To make this absolutely clear, nobody is to reproduce this introduction in any way. It is copyrighted 2008, by Rook Hawkins (me). This is also subject to change.
INTRODUCTION
“We can now say with considerable confidence that
the Bible is not a history of anyone’s past.” – Thomas L. Thompson
Upon first glance, the quote above from Thomas Thompson seems extreme. Of course the Old Testament is a history of the Israelites. At the very least there must have been an Exodus, an Abraham and Moses, a monarchal period under David and Solomon, some conquest of the various Canaanite tribes lead by Joshua. Historians and archaeologists should have verified at least some underlining truth to these stories and more. Surely, this is a rather arrogant position on the part of Thompson to boastfully claim that there is no historical credulity to the Scriptures, right? Well, as it goes, things are a lot more complicated than they appear. In a mock response to his own articles question, “Was there an Exodus?” Graham Davies writes, “Only a generation ago this would have seemed an absurd question to ask…[but] now all this has changed. Everything about the early history of Israel is in doubt, including the Exodus.”[1] But how did this happen?
Walter Brueggemann explains this transformation; “Within recent decades…the emergence of new critical methods, together with fresh perspectives and new questions, have lead many critical scholars to conclude that the story line given in the Old Testament is itself no reliable guide for ‘what happened.’” (p. 4) He continues, “Reliance upon extrabiblical evidence such as archaeological remains and inscriptions, moreover, has lead many scholars to the conclusion that much of what is claimed as ‘history’ in the Old Testament has no basis in ‘verifiable fact.’ This judgment makes the story line of the Bible, to say it boldly, fiction.” (ibid.) Brueggemann was correct when he said that many scholars have been influenced by this shift in consensus. Niels Peter Lemche opens his book with amazing wit when he writes, “Recent developments in the study of ancient Israel have caused a lot of concern. We hear rumors that biblical scholars have questioned the value of the Old Testament as a source for the history of Israel, thereby dismissing the entire Old Testament as a book of guidance for Christian as well as Jewish believers. To a certain degree this is true, at least as long as the Old Testament is used primarily as a historical textbook.”[2] At the conclusion of his monograph, History and Ideology in Ancient Israel (1988), Giovanni Garbini remarks at his books ‘unexpected conclusion;’ “The Narratives which are to be found in the Hebrew Bible are less than historical, and therefore it is useless to look for an ‘idea of history’ in them.” (p.178) In one of the opening chapters of Philip R. Davies book, In Search of ‘Ancient Israel’ (1992; 3rd. revd. ed. 2006), he writes, “neither the ‘patriarchal period’ nor the ‘wilderness period’ nor the ‘period of the judges’ can be transformed into an epoch in the history of Palestine.” (p. 26) Even with some criticism still lingering this viewpoint, or rather this change of viewpoint from past decades, has brought in some serious numbers in the scholarly and archaeological communities.
But who launched this perspective? Ernest Nicholson points the finger at two individuals, Thompson and Philip Davies, as what he calls the main ‘protagonists’ of this ‘revisionist’ movement. “A new debate on the supposed antiquity of the patriarchal traditions was opened by substantial studies by John Van Seters and Thomas L. Thompson” who “critically re-examined” the works of Albrecht Alt.[3] As put by Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman:
“Biblical historians…Thomas Thompson and Niels Peter Lemche of the University of Copenhagen and Philip Davies of the University of Sheffield, dubbed “biblical minimalists” by their detractors, have argued that David and Solomon, the united Monarchy of Israel, and indeed the entire biblical description of the history of Israel are no more than elaborate, skillful ideological constructs produced by priestly circles in Jerusalem in post-exilic or even Hellenistic times.”[4]
In the following paragraph, the authors above do not disagree with these minimalists. Instead, they state that “from a purely literary and archaeological standpoint, the minimalists have some points in their favor.” (p. 11) But this raises the question: What exactly is minimalism? The answer to this question is often different depending on who you ask. It has been viewed as critical—generally secular—scholarship, which according to some, is made up of liberal apostates who want to remove the Biblical stories from history. For others, minimalism should be applauded as an intellectual succession from evangelical ideas. It is a stride forward into the realm of science and practical thought. Minimalism walks in the steps of the redaktionsgeschichte schule of the early nineteenth century. It is a position that has so miniaturized the evangelical perspective that the Bible can no longer be viewed as a ‘historical source.’ Thus, minimalism can be scary, and often threatening, to those who wish to find some level of truth in the narratives of the patriarchs, in the conquests, or in the prophets. But to the minimalists, these events never occurred in history. Rather, these stories are simple fiction. This may come as a shock to some, especially those who were brought up believing the Bible was a historical document; that Moses led his people out of Egypt; that Joshua stormed around Jericho and knocked down the city with sound waves; that Israel had existed as a monarchy and prospered as an independent nation.
This new critical look on scriptures is not so new, nor should it rest entirely on the shoulders of the Copenhagen school, although it deserves much credit. Critical scholarship, in some vein, has existed for the past two hundred and fifty years, and without the contributions of these pioneers scholarship may not be where it is today. At first it had been critically-minded German scholars of the New Testament who saw a problem with much of the mythological aspects of the Gospel narratives, especially when compared to the archaeological and textual finds of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It was this mythology that led many scholars of the German redaction history schools on a ‘Jesus quest.’ Initially, the Old Testament scholarship lagged behind in method and practice, while the New Testament scholars of the day were arming themselves with advances in new methods in textual and redaction criticism. But with the progress so evident with the first quest for the historical Jesus, Old Testament scholars took up their own quest to find history in the scriptures. It was Wellhausen,[5] over a century ago, who first critically examined the Old Testament and concluded that there were not just redactions, but that the Pentateuch and several of the books following were formed from four earlier sources (the so-called Yahwist, Elohist, Deuteronomist and Priestly sources).[6] This hypothesis, also called the “Wellhausen Hypothesis” or “Documentary Hypothesis”, did not end the debate. It was, however, an achievement over previous methods and assumptions that had held Old Testament scholarship from advancing past fundamentalism. With the first historical Jesus quest ending and Wellhausen’s hypothesis now in the hands and minds of scholars across the world, the Old Testament became the focus for both evangelicals and critical historians alike. Gunkel, followed by Gressmann, published several works on folklore in connection with many of the narratives of the patriarchs.[7] Shortly after Gunkel, James Frazer published his monumental three-volume work, Folklore in the Old Testament (1918). In these volumes, Frazer “sought to demonstrate that there were parallels to various narratives and customs in the Old Testament.”[8] But something happened along the way. Much in the same way the Jesus quest of the nineteenth century ended, Old Testament scholars who could not compartmentalize any longer started to focus on a new way to validate their faith through method. A very attractive proposal put forth by Eissfeldt in 1923 was the beginning of the end for Old Testament critical scholarship in the early twentieth century. Per Eissfeldt, there were underlining events of historicity which originated the legendary traditions—which then inspired the narratives—of the scriptures.
“…With Eissfeldt, the history of the pentateuchal tradition no longer led back to an ever more fragmented and inaccessible folklore, populated by myths and other tall tales. The pentateuchal legends were now judged to have been in their earliest forms tales about historical individuals: folk histories, which, because of their mode of transmission as relatively unfixed oral traditions, continuously attracted secondary inflations of what was asserted as an original historical account, eventually achieving a resemblance to fictive tales. That is, one had in the Old Testament not historicized fiction, but fictionalized history.”[9]
It was Eissfeldt who, in the manner of Albert Schweitzer, laid out the method by which evangelical scholars could believe in the historical foundation of the narrative traditions. This led Old Testament scholarship on a journey which sought these so-called historical figures and events in a process dubbed traditionsgeschichte. “In this search, secondary expansions were sharply distinguished…from what was (frequently mistakenly) thought to be more original, primary, cores of tradition that were inevitably given great historical weight….”[10] This trend continued through the course of early Old Testament “tradition history” by conservatives in the field, and this had effectively decapitated Wellhausen’s conclusions, killing early critical methods and stopping new methods from arising for decades. In the process, contemporary conservatives of Eissfeldt like Albrecht Alt and William F. Albright were allowed to promote horribly flawed hypotheses, resting solely on presuppositions and assumptions.[11] These assumptions allowed scholarship to become a breeding ground of fundamentalist ideas, and corrupt a generation of scholars. Among this new generation was Speiser who attempted to show that inscriptions from extrabiblical tablets found at Nuzi could validate several Old Testament laws, such as the purported wife-sister stories found in Genesis.
It would take almost fifty years for scholarship to realize the folly of this maneuver. It wouldn’t be until the establishment of a minimalist school, promptly initiated by three major works in the 1970’s and 1980’s,[12] which would lead the way in critical thought once more. Finally, scholarship realized that the parallels put forth by Speiser were fallacious, and that the formations of the theories put forth by Alt’s and Albright’s school were founded on assertions which presupposed the reliability of the narratives which could no longer be assumed. Thomas L. Thompson writes:[13]
“…I had been so convinced of the historicity of the tales about the patriarchs in Genesis that I unquestioningly accepted parallels that had been claimed with the Late Bronze Age family contracts at Nuzi in northern Mesopotamia. It was therefore all the more upsetting when, in 1969, after more than two years work, it became clear that family customs and property laws of ancient Nuzi were neither unique in ancient Near Eastern law nor implies by the Genesis stories. Many of these contracts had been misread or misinterpreted. At least one contract had been mistranslated with the purpose of creating a parallel with the Bible. The entire claim of Nuzi parallels to patriarchal customs had been a thinly veiled fabrication, a product of wish-fulfillment. An entire social world had been created which had never existed.” (p. xii)
It was this redemptive turn-around that cleared the way for a bright new generation of scholars to critically review the data. These minimalists have been dubbed “the Copenhagen School.” In effect, what had happened was that many scholars had “taken for granted what they set out to prove.” That is, “what was presented as the assured results of decades of science and scholarship amounted to careless assertions.”[14] It was this school which “made biblical scholars aware of many of the theological biases that they held.”[15]
But the same can not be said for New Testament scholarship. Even with the advent of the Jesus Seminar and three historical Jesus quests, there is still an underlining assumption of most New Testament scholars. The assumption is founded on the conclusion (generally due to a theological bias) that Jesus must have existed as a historical figure. This assumption has led to the false presupposition that the Gospels are biographies. Although Old Testament scholarship has finally become more critical where it used to lag behind, now New Testament scholarship is finding itself ‘left in the dust’. Even with the success of the Copenhagen school, the second quest for a historical Jesus had ended shortly before the nineteen-seventies, leaving New Testament scholarship in the wake of the same sort of evangelical take over that was seen with Albright and Alt in the nineteen-thirties. Even in the early nineties when the third quest for the historical Jesus began, the quest was still fundamentalized by the religious. Although these scholars were more liberal than their predecessors Käsemann and Robinson, underlining presuppositions founded the core positions of the quest. The publication of several books exposing these presuppositions came about shortly after the third quest began, such as the works of G.A. Wells,[16] Robert M. Price,[17] and most importantly, Thomas L. Thompson with his book, The Messiah Myth (2005).
Thompson’s book was a call to arms for New Testament scholarship, much like his book on the Patriarchal narratives was to Old Testament scholars. The Messiah Myth was not only the first book of its kind to establish a critical link between the use of the Old Testament—specifically the stories of David and Elijah—by the Gospel authors, but it was the first to question the genre of the Gospel narratives. Other monumental books have been published critically examining the intertextuality of the Narratives themselves,[18] such as Mary Ann Tolbert in her work Sowing the Gospel (1989), where she writes, “Literary criticism understands the Biblical text as fiction, the result of literary imagination, not of photographic recall.” (p. 25) In Tolbert’s book, she shows convincingly how modern critics of the New Testament and evangelists alike fracture the biblical narratives into sections, down to verses, and assume a historical position. This fracturing has halted any serious look at the Gospels as a whole, and has allowed many scholars, including historical Jesus scholars, to get away with historicizing specific sections of text.[19] Tolbert’s conclusions are to be held as nothing short of observant. Even with these advancements in critical scholarship, as of now nobody has really taken up the call to present a clear-cut case against the presuppositions of current mainstream New Testament scholarship, nor has anybody presented a viable case for a reconstruction of the history of the early church without these presuppositions. Charles H. Talbert partially attempted this task a little over two decades ago with his book What is a Gospel (1986), but while it was a start, failed to adequately deal with specific presuppositions held by New Testament scholarship of the day.[20] It is also out-dated by today’s standards, having been written prior to the Jesus Seminar’s report[21] and more current trends on the dating of Luke-Acts.[22]
In effect, this book takes up the charge, put forth by Thompson, of establishing the genre of the Gospel traditions, while framing a possible history of the early church. It will be argued—hopefully persuasively—that the Gospel narratives can no longer be accepted as biographies; rather they must be acknowledged as narratives in which the authors intended their audiences to have read them as fiction.
[1] Graham Davies, Was there an Exodus?, In Search of Pre-Exilic Israel (John Day, 2004), p. 23
[2] Niels Peter Lemche, The Israelites in History and Tradition (1998)
[3] Ernest Nicholson, Current ‘Revisionism’ and the Literature of the Old Testament, In Search of Pre-Exilic Israel (John Day, 2004), p. 5. Incidentally, neither of the works in question, both from Van Seters and Thompson, are re-examinations of Albrect Alt. It makes one wonder if Nicholson actually read the two books.
[4] Israel Finkelstein & Neil Asher Silberman, The Bible Unearthed (2002), p. 128
[5] J. Wellhausen, Geschichte Israels (1878, 2nd Ed. = Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels, 1883)
[6] Also known as J, E, D and P.
[7] H. Gunkel, Genesis, Handkommentar zum alten Testament (1901), H. Gressmann, Altorientalische Texte zum alten Testament (1926)
[8] Alan Dundes, Holy Writ as Oral Lit: The Bible as Folklore (1999)
[9] Thomas L. Thompson, Early History of the Israelite People, p. 9
[10] Early History of the Israelite People, p. 9
[11] This is not the book to go into the details of the conclusions of Alt and Albright. For a thorough and fascinating look at the history of Old Testament critical scholarship, and the scholarship of both Albright and Alt, see Thomas L. Thompson’s Early History of the Israelite People, p. 2-26.
[12] These three works: John Van Seters, Abraham in History and Tradition (1975), Thomas L. Thompson, The History of the Patriarchal Narratives (1973), and Niels Peter Lemche, Early Israel (1985)
[13] Thomas L. Thompson, The Mythic Past: Biblical Archaeology and the Myth of Israel (1999)
[14] The Mythic Past, p. xii
[15] Marc Svi Brettler, How to Read the Bible (2005), p. 21
[16] G.A. Wells, The Jesus Legend (1996), The Jesus Myth (1998), Can We Trust the New Testament (2003)
[17] Robert M. Price, Deconstructing Jesus (2000), The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man (2003), Jesus is Dead (2007)
[18] Charles H. Talbert, What is a Gospel (1986), Reading Luke-Acts in Its Mediterranean Milieu (2003), Perspectives on Luke-Acts (1980), Literary Patterns, Theological Themes and the Genre of Luke-Acts (1974), Reading Luke (1984), Luke and the Gnostics: An Examination of Lucan Purpose (1966); Thomas L. Thompson, The Messiah Myth (2005), Dennis R. MacDonald, Christianizing Homer: The Odyssey, Plato and the Acts of Andrew (1994), The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark (2000), Mimesis and Intertextuality in Antiquity and Christianity (2001), Does the New Testament Imitate Homer?: Four Cases from the Acts of the Apostles (2003)
[19] This is seen with the most recent historical Jesus movement, specifically with the Jesus Seminar, where selections of hundreds of manuscripts were looked at and examined by the Fellows, who then voted on the passages authenticity. This will be discussed more in the next chapter.
[20] Talbert’s What is a Gospel is a monograph which sets out to establish the genre of the Gospels. He redefines “biography” to mean “prose narration…presenting supposedly historical facts…with the purpose of affecting the behavior of the reader.” (p. 17) He grants the genre of biography, clarifying that it is “ancient biography” where kerygma is influencing the author. Although this author finds the complete redefinition to be a product of Talbert’s presuppositions, the new definition Talbert gives, while calling it “biography” clearly does not reflect an accurate account of the life of any historical person, which he seems to admit. (p. 133-135) This will be discussed in detail in a later chapter.
[21] Discussed in a following chapter.
[22] Joseph Tyson and his book, Marcion and Luke-Acts: A Defining Struggle (2006), gives us an excellent case for a late dating for the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles.
