism that culminated in Julius Wellhausen formalising the documentary hypothesis in the 1870s, 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.

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)

Genesis creation narrative

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'." Greek philosophers Aristotle, Critolaus and Proclus 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".

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." 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.

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.

The Patriarchs

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.

— Gunkel, 1997, page xviii

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

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 and Abraham in History and Tradition by John Van Seters. 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. 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. Some conservative scholars attempted to defend the patriarchal narratives in the following years, but this position has not found acceptance among scholars.

Nevertheless, some biblical scholars argue that the names of Patriarchs correspond to Amorite personal names typical of the Middle Bronze Age (2000 BCE – 1550 BCE) rather than to other names from later periods, which suggests that the Patriarchal narratives were based on traditions originating in the second millennium BCE. Other scholars argue that the narratives fit better the historical reality of the late Judahite monarchy. The narratives refer to camel-based traders carrying gum, balm, and myrrh, which they hold it is unlikely prior to the first millennium, as such activity only became common in the 8th–7th centuries BCE when Assyrian hegemony enabled this Arabian trade to flourish into a major industry. In 2013, excavations in the Timna Valley discovered what may be the earliest bones of domesticated camels found in Israel or even outside the Arabian peninsula, dating to around 930 BCE. This is seen as evidence that the stories of Abraham, Joseph, Jacob and Esau were written after this time. In 2021, Martin Heide and Joris Peters argued that camels were already domesticated in the early second millennium BCE and that their presence in the Patriarchal narratives was not anachronistic.

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. William Dever stated in 1993 that

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".

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

The 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. 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). 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. The geography is vague with regions such as Goshen unidentified, and there are internal problems with dating in the Pentateuch. 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. Some elements of the story are miraculous and defy rational explanation, such as the Plagues of Egypt and the Crossing of the Red Sea. The Bible also fails to mention the names of any of the pharaohs involved in the Exodus narrative.

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. 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.

Despite the absence of any archaeological evidence, a majority of scholars agree that the Exodus probably has some historical basis, with Kenton Sparks referring to it as "mythologized history." 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. William G. Dever cautiously identifies this group with the Tribe of Joseph, while Richard Elliott Friedman identifies it with the Tribe of Levi. 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. 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, and the names Moses, Aaron and Phinehas, which seem to have an Egyptian origin.

Scholarly estimates for how many people could have been involved in such an exodus range from a few hundred to a few thousand people.

Donald Redford held that the Exodus narrative is a Canaanite memory of the Hyksos' descent and occupation of Egypt.

Deuteronomistic history

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.

The "conquest narrative" in Joshua and Judges

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.

However, flaws in the conquest narrative appeared. The most high-profile example was the "fall of Jericho", excavated by John Garstang in the 1930s. 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. 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. The same conclusion, based on an analysis of all the excavation findings, was reached by Piotr Bienkowski. 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 consensus for the conquest narrative was eventually abandoned in the late 20th century.

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. However, there are a few cases where the biblical record is not contradicted by the archaeological record. For example, stratum 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. The city also shows signs of having been a magnificent Canaanite city prior to its destruction, with great temples and opulent palaces, 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 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.

Amnon Ben-Tor (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) believes that recently unearthed evidence of violent destruction by burning verifies the biblical account. 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. 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.

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. 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. Alan Millard argues that those elements of the Biblical narrative are not anachronistic.

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.

The minimalist Thomas L. Thompson 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.

— 

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. 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 as arising separately from Judah and 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."

The status of Jerusalem in the 10th century BCE is a major subject of debate. 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. 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. 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."

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.

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 (another possible reference occurs in the Mesha Stele), 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. 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.

New Testament

Historicity of Jesus

The majority of modern scholars of antiquity agree that Jesus existed historically, and that he was crucified by order of Roman prefect Pontius Pilate. 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, James D. G. Dunn, John P. Meier, E. P. Sanders and N. T. Wright being the most widely read and discussed. Other works on the matter were published by Dale Allison, Bart D. Ehrman, Richard Bauckham and Maurice Casey.

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.

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. 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.

Most historical critics agree that a historical figure named Jesus taught in 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.

Miracles of Jesus

Scholars are divided on the matter of miracles with no consensus on their historicity; some ruling them out a priori, others defending the possibility of miracles, and others defending them outright. New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman argues that though some historians believe that miracles have happened and others do not, due to the limitations of the sources, it is not possible for historians to affirm or deny them. He states "This is not a problem for only one kind of historian—for atheists or agnostics or Buddhists or Roman Catholics or Baptists or Jews or Muslims; it is a problem for all historians of every stripe. According to Mike Licona, among general historians there are some postmodern views of historiography that are open to the investigation of miracles.

Burial

In the gospel accounts, the resurrection tradition appears in Mark 16, Matthew 28, Luke 24, and John 20 to 21 where the risen Jesus appears to different people after his tomb was found empty by women. A topic of debate among scholars is whether Jesus was ever buried in a tomb, and if such a tomb was indeed found empty. An argument in favor of a decent burial before sunset is the Jewish custom, based on the Torah, that the body of an executed person should not remain on the tree where the corpse was hung for public display, but be buried before sunrise. This is based on Deuteronomy 21:22–23, but also attested in the Temple Scroll of the Essenes, and in Josephus' Jewish War 4.5.2§317, describing the burial of crucified Jewish insurgents before sunset.

Scholars such as Bart Ehrman and John Dominic Crossan doubt that Jesus had a decent burial, or that the disciples even knew what had happened to his body. Ehrman argues that crucifixion was meant "to torture and humiliate a person as fully as possible", and the body was normally left on the stake to be eaten by animals. Ehrman further argues that criminals were usually buried in common graves, and Pilate had no concern for Jewish sensitivities, which makes it unlikely that he would have allowed for Jesus to be buried.

In contrast, James Dunn argues that the burial tradition is "one of the oldest pieces of tradition we have", referring to 1 Cor. 15.4; burial was in line with Jewish custom as prescribed by Deut. 21.22-23 and confirmed by Josephus War; cases of burial of crucified persons are known, as attested by the Jehohanan burial; Joseph of Arimathea "is a very plausible historical character"; and "the presence of the women at the cross and their involvement in Jesus' burial can be attributed more plausibly to early oral memory than to creative story-telling". Similarly, Dale Allison, reviewing the arguments of Crossan and Ehrman, considers their assertions strong but "find it likely that a man named Joseph, probably a Sanhedrist, from the obscure Arimathea, sought and obtained permission from the Roman authorities to make arrangements for Jesus’ hurried burial."

According to religion professor John Granger Cook, there are historical texts that mention mass graves, but they contain no indication of those bodies being dug up by animals. There is no mention of an open pit or shallow graves in any Roman text. There are a number of historical texts outside the gospels showing the bodies of the crucified dead were buried by family or friends. Cook writes that "those texts show that the narrative of Joseph of Arimethaea's burial of Jesus would be perfectly comprehensible to a Greco-Roman reader of the gospels and historically credible."

Empty tomb and resurrection appearances

Scholars have tackled the question of establishing what contents of the resurrection tradition are historically probable. For example, it is widely accepted among New Testament scholars that Jesus' followers soon came to believe they had seen him resurrected shortly after his death. Robert Funk writes that "the disciples thought that they had witnessed Jesus’ appearances, which, however they are explained, “is a fact upon which both believer and unbeliever may agree."

Most scholars believe that John wrote independently of Mark and that the Gospel of Mark and the Gospel of John contain two independent attestations of an empty tomb, which in turn suggests that both used already-existing sources and appealed to a commonly held tradition, though Mark may have added to and adapted that tradition to fit his narrative. Other scholars have argued that the Apostle Paul is aware of an empty tomb in his earlier creed in 1 Cor. 15 and thereby corroborating the gospel accounts.

Scholars have identified legendary or unoriginal details within the resurrection tradition. For example, the story of the guards at the tomb in Matthew 27 is "widely regarded as an apologetic legend" meant to refute Jewish critics. Quoting a published dissertation on the empty tomb tradition in Mark, Mike Licona writes that “not a few, but rather a majority, of contemporary scholars believe that there is some historical kernel in the empty tomb tradition."

According to Geza Vermes, "had the accounts been the products of wholesale manufacturing, it is highly unlikely that they would have provided female witnesses who “had no standing in a male-dominated Jewish society.” Moreover, they would have gotten the number of women in the various narratives correct. In short, had the narratives been the result of complete invention, they would have been more uniform and they would have included credible witnesses. In contrast, Bart D. Ehrman rejects the story of the empty tomb, and argues that "an empty tomb had nothing to do with an empty tomb would not produce faith". Ehrman argues that the empty tomb was needed to underscore the physical resurrection of Jesus.

As with miracles, there is no single approach by scholars to the question of the resurrection of Jesus and if it really happened or not. "Historical Jesus" scholars in general tend to avoid the topic since many believe the matter to be about faith, or lack thereof. Nevertheless, scholars have sought to make their own cases for and against the historicity of the resurrection. Skeptical scholars generally argue that the resurrection appearances were caused by hallucinations. For example, Gerd Lüdemann argues that Peter had a vision of Jesus, induced by his feelings of guilt for betraying Jesus. The vision elevated this feeling of guilt, and Peter experienced it as a real appearance of Jesus, raised from dead. However, scholars such as N.T. Wright and Dale Allison, among others, argue that hallucinations would not lead or correspond to a belief in resurrection. In contrast to the skeptical view, Christian biblical scholars typically argue for a historical, physical resurrection of Jesus based on biblical evidence. For example, scholars such as Mike Licona argue that the diversity of different witnesses, such as skeptics Paul and James, are of important value to historians and, writing further, that attempts to downplay such value don't work. According to Wright, there is substantial unanimity among the early Christian writers (first and second century) that Jesus had been bodily raised from the dead.

Historicity of the Gospels

Most modern scholars hold that the canonical gospel accounts were written between 70 and 100, 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 although this view is disputed by other scholars.

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; however, opinion varies, and scholars such as Craig Blomberg accept the more traditional view. J. A. Lloyd argues that recent archaeological research in the Galilee region shows that Jesus' itinerary as depicted by Mark is historically and geographically plausible. The use of expressions that may be described as awkward and rustic cause the Gospel of Mark to appear somewhat unlettered or even crude. This may be attributed to the influence that Saint Peter, a fisherman, is suggested to have on the writing of Mark. 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.

Historicity of Acts

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. Acts differs from Paul's letters on important issues, such as the Law, Paul's own apostleship, and his relation to the Jerusalem church. Scholars generally prefer Paul's account over that in Acts.

Schools of archaeological and historical thought

Overview of academic views

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?"

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.

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 and Old Testament scholar Walter Kaiser, Jr., as well as R. N. Whybray, Umberto Cassuto, O. T. Allis, Gleason Archer, John Sailhamer, Bruce Waltke, and Joshua Berman.

Maximalist–minimalist dichotomy

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. The Quest for the Historical Israel by Israel Finkelstein et al attempted to be more balanced.

Biblical minimalism

The viewpoint sometimes called biblical minimalism generally holds that the Bible is principally a theological and apologetic work. The early stories are held to have a historical basis that was reconstructed centuries later, which are supported by archaeological discoveries. In this view, the stories about the biblical patriarchs are believed to be fictional. Furthermore, 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, believing that the united Kingdom of Israel—where the Bible says that David and Solomon ruled over an empire from the Euphrates to Eilath— never 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.

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" 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.

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.

Decreasing conflict

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. 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, although leading minimalists deny this and a claim has been made "We are all minimalists now" (an allusion to "We are all Keynesians now").

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

— Philip Davies.

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., 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., 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.

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.

— 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) from Judah about the 10th century BCE, 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, 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. 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.

These views are strongly criticized by William G. Dever, Helga Weippert, Amihai Mazar and Amnon Ben-Tor. Dever stated that in the 10th century BCE Judah was an "early inchoate state" "one that will not be fully consolidated until the 9th century BCE", and Israel had a separate development in the 9th century BCE.

André Lemaire states in Ancient Israel: From Abraham to the Roman Destruction of the Temple 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. This view is also taken by Richard S. Hess, which shows there is in fact a plurality of views between maximalists and minimalists. Jack Cargill 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.

See also

• Academic 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
• Theudas

Notes

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". 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". Robert M. Price does not believe that Jesus existed, but agrees that this perspective runs against the views of the majority of scholars. James D. G. Dunn calls the theories of Jesus' non-existence "a thoroughly dead thesis". 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". Robert E. Van Voorst states that biblical scholars and classical historians regard theories of non-existence of Jesus as effectively refuted. 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"

References

Citations

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. Thompson, Thomas L. (2000). The Bible in History. London: Vintage. pp. xv–xvi. ISBN 978-0-712-66748-7.
4. 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."
5. 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.
6. 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."
7. ^ 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."
8. 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).
9. 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."
10. William G. Dever (1992). "Archeology". In David Noel Freedman (ed.). The Anchor Bible dictionary. Doubleday. p. 358. ISBN 978-0-385-19361-0.
11. 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.
12. Dearman, J. Andrew (2018). Reading Hebrew Bible Narratives. Oxford University Press. pp. 113–129. ISBN 9780190246525.
13. Hendel, Ronald (2005). Remembering Abraham: Culture, Memory, and History in the Hebrew Bible. Oxford University Press. pp. 3–30. ISBN 9780199784622.
14. 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.
15. 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)
16. 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.
17. Compare Herodotus and Ranke.
18. McNutt, Paula M. (1999). Reconstructing the society of ancient Israel. London: SPCK. p. 4. ISBN 978-0281052592.
19. "JCR - The Babylonian Talmud, Pesachim". juchre.org. Retrieved 2023-05-11.
20. Heschel, Abraham Joshua (2005-01-01). Heavenly Torah: As Refracted Through the Generations. A&C Black. ISBN 978-0-8264-0802-0.
21. 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.
22. Dever, William G. (2008), "Did God Have a Wife?: Archaeology and Folk Religion in Ancient Israel" (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company)
23. Ingram, Thomas C. (2019). "Ecological Facts About The Bible". funfactoday.com. Retrieved 2020-03-19.
24. Henry, Carl Ferdinand Howard (1999) . "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.
25. Note the varying creation accounts of Genesis 1 versus Genesis 2.
26. "And it repented the LORD that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart." – Genesis 6:6.
27. Thompson, Thomas (2016) . The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives: The Quest for the Historical Abraham. Berlin/Boston: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. p. 330. ISBN 978-3-11-084144-2.
28. 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.
29. ^ Collins 2018, p. 55.
30. 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.
31. Driver 1911, p. 861.
32. 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).
33. Simon, Richard (1682). A critical history of the Old Testament. London: Walter Davis. p. 21.
34. ^ Wenham, Gordon J. (2003). "Genesis 1–11". Exploring the Old Testament: A Guide to the Pentateuch. Downers Grove, Ill: InterVarsity Press. ISBN 978-0830825516.
35. Wellhausen, Julius (1885). Prolegomena to the History of Israel. Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black.
36. Wenham, Gordon (1996). "Pentateuchal Studies Today". Themelios. 22 (1): 3–13.
37. 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.
38. Physics I, 7
39. Dorandi 1999, p. 50.
40. Lang 2001, p. 2.
41. 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."
42. Gillispie, Charles Coulston (1996) . 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.
43. Quoted in Gillispie, Charles Coulston (1996) . 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.
44. Gunkel 1997, p. lxviii.
45. 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." 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.'"

    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: "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".

46. Thompson, Thomas L. (1974). The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives: The Quest for the Historical Abraham. Text. Gruyter, Walter de, & Company. ISBN 9783110040968.
47. Seters, John Van (1975). Abraham in History and Tradition. Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-01792-2.
48. Moore & Kelle 2011, pp. 18–19.
49. Moorey, Peter Roger Stuart (1991). A Century of Biblical Archaeology. Westminster John Knox Press. pp. 153–154. ISBN 978-0-664-25392-9.
50. Kitchen, Kenneth (1995). "The Patriarchal Age: Myth or History?". Biblical Archaeology Review. Retrieved 2021-07-12.
51. Kitchen 2003, p. 313.
52. 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."
53. Rahkonen, Pauli (2019). "Personal Names of the Pentateuch in the Northwest Semitic Context: A Comparative Study". Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament. 33 (1): 111–135. doi:10.1080/09018328.2019.1600259. ISSN 0901-8328.
54. Millard, Alan (2024). "Patriarchal Names in Context". Tyndale Bulletin. 75 (December): 155–174. doi:10.53751/001c.117657. ISSN 2752-7042.
55. The Bible Unearthed, p. 37.
56. Hasson, Nir (Jan 17, 2014). "Hump stump solved: Camels arrived in region much later than biblical reference". Haaretz. Retrieved 30 January 2014.
57. Sapir-Hen, Lidar; Erez Ben-Yosef (2013). "The Introduction of Domestic Camels to the Southern Levant: Evidence from the Aravah Valley". Tel Aviv. 40 (2): 277–285. doi:10.1179/033443513x13753505864089. S2CID 44282748.
58. Heide, Martin; Peters, Joris (2021). Camels in the Biblical World. Penn State Press. p. 302. ISBN 978-1-64602-170-3.
59. Faust 2022, pp. 69, 71–72.
60. 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.
61. Moore & Kelle 2011, p. 81.
62. Dozeman & Shectman 2016, pp. 138–139.
63. Dever 2003, pp. 18–19.
64. Dozeman & Shectman 2016, p. 139.
65. Grabbe 2014, pp. 63–64.
66. Dever 2003, pp. 15–17.
67. Grabbe 2014, p. 69.
68. 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.
69. Grabbe 2014, pp. 65–67.
70. ^ Faust 2015, p. 476.
71. 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."
72. Sparks, Kenton L. (2010). "Genre Criticism". In Dozeman, Thomas B. (ed.). Methods for Exodus. Cambridge University Press. p. 73. ISBN 9781139487382.
73. 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."
74. Dever 2003, p. 231.
75. Friedman, Richard Elliott (2017-09-12). The Exodus. HarperCollins. ISBN 978-0-06-256526-6.
76. Meyers, Carol (2005). Exodus. Cambridge University Press. pp. 8–10. ISBN 9780521002912.
77. Redmount 2001, p. 65.
78. Redford, Donald B. (1992). Egypt, Canaan, and Israel in Ancient Times. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-03606-9.
79. ^ Mazar, Amihai (2010). "Archaeology and the Biblical Narrative: The Case of the United Monarchy" (PDF). In Kratz, Reinhard G.; Spieckermann, Hermann; Corzilius, Björn; Pilger, Tanja (eds.). One God – one cult – one nation archaeological and biblical perspectives. Walter de Gruyter. pp. 29–58. doi:10.1515/9783110223583.29. ISBN 978-3-110-22358-3. S2CID 55562061. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2017-04-02.
80. ^ 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.
81. ^ 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.
82. Kenyon, Kathleen M. (1957). Digging up Jericho: The Results of the Jericho Excavations, 1952–1956. New York: Praeger. p. 229.
83. Bienkowski, Piotr (1986). Jericho in the Late Bronze Age. Warminster. pp. 120–125.
84. Peake, A. S.; Grieve, A. J., eds. (1919). A Commentary on the Bible (1st ed.). London: T.C. and E.C. Jack.
85. "Hatzor – The Head of all those Kingdoms". Retrieved 2018-09-18.
86. ^ Finkelstein & Silberman 2001
87. Ben-tor, Amnon (2013-01-01). "Who Destroyed Canaanite Hazor?". BAR.
88. "A 3,400-year-old Mystery: Who Burned the Palace of Canaanite Hatzor?". Haaretz. Retrieved 2023-05-11.
89. Friedman, Richard Elliott (2017-09-12). The Exodus. HarperCollins. p. 80. ISBN 978-0-06-256526-6.
90. ^ Redford, Donald B. (1992). Egypt, Canaan, and Israel in ancient times. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. p. 305. ISBN 978-0691000862.
91. 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.
92. 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.
93. "The Bible in History: How Writers Create a Past (Thomas Thompson)". dannyreviews.com. Retrieved 2023-05-11.
94. 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.
95. Faust 2022, p. 73.
96. 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 978-9-652-21124-8.
97. 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.
98. Dever, William G. (2002), What Did the Biblical Writers Know and When Did They Know It? Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, ISBN 080282126X
99. Lemaire, André "House of David Restored in Moabite Inscription" Archived 2011-07-13 at the Wayback Machine, Biblical Archaeology Review, May/June 1994.
100. Orlin, Eric (2015). Routledge Encyclopedia of Ancient Mediterranean Religions. Routledge. p. 462. ISBN 9781134625529.
101. Dever, William G. (2020). Has Archaeology Buried the Bible?. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. ISBN 978-1-4674-5949-5.
102. 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.
103. Burridge, Richard A.; Gould, Graham (2004). Jesus Now and Then. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. p. 34. ISBN 978-0-8028-0977-3.
104. 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.
105. 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.
106. Grant, Michael (1977). Jesus: An Historian's Review of the Gospels. Scribner's. p. 200. ISBN 978-0-684-14889-2.
107. 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.
108. Baden, Candida Moss (October 5, 2014). "So-Called 'Biblical Scholar' Says Jesus a Made-Up Myth". The Daily Beast.
109. Crossan, J. D. "The Historical Jesus: A Mediterranean Jewish Peasant," HarperOne, 1993, ISBN 0060616296
110. James D. G. Dunn, "Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, Vol. 1, Eerdmans, 2003"
111. John P. Meier, "A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus, 5 vols., the most recent volume from Yale University Press, 2016"
112. Sanders, E.P. "The Historical Figure of Jesus," Penguin, 1996, ISBN 0141928220
113. Wright, N.T. "Jesus and the Victory of God: Christian Origins and the Question of God", Vol. 2, Augsburg Fortress Press, 1997, ISBN 0800626826
114. Allison, Dale C. (1998). Jesus of Nazareth: Millenarian Prophet. Fortress Press. ISBN 978-1-4514-0556-9.
115. Ehrman, Bart D. (1999). Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-983943-8.
116. ^ Richard, Bauckham (2017). Jesus and the Eyewitnesses (2nd ed.). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. ISBN 978-0-8028-7431-3.
117. Casey, Maurice (2010-12-30). Jesus of Nazareth: An Independent Historian's Account of His Life and Teaching. A&C Black. ISBN 978-0-567-64517-3.
118. John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew Volume I, Doubleday, 1991.
119. 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.
120. 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.
121. 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.
122. Meier, John P. A Marginal Jew, Vol. II, Doubleday, 1994, ISBN 0300140339
123. Beilby, James K.; Rhodes Eddy, Paul, eds. (2009). "Introduction". The Historical Jesus: Five Views. IVP Academic. pp. 38–39. ISBN 978-0830838684. "Contrary to previous times, virtually everyone in the field today acknowledges that Jesus was considered by his contemporaries to be an exorcist and a worker of miracles. However, when it comes to historical assessment of the miracles tradition itself, the consensus quickly shatters. Some, following in the footsteps of Bultmann, embrace an explicit methodological naturalism such that the very idea of a miracle is ruled out a priori. Others defend the logical possibility of miracle at the theoretical level, but, in practice, retain a functional methodological naturalism, maintaining that we could never be in possession of the type and/or amount of evidence that would justify a historical judgment in favor of the occurrence of a miracle. Still others, suspicious that an uncompromising methodological naturalism most likely reflects an unwarranted metaphysical naturalism, find such a priori skepticism unwarranted and either remain open to, or even explicitly defend, the historicity of miracles within the Jesus tradition."
124. Ehrman, Bart D. (2001). Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0195124743. "I should emphasize that historians do not have to deny the possibility of miracles or deny that miracles have actually happened in the past. Many historians, for example, committed Christians and observant Jews and practicing Muslims, believe that they have in fact happened. When they think or say this, however, they do so not in the capacity of the historian, but in the capacity of the believer. In the present discussion, I am not taking the position of the believer, nor am I saying that one should or should not take such a position. I am taking the position of the historian, who on the basis of a limited number of problematic sources has to determine to the best of his or her ability what the historical Jesus actually did. As a result, when reconstructing Jesus' activities, I will not be able to affirm or deny the miracles that he is reported to have done...This is not a problem for only one kind of historian—for atheists or agnostics or Buddhists or Roman Catholics or Baptists or Jews or Muslims; it is a problem for all historians of every stripe."
125. Licona, Michael R. (20 November 2014). "Historians and Miracle Claims". Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus. 12 (1–2): 106–129. doi:10.1163/17455197-01202002.
126. Dijkhuizen, Petra (2011). "Buried Shamefully: Historical Reconstruction of Jesus' Burial and Tomb". Neotestamentica 45:1 (2011) 115-129
127. Dunn, James D.G. (2003b), Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, Volume 1, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, p. 782
128. Ehrman, Bart D. (2014-03-25). How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee, p. 82-88
129. Crossan, John Dominic (2009). Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, p. 143
130. ibid. p.85
131. ibid. p.86
132. ibid. p.87
133. Dunn, James D.G. (2003b), Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, Volume 1, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, p. 781-783
134. Allison, Dale C. Jr. (2021). The Resurrection of Jesus: Apologetics, Polemics, History p. 112
135. Cook, John Granger (April 2011). "Crucifixion and Burial". New Testament Studies. 57 (2): 193–213. doi:10.1017/S0028688510000214. S2CID 170517053.
136. Allison, D. 2005. Resurrecting Jesus: The Earliest Christian Tradition and its Interpreters. p. 283 "It is a historical fact that some of Jesus’ followers came to believe that he had been raised from the dead soon after his execution. We know some of these believers by name; one of them, the apostle Paul, claims quite plainly to have seen Jesus alive after his death. Thus, for the historian, Christianity begins after the death of Jesus, not with the resurrection itself, but with the belief in the resurrection."
137. Ehrman, B. 1999. Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium. p. 230-231 "That Jesus’ followers (and later Paul) had resurrection experiences is, in my judgment, a fact. What the reality was that gave rise to the experiences I do not know."
138. Sanders, E. 1995. The Historical Figure of Jesus "It may be taken as historically certain that Peter and the disciples had experiences after Jesus’s death in which Jesus appeared to them as the risen Christ."
139. Ludemann, G. 1996. What Really Happened? p. 80 "After Jesus’ death, the disciples endured persecution, and a number of them experienced martyrdom. The strength of their conviction indicates that they were not just claiming Jesus had appeared to them after rising from the dead. They really believed it. They willingly endangered themselves by publicly proclaiming the risen Christ."
140. Fuller, R. 1965. The Foundations of New Testament Christology. p. 142 "Even the most skeptical historian” must do one more thing: “postulate some other event” that is not the disciples’ faith, but the reason for their faith, in order to account for their experiences. Of course, both natural and supernatural options have been proposed."
141. Funk, R. 1998. The Acts of Jesus. p. 466
142. Aune, David (2013). Jesus, Gospel Tradition and Paul in the Context of Jewish and Greco-Roman Antiquity, p. 169
143. Engelbrecht, J. “The Empty Tomb (Lk 24:1–12) in Historical Perspective.” Neotestamentica, vol. 23, no. 2, 1989, p. 245.
144. Resurrection in Paganism and the Question of an Empty Tomb in 1 Corinthians 15. Journal for New Testament Studies., pp. 56-58, John Granger Cook
145. The Resurrection of Jesus in the Pre-Pauline Formula of 1 Cor 15.3–5. Journal for New Testament Studies, p.498, James Ware
146. "The guard at the tomb, ReasonableFaith.org". Archived from the original on 2013-11-12.
147. Ancient Christian Gospels Koester, Helmut; Trinity Press, (1992) pg 237.
148. Mike Licona, The Historicity of the Resurrection of Jesus: Historiographical Considerations in the Light of Recent Debates, p.324
149. Geza Vermes, The Resurrection: History and Myth, p. 140-141
150. Mike Licona, The Historicity of the Resurrection of Jesus: Historiographical Considerations in the Light of Recent Debates, p. 331
151. Ehrman, Bart D. (2014-03-25). How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee, p. 90,98
152. Bockmuehl, Markus (2001). "7. Resurrection". In Bockmuehl, Markus (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Jesus. Cambridge University Press. p. 103. ISBN 9780521796781. Nevertheless, what is perhaps most surprising is the extent to which contemporary scholarly literature on the 'historical Jesus' has studiously ignored and downplayed the question of the resurrection...But even the more mainstream participants in the late twentieth-century 'historical Jesus' bonanza have tended to avoid the subject of the resurrection – usually on the pretext that this is solely a matter of 'faith' or of 'theology', about which no self-respecting historian could possibly have anything to say. Precisely that scholarly silence, however, renders a good many recent 'historical Jesus' studies methodologically hamstrung, and unable to deliver what they promise...In this respect, benign neglect ranks alongside dogmatic denial and naive credulity in guaranteeing the avoidance of historical truth.
153. Ehrman, Bart D. (2014-03-25). How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee, p. 98, 101
154. Vermes, Geza. The Resurrection. pp. 148–152
155. Geza, Vermes. The Authentic Gospel of Jesus. p. 112.
156. Paula Fredricksen, From Jesus to Christ Yale university Press. pp. 133–134
157. Bart Ehrman (5 October 2012), Gerd Lüdemann on the Resurrection of Jesus
158. Gerd Lüdemann, The Resurrection of Christ: A Historical Inquiry, p. 190
159. Wright, N. T. Resurrection of the Son of God. Spck Publishing, 2003, p. 690-691 "precisely because such encounters were reasonably well known they could not possibly, by themselves, have given rise to the belief that Jesus had been raised from the dead Indeed, such visions meant precisely, as people in the ancient and modern worlds have discovered, that the person was dead, not that they were alive".
160. Allison, Dale C. Resurrecting Jesus: the Earliest Christian Tradition and Its Interpreters. New York: T & T Clark, 2006. 324-325, "If there was no reason to believe that his solid body had returned to life, no one would have thought him, against expectation, resurrected from the dead. Certainly visions of or perceived encounters with a postmortem Jesus would not by themselves, have supplied such reason."
161. Walker, P. 1999. The Weekend That Changed the World. p. 63 "Typical encounters with the recently deceased do not issue in claims about an empty tomb, nor do they lead to the founding of a new religion. And they certainly do not typically eat and drink, and they are not seen by crowds of up to five hundred people."
162. Bryan, C. 2011. The Resurrection of the Messiah. p. 169 "Everyone in the ancient world took it for granted that people had strange experiences of encountering dead people. They knew at least as much as we do about visions, ghosts, dreams, and the fact that when somebody is grieving over a person who has just died, they sometimes see, briefly, a figure that seems to be like that person appearing to them. This is not a modern invention or discovery; ancient literature is full of it. They had language for that sort of phenomena, and that language was not ‘resurrection.’ They described these situations as a kind of angelic experience."
163. Blomberg, Craig L. (1987), The Historical Reliability of the Gospels, 2nd Ed, 2007.
164. N.T. Wright (2003), Resurrection of the Son of God
165. Mike Licona, The Historicity of the Resurrection of Jesus: Historiographical Considerations in the Light of Recent Debates (2008), p. 306-324
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• Gunkel, Hermann (1997) . 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.
• Lang, Helen (2001). Introduction. On the Eternity of the World. By Proclus. Berkeley: University of California Press. p. 2. ISBN 978-0520225541.
• Lloyd, J. A. (2021). Archaeology and the Itinerant Jesus: A Historical Enquiry into Jesus' Itinerant Ministry in the North. Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament 2. Reihe. Vol. 564. Mohr Siebeck. ISBN 978-3-16-159347-5.
• 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. 2 (1). Leiden: Brill Publishers: 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) . "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

• 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) . 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) . 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

• '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

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