Isn't a "maximalist" what most people call "fundamentalists?
I have a general problem with/suggestion for this article, although I may be way off-base and defer to others. But it seems to me that the article itself recognizes that the distinction between minimalist and maximalist is overly simplistic. Indeed, when I studied Bible (a very long time ago) I never learned these terms, so I wonder who/how many people use them -- at the very least, the article must state who uses these terms. In any event, I wonder if these two terms oversimplify because they conflate two very different contexts in which people talk about the Bible. It seems to me that, because Bible-based (or legitimated) religions have played such an important role in social control and political action, it is inevitable that many, many people (I mean "laypeople") will have very strong attitudes towards the Bible, that it is all true, or all false. But these are political positions that have meaning and operate in a political context. But there is also a whole field of critical Biblical scholarship that would not find this opposition meaningful or useful; people who see the Bible as an historical document that is a product of historical events and reveals something about historical events, but that often does so through highly mediated and sometimes metaphorical, and anachronistic (i.e. "fictive") ways.
If I am right, to try to account for how people talk about the Bible in one way (as this article seems to do, presenting the binary as two poles of a continuum) would be to combine two different discourses of two groups of people who seldom speak to one another. The result would at best be misleading. Slrubenstein
- No serious researcher of biblical history I know would place himself at one of the presented positions (I wouldn't dare to present this article to my old hebrew teacher, btw, who spends his time doing linguistic analysis of the bible, comparing parts to egyptian papyrii etc.). The presented debate seems to be purely religiously and politically motivated. Or can you imagine a critical scholar bringing "proofs" that "the patriarchs never existed" (or the opposite)? This is no scientific attitude and should not be presented as a academical debate. In an article about the bible and history I would expect a review of the current state of academical research, not speculations about anti-semitic motivations of some "biblical minimalists". --Elian
Well, what you write confirms my suspicions. I just think that the "model" here has to be clearly contextualized. this is not an article on "the Bible and history," it is an article (maybe) on how one group of people talk about the Bible and history, for particular reasons; this should be explicit. Slrubenstein
I couldn't agree more. As it stands now, the literary and historical value of the Bible as a source for better understanding a particular period of the past is being circumvented by religious and political agendas, and this, from the point of view of biblical scholarship (linguistic, historical, or other) is a serious anachronism. I invite you to take a look at the Israelites page as well, where this is especially blatant. I woudl like to do something a bit more scholarly, but I am not willing to get into a flame war with anyone over it. Unfortunately, Elian, there are plenty of self-proclaimed biblical experts who use their so-called "expertise" to forward their agendas in the name of scholarship. Danny